Strategic Leaders as the Focal Points - Research Paper Example

Porter Novelli Porter Novelli Strategic leaders play crucial roles in performance management within the organizations. According to Karin (2008), they are always focused on examining strategies to be implemented in ensuring greater performance are enhanced within organizations. Ideologically, strategic leaders act as the focal points in making critical decisions on the activities that will result in better performance. As good managers, they invent strategic activities such as competitive analysis, internal analysis, and industry analysis that are suitable for shaping the performance of the entire enterprise. On the other hand, strategic leaders develop strategic visions and mission to guide performance management. Heckman (2011) argues that the leaders create ideas aligned with the imagination and energies of the employees. Ideally, the strategic leader understands the ultimate task of aligning human resources to the human vision. However, they usually attach the vision to the organizational values to enhance greater performance. Properly designed ideas move the enterprise, value the past and looks at improved future returns. Furthermore, the strategic leaders articulate a separate mission of the company to guide the behavior of the stakeholders of the organization. The mission is a valuable tool for an organization that is used to describe why the organization exists. According to Bourne, Melnyk, and Faull (2007), strategic leaders formulate good mission statements with a unique contribution to the attitudes of the employees and customers. Besides, strategic leaders set goals and objectives that drive performance. The strategic kicks usually begin with the leader setting strategic goals and achievable objectives. According to Venkateswara (2004), this is what drives good performance within the organization as well as enhancing commitments in executing the tasks. Mostly, strategic leaders set measurable goals then build attainment incentives to ensure the employees work hard towards achieving them. The incentives tend to motivate and realize the goal-attaining behavior to the employees. Subsequently, strategic leaders craft effective strategies that enhance performance management within the organization. According to Demartini (2013), crafting of strategies aligns the activities with the available resources of the organization. In fact, the essence of the strategy helps the leaders in choosing what to do and what not to do. Specifically, this directs the efforts on what should be done, and this enables the organization to operate at its optimum. Heckman (2011) points out that, effective leaders formulate competitive strategies that are implemented to make an organization competitive within the market place. Nonetheless, strategic leaders form part of executing strategy. Venkateswara (2004) argues that strategic leaders do not only formulate or craft policies, but they also set examples by executing them. Ideally, the leaders’ primary responsibility is to implement the chosen strategy and reveals the action plan to other employees. Primarily, the strategic leaders build an organizational culture that drives the realization of the formulated strategies. They direct the efforts of the employees towards achieving set high goals in the organization. In fact, the management team accomplishes competitive, distinctive capabilities that make organizations profitable consistently. Arguably, strategic leadership helps in choosing the right people that are best placed to execute strategies within organizations. They pick correct roles, and right people to suit such roles. Procedurally, the strategic leaders evaluate the performance of individuals within the organization and measure the performance of the organization in general. Karin Behrens (2008), posits that the organization’s leadership must always remain agile to ensure stakeholders pursue the formulated strategies effectively. Without performance evaluation, the enterprise is destined to failure. Strategic resilience makes the organization successful. The leaders evaluate their performance and measure the performance of others as a way of ensuring there is boosted performance at the firm. On the other hand, effective or strategic leaders nurture and utilize talents within and outside the organization. Talent management within an organization is quite critical. Karin Behrens (2008) believes that proper management ensures efficient utilization of skills that results in greater achievement to the organization. As such, talents must be identified and properly managed within the organization. However, the internal abilities must be aligned to meet both the long term and short term objectives of the organization. According to Bourne, Melnyk, and Faull (2007), this process entails building the needed talents from within the business as well as outside its in boundaries. There are five-point criteria used to evaluate the performance of individuals within the organization. I. Strategic congruence It is the evaluation of performance based on the alignment of the goals of the organizations to the strategies of the organization. According to Heckman (2011), job performance must be congruent with the organizational strategy, culture, and goals. For instance, if the organization focuses on customer service then the performance system must assess the performance of its employees in serving the customers. II. Validity Validity is also one of the criteria used to evaluate the performance of employees within the organization. According to Venkateswara (2004), performance measure must assess all the relevant aspect of performance (content validity). For the performance measure to be valid, it must not be contaminated with other elements. III. Reliability In measuring the performance of employees, reliability must always be achieved. The measure of performance must be accurate and reliable in evaluating the performance of individuals within the organization. Demartini (2013) argues that there must be consistency among the leaders or individuals that evaluates the employee’s performance. A performance measure must show interrater-reliability if two people use the same or close evaluation models. IV. Acceptability On the other hand, the performance measure or evaluation used must usually concur with the expectations of the users. Ideally, the performance measure must be accepted by the users who evaluate or assess the performance of others. As such, the measure used should be extremely valid and reliable. Again it should take less time to be administered, but not necessarily accepted by those being evaluated. V. Specificity Specificity plays a crucial role in performance management. It is the extent to which the measures communicate to the employees what is expected of them. Heckman (2011) points out that, specificity is very critical in both developmental and strategic performance management. The measure specifies what the employees should execute in supporting the organization to achieve its strategic goals. Even though, there are various models or approaches used to evaluate the performance of workers, attribute approach is realized to play greater roles in assessing the performance of employees within the firms. According to Friedlob and other writers, this approach focuses on the level to which the employees are certain to their character traits as a means of achieving performance within the organization (2002). Fundamentally, individual attributes or character traits are believed to drive enterprise success. Organizations that use this model believe in a set of traits that are desirable for the success of the organization. This technique entails evaluation of a set of traits such as leadership, competitiveness and imitativeness of an individual. According to Karin Behrens (2008), there are various forms of attribute approach used to evaluate performance. Some organizations use graphic rating scales whereby a list of traits is evaluated based on a scale of five points. The strategic leaders or managers evaluate one employee at a time by circling the number that signifies the performance of the employee based on each character trait. The appraisal is used to rate employees based on some factors including job knowledge, quantity of work, dependability, volume of work and cooperation. On the other side, some organizations use the mixed standard scales within this model to assess the performance of their employees. This performance measure entails the use of statements representing poor, average and good performance along each dimension of the employee’s attribute. The statements are mixed with representation from other statements from other dimensions giving an actual rating instrument. The attribute-based approach is the most common performance measure among organizations. According to Demartini (2013), it is quite easy to develop and use across all types of jobs. This model link attributes of employees to the descriptions of the job and evaluates their performance based on the job description. Arguably, this helps the organizations to recruit employees for jobs that fit their attributes and skills rather than academic qualifications. In fact, the attention of the evaluators is devoted to identifying and assessing qualities that are very relevant to the job. In recruitment and selection perception, employees that fit such attributes will automatically uphold high performance at the organization. Data assessed and evaluated by this model may come from various sources. The managers or strategic leaders can directly extract data from the performance management system within the organization. Also, the data can be collected by evaluating the need for training within the organization. Again, an audit of whether the strategies or actions taken yield the desired results can be carried out. However, this model shows some shortcomings that should be mitigated to have effective performance system that completely enhances greatest performance within organizations. Based on this, it is recommendable to take various considerations in building an effective performance management system. They include; The system must mirror the corporate culture and values of the organization in the assessment of the employees. The performance system must focus on the right organizational performance measures to steer the efforts of workers in achieving the set goals of the organization Subsequently, the leaders and individuals who measure the performance of others must be trained in performance management. More significantly, the job descriptions of each employee must be linked to the performance system. References Bourne, M., Melnyk, S., & Faull, N. (2007). The impact of performance measurement on performance. Bradford, England: Emerald Group Pub. Demartini, C. (2013). Performance management systems: Design, diagnosis, and use. Friedlob, G. T., Schleifer, L. L., & Plewa, F. J. (2002). Essentials of corporate performance measurement. New York: Wiley. Heckman, J. J. (2011). The performance of performance standards. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Karin Behrens. (2008). Investigating the high performance work system: Employee perceptions and employment conditions in a health care setting. PWASET. Venkateswara, R. T. (2004). Performance management and appraisal systems: HR tools for global competitiveness. New Delhi: Response Books, a division of Sage Publications. Read More