Moving to a more consistent performance and enabling culture

There was wide recognition that the council was improving its ability to manage performance, but many wished to see greater consistency and general improvement. This meant a need to establish realistic targets for everyone across all their work, and to review progress regularly against these, ensuring that any changes to plan were discussed and incorporated.

The organization was already moving towards a performance management and competency based framework. Some areas were beginning to experiment with a development process that linked to service plans, team plans and individual plans. This was successfully helping people to clarify key outcomes and contributions from individuals and teams, and this approach promoted greater ownership of the service and the council’s agenda.

For the organization to embrace performance management more fully, the organization needed to begin to address a number of cultural issues that were hindering progress:

the lack of direction and multiple priorities;
the overwhelming feeling of organizational complexity;
the uncertainty of what the city council actually stood for;
the lack of understanding (in both senses of the word) between the constituent parts of the organization;
the ‘political’ nature of many of the transactions and relationships;
the tendency towards a blame culture where valuing, appreciating and recognizing the contribution of others is kept to a minimum;
the ‘closedness’ of the culture (inability to look outside for new ideas);
the lack of focus on developing people.