Improving performance
Performance, the act of performing a dramatic role, or piece of music, a display of over-exaggerated behaviour (‘you’ve made a bit of a performance of that’), or simply the act or process of accomplishing a task or function, is a preoccupation of contemporary management. These days we are all concerned to improve performance. But how would we know if we had so improved? The first recourse for many contemporary managers is to reach for performance indicators, sometimes known as Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. These are quantitative indicators, things we can count and match against prereflected targets for improvement or aspirations for the good. In a school these might be exam results, in a university, journal articles written, and in a company selling products, sales figures. Sometimes there is an expectation that these figures can only increase: being static or decreasing can only be seen as a failure, as we ‘improve our performance’ endlessly into an idealised future. As one UK government minister is reported to have said without any sense of irony: we want to increase performance until all schools in the UK are above average. Although of course, every school aspires to being outstanding.
Performance measures can themselves create a performance — they become performative. This might involve the performance of being busy, the performance of appearing to take the indicators seriously, the performance of gaming the indicators in order to appear to be performing. It might also provoke exactly the behaviour in staff that they are designed to, a relentless focus on what has been decided by senior managers is most important, although that says nothing about how people might do that. Presented as an objective way of judging reality it is less obvious that these measures also help shape the reality they claim to judge, as we mould our public behaviour and focus of attention to make ourselves measurable. Taking performance indicators seriously becomes a public habit of speaking and acting.
When managers concentrate on performance measures, both individual and group, they also express a particular way of understanding power relationships and are a statement of values without an overt values statement. They are both a disciplinary instrument and an expression of what matters around here, and can be experienced as a kind of relentless surveillance. I am not the first to point out the we are disciplined, and we come to discipline ourselves in anticipation. To call performance indicators into question is not to get with the programme, and not to be seen to be performing risks exclusion from the cult of performance.
There is a moral case for quantifying performance measures — why should we necessarily trust the word of professionals who have a stake in the game that they are good at what they do, when we can trust in numbers? We should of course be concerned that our children do well in school, that our surgeons are safe, that our academics are being productive, that we get value for money from our public services. There must be generalisable ways of making comparisons, of comparing like with like, of getting into a discussion about quality.
But here are some of the difficulties of the narrowest sense of how we have come to understand performance, particularly when it is reduced to a handful of metrics.
There is a danger that performance indicators are likely to unravel the social conditions which are required to increase performance more generally, particularly if they are individually described. So, going back to the original definition of performance, an individual actor, no matter how brilliant, can only be brilliant with an ensemble of other players, the right props and set, a good script and a responsive audience. How much training, effort and support, how many institutions are required to produce a good surgeon, dependent in the operating theatre on a broad range of colleagues with improvisational skills to match their skill? Where performance indicators produce rivalry between colleagues, anxiety in staff at the prospect of failure, of being ‘found out’, envy between ‘high performing’ and ‘low performing’ colleagues, then the collective performance of the institution is likely to suffer. What interest do I have in helping you if increasing your numbers make my numbers look less good, or even go down?
In addition, there are less tangible elements of successful performance — I want my child to do well at school, but this may or may not involve just passing exams. As important are that the child is encouraged to be curious, has a secure group of friends, is recognised in the school community and recognises others, is relatively stable in their relationships with others, both children and adults, becomes an active citizen. Doing well at school, or in the workplace, also involves being trusted to exercise one’s judgement about what is needed in this particular situation at this particular time with these particular others, irrespective of whether there is a performance measure for that.
In drama school, when actors are learning their trade with improvisational exercises, they are encouraged to make their actor partners look good in the moment. In other words, if you and I are improvising a role play together I can obstruct you or I can help you perform, which in turn helps me take my turn. This negotiation is likely to be hit and miss, because there are never any guarantees that what I think is helpful will turn out to be so. But when we proceed from an understanding that whatever emerges does so because of what we are all doing together, then it ceases to be just about me and my individual performance and becomes more about my sense of what my colleagues require of me for us to go on together. It becomes a matter of group-mindedness.
And sometimes it’s liberating to be just good enough for now, a good enough parent, a good enough teacher, a good enough boss, until something else is required of us.
