How to manage team performance in a decentralized organization
Motius is a decentralized organization. Obviously, individual and joint progress are essential to make such an organization possible, including e.g. personal development and promotions. Whereas it is crucial to keep team performance management personal, it is not an easy task to set up a system that allows us to do so. But with the years, we have managed to create a system that does not just work but really is personal, fair and transparent. Here is how we do it.
Goals and requirements for managing a decentralized organization
In an organization where most decisions and processes are decentralized, it is important to integrate feedback and performance evaluations. At the same time, we want to keep hierarchies flat and the system collaborative.
While there are a lot of models out there (spotify system, holacracy, etc.), none of them would fit 100% to our fluid structure and our culture. So last year, we decided to design our own system.
One main situation that we face is that people in decentralized organizations inherently do not work as closely with their direct supervisors as they would in a regular company. That means that managing team performance could be challenging if you do not have a proper system in place to do so.
The goal of personal evaluations is to give Motees the chance to reflect on their position and performance at Motius despite the busy day to day operations.
For maximum personal growth and to get the most out of the evaluations, we needed to create a system that is:
- regular
- transparent
- objective
- evaluating a broad scope of skills
- reinforcing Motius’ company culture
So in order to be able to decentralize personal development and promotions, we had to answer three critical questions:
- How can we create a company-wide understanding of the different roles and clear expectations for each Motee?
- Being decentralized, how can we ensure that each Motee can benefit from an individual performance review in order to stay aligned with our growth mindset?
- How can we translate that performance review into the best possible yet individual feedback and create a personal development plan?
In finding answers to those questions, we built our system on three pillars which we are going to dive into in the upcoming sections. On a side note: of course we are constantly evaluating and improving our system.
Pillar №1: Competence models, transparent expectations and techie ratings
Our vision at Motius is to be the best place for techies. So for every role at Motius, we need to have a clear prospect on personal growth and a transparent set of competencies that respective Motees need to develop in order to grow.
On the one hand, we fulfil these needs through our Talent Journey which clearly shows the possible development paths. On the other hand, our performance management processes described in this blogpost enable Motees to get from one level to the next.
As you can see above, the Talent Journey shows a clear development path for Motees in our Tech Hubs and defines the tasks and responsibilities that come with each role. Logically, each role requires a range of competencies that Motees need to develop in order to be able to fit in respective positions.
We divide such competencies into basic competencies that everyone needs to have from the beginning (and of course keep developing) and role-specific ones that depend on the level that a Motee is on.
Basic competencies include e.g. “manage yourself” and “take the responsibility”.
Role-specific competencies include e.g. “know your TechStack” and “know your clients”.
For each competency, Motees themselves clearly defined a vision statement that describes the optimal situation and always reminds us how we can improve. Further, a vision statement reduces the overhead of level-specific wordings, which makes it easier to evaluate the personal competencies of a Motee within this competence model.
In addition to the vision statements, we created reference profiles that make our expectations for every role on every level clear. Moreover, they give us an additional ideal situation that we can base the personal performance evaluations on. To see you what such a profile looks like and how the competency ratings differ from role to role, have a look at the figure below.
Since Motius is Motius, we created a special rating system for these competencies. Going from being an observer to becoming a padawan and finally a role model, you basically go from being BB-8 all the way to being Master Yoda.
To quickly summarize the basics of our described competence system: it shows clear development pathways, describes which competencies each Motee on the respective level has to have and includes a transparent rating system for those competencies. With that understanding in mind, it is time to dive deeper into the process itself and show how it actually works.
The goal of the second pillar was to set up a process that effectively measures the performance of Motees according to their role. As you can imagine, doing that in a decentralized and fast-paced company can be a bit tricky.
Pillar №2: Personal performance evaluation in three phases
Twice a year, evaluation committees decide (1) about the next personal development steps for every Motee including a personal feedback report and (2) about possible promotions for those Motees who applied for a promotion.
The whole process consists of three phases. Before we start looking at the process itself, let’s first have a look at who is involved:
The peer group consists of reviewer Motees who want to give the reviewee Motee feedback. How are those groups built? Motees can choose five other Motees who they want to review and our own internal matching tool randomly matches peers for that matter.
The reporter is an experienced Motee who is in charge of filling in the report, asking critical questions, diving deeper into unclear situations and ensuring a balanced evaluation process overall. Further, reporters build up the evaluation committees (described below), change every year and are announced short-term in order to guarantee a fair and independent process.
Consisting of three reporters, the evaluation committees make sure that all Motees are treated equally. They aim to assist Motees to perform at their best — they improve collaboration and accountability across the organization and identify relevant learning and development needs. Each commitee is supervised by an HR team member. Why? Because they set up the whole process, train the reporters, create the personal development reports and ensure that Motees work on projects that are beneficial for their desired development.
Now let’s dive into the different parts of the process.
Phase 1: The Evaluation
In the first phase, a Motee engages in a self-evaluation of his skills and competencies in order to find blind spots in her performance. A group of automatically matched peers from different Talent Journey tracks does a peer evaluation for that Motee. Both of these evaluations are based on the competencies table shown above.
The results are then taken to the peer review meeting where the Motee, the peer group and the neutral reporter will present and elaborate on the feedback results through giving concrete examples and suggestions for improvement. Since these meetings are tough conversations that encourage an open and honest togetherness, we made sure that they do not take place without everyone involved actually being there.
Phase 2: The Committees
In the second phase, an evaluation committee (described above) pair the prior peer review feedback with “hard external facts” that matter for the Motee’s talent journey, e.g. how long the Motee has been at Motius or when the last promotion took place. In order to evaluate technical or project management skills, team feedback from completed projects is considered too. Based on this, the committee gives a well-founded and sound recommendation about next steps to the CTO. Together, for instance, they then make joint decisions about e.g. a Motee’s promotion or track changes.
Phase 3: The Feedback
Last but not least, the Motee gets the committee results in a personal meeting with his supervisor. Based on those results, they plan the next steps for the Motee’s personal development plan. Wonder what that looks like? We will explain in the next section.
Pillar №3: A personal development plan for maximum growth
As we said above, we want to create the best possible environment for our Motees where they can continuously grow and develop their skills. The described feedback processes and performance evaluations support that vision of becoming the best place for techies. To complement these, every Motee has a personal development plan.
This memorandum is a written record of the Motee’s career development and learning plan. It enables us to plan next steps, track individual progress and have a clear vision for each Motee.
For instance, it includes a “self vs. peer line chart” which visualizes a Motee’s competencies in comparison with target values and average peer values. Further, it talks about personal growth fields, i.e. compares the competence vision statements with actual quotes from peer reviews, thus shows how to get closer to the behavior that is described in the vision statements. It also features “personal strength quotes” that highlight evaluation results from the feedback process. Last but not least, an individual development plan describes concrete development goals and the ways to achieve those goals.
The whole personal development plan gets revised together with the supervisor after every performance evaluation. This ensures that Motees always stay on track and develop along the Talent Journey.
With team performance management towards our vision
In pursuit of our vision, we at Motius keep feedback personal, fair and transparent. Clear, open and transparent expectations for every role at Motius combined with decentralized performance evaluations allow us to do so. On top we create personal development plans with our Motees that enable them to reach their fullest potential.
The impact? All of this enables us to be a decentralized company. On the business side, everybody has a clear understanding of their own role, knows which competencies are needed, receives frequent, transparent and fair feedback and is enabled to act on it.
On the cultural side, which is just as important, this structure reinforces our company culture as it represents our core values — we are community-driven, we create, enable and explore. Integrated into our team performance management, these values lead the way towards becoming the best place for techies.
And just to make that clear once more: our system is not perfect yet and we are constantly evaluating and improving it. In doing so, we keep going on our journey towards our vision.
