ET BureauBENGALURU: Managers at Cisco will now be asked how they intend to invest in employees rather than having to rate them, thereby bringing about a change in how the company does performance management.
The technology conglomerate is turning around the traditional model of performance management — where a manager rates an employee — to ask managers how they intend to invest in their team. The step will focus on how team leaders can help employees develop their skills, and how the company can hold them accountable for following through with these, Ashley Goodall, the senior vice-president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco, told ET.
In the past few years, the San Jose, California-headquartered company, which has more than 10,000 employees in India, has reworked leader training, deployed technology to serve leaders and teams, and rolled out a strength assessment to more than 76,000 employees globally. In 2015, Cisco axed the traditional bell curve-based method of assessing employees. The organisation is now looking to redefine performance management further by focusing on teams and not individuals, Goodall said.
“We now believe that the future of work will be characterised by teams and that the only way to build a great company is to pay attention to the collective,” he told ET. As part of this new strategy, the company has started some work in organisational network analysis, where it is using technology to visualise data in 3D to develop a map of connections and interactions between teams and individuals. This allows leaders to understand how people and teams are connected.
Cisco will also be looking into creating intelligence systems for its 15,954 teams, for them to understand what is going on within their group and in all the teams that are adjacent to them every day so that they are empowered to take the right actions, he said.
The technology conglomerate is turning around the traditional model of performance management — where a manager rates an employee — to ask managers how they intend to invest in their team. The step will focus on how team leaders can help employees develop their skills, and how the company can hold them accountable for following through with these, Ashley Goodall, the senior vice-president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco, told ET.
“We are now halfway through this shift, and I see a future where our organisational data can show how we have invested in people across the board — this will help us develop our succession pipeline,” Goodall said.
In the past few years, the San Jose, California-headquartered company, which has more than 10,000 employees in India, has reworked leader training, deployed technology to serve leaders and teams, and rolled out a strength assessment to more than 76,000 employees globally. In 2015, Cisco axed the traditional bell curve-based method of assessing employees. The organisation is now looking to redefine performance management further by focusing on teams and not individuals, Goodall said.
“We now believe that the future of work will be characterised by teams and that the only way to build a great company is to pay attention to the collective,” he told ET. As part of this new strategy, the company has started some work in organisational network analysis, where it is using technology to visualise data in 3D to develop a map of connections and interactions between teams and individuals. This allows leaders to understand how people and teams are connected.
Cisco will also be looking into creating intelligence systems for its 15,954 teams, for them to understand what is going on within their group and in all the teams that are adjacent to them every day so that they are empowered to take the right actions, he said.
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( Originally published on Nov 04, 2019 )
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