Aligning Personal Growth to Support Corporate Growth

By Yesmean Rihbany

As we enter a new year, many people will embrace the tradition of making resolutions. While long seen as a time to focus on personal growth, there is also an opportunity for companies to harness that energy to align employees' goals to their own annual business objectives.

A successful performance management program can provide employees with a common purpose and the focus they need to prioritize their workloads. Working with employees to identify concise, achievable goals gives them a greater role in the overall success of the organization and fosters a feeling that they play a vital role.

Review the Needs

Before you begin, review your company's short- and long-term goals with your employees. This will help them identify areas where they may be able to contribute.

Do you need to improve your profit margin? Strenghten customer service? Improve your safety record?

Once you know what your needs are, you can begin a dialogue with your employees about how their personal goals for improving themselves match those of the company. Maybe you have an employee who is interested in learning how to incorporate sustainable design elements into building construction or a project manager who would like to decrease the number of recordable injuries that occur in the field.

The key to setting personal goals is to have a definite plan that details what will be accomplished and how it will be done, what date these objectives will be achieved by, and how the results will be measured.

Draw Up a Blueprint

Next, draw up a blueprint of the skills and knowledge each individual will need in order to achieve the annual goals you set together. Also determine how the skills and knowledge can be obtained.

Your employee who is interested in sustainable design might want to research and contract with vendors that offer "green" building products or enroll in a sustainable design course or attend the U.S. Green Building Council's annual Greenbuild conference. Another employee might want to implement an ISO 14001 environmental management system training program to minimize the impact of your projects on the environment.

As more and more clients, especially governmental agencies, become environmentally conscious, these personal development goals would help your company grow to meet these emerging demands.

Build and Maintain

Once your employee has started building his/her skills, continue the momentum through ongoing discussion and providing feedback, both positive and constructive. Just as someone making a resolution to exercise more or to quit smoking is more likely to succeed with a support system in place, your employees will see greater results if discussions about personal development become part of the everyday company culture.

For example, your project manager who wants to improve safety may introduce a training program aimed at reducing recordable injuries. As a manager, you will want to observe a training session, review any new policies and visit work sites to determine how well the new skills are being utilized. Then, use those observations to provide constructive feedback.

Your comments should be related to specific behaviors, not personality traits, and be provided as soon after you observe the action as possible. Whenever possible, bring examples of both quality work and of where improvement is needed.

Finally, move forward by setting new milestones. As your employees become more skilled at setting goals and this process becomes part of the company culture, you can also encourage them to work together to identify solutions to the challenges they face.

An individual project manager may experience a problem such as materials that were not received on time. But, when a group of project managers looks at several projects they may find a reoccurring problem and determine that the company needs to reexamine its requisition process, develop a better system to track supplies or contract with a different vendor.

In addition, employees may want to create a way to share the lessons they have learned through a discussion board or a newsletter or unveil an awards program to celebrate their successes.

Whatever the goal, be prepared to invest in your people if you want them to return optimum performance results. The investment you make now will pay off later as team members become able to work more independently and adopt and create new best practices that will improve performance throughout the organization.

Rihbany is senior director of talent and organization development at Long Beach-based Earth Tech Inc., a global provider of consulting, engineering and construction service,s and a business unit of Tyco International Ltd.