Business Services
Talent agent
How to manage performance to get the most out of your employees
By Patrick Mayock
Smart Business Los Angeles | July 2008
Page 1 of 2
Adam Miller
CEO, Cornerstone OnDemand Inc.
When Adam Miller delegates a task, he’s not
handing away allresponsibility. As founder, president and CEO of Cornerstone
OnDemand Inc., he believes
that the onus is also on him to
track performance and provide
help when needed.
“The real objective of performance management is not
to punish employees,” Miller
says. “It’s to make people more
productive and to help them do
better in their careers.”
The task is something of a specialty at Cornerstone, which produces talent management software for companies across the
globe. As a business philosophy,
it’s also helped Miller lead the
145-employee company from
2003 revenue of $2.5 million to
2006 revenue of $6.7 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Miller about how to get the
most out of employees and
how to gauge potential by
using a tic-tac-toe-style grid.
Q. How do you get the most
out of your employees?
Make sure that your employees respect you and you respect
them. Give them the responsibility they earn or deserve, and
monitor their progress to make
sure they’re able to do what
you’ve asked them to do.
In other words, give them
enough rope but not too much.
Q. How do you find that
balance?
One way is to have clear targets
and objectives and to have some
key metrics to monitor those
objectives. In other words, don’t
wait until the end of whatever
time frame you gave them to determine whether they achieved
or failed on that objective.
Have some milestones or metrics that you’re tracking along the
way to make sure that they’re
on track. If they go off track,
step in or help remediate by giving them either more resources,
more coaching or more help.
Q. How do you set those
milestones?
In sales, it tends to primarily
focus on revenue objectives. In
other departments, it might be
focused on specific objectives
given to the employee by their
manager that could be very finite.
For somebody (in public
relations), it might be to
set up X number of press
interviews or put out X
number of press releases.
For other employees, such
as in the tech area, we will
have specific projects with
due dates.
Those objectives should
be set at whatever frequency makes sense for
that particular position or
that particular company.
... They should be reviewed not once a year
but on an ongoing basis ...
with the idea that if somebody is off track, you have
the ability to proactively
get them back on track.
