KeyneTalk

Who Owns Performance Management?

It's amazing to me that conventional wisdom says HR is the owner of the performance management process.  This comes from the misunderstood notion that performance appraisal is the same as performance management.  After all, isn't performance management about evaluating people, and isn't HR responsible for everything to do with people?  The purpose of performance management is to ensure we're in compliance and have documentation for compensation decisions, right?

No, not really.

True performance management is about operationalizing the strategic plan and/or the annual operating plan of the organization.  It's about managing individual and group efforts toward the accomplishment of organizational initiatives.  It's about clarity of direction, alignment of all goals down to an individual level and engagement of the employees in the goal setting process.  It's about ensuring the clarity of individual roles and responsibilities.

So who should own the performance management process?  Senior management.  Actually, the process is owned by senior management, but it is a core responsibility of every manager down to the first line supervisor.

Radical? Maybe.  Out of step? Possibly.  But if you think it through, I believe you'll see that it is the only way to ensure its success in your organization.

To learn more about performance management visit us at www.keyneinsight.com

Performance Management - What's the secret?

"If you had to narrow it down to one thing, what is the most important component in performance management?" 

This was one of the questions I was asked last week while giving a presentation on the difference between performance management and performance measurement.  The answer is actually fairly simple.  Performance management at its heart, is clarification of expectations and communication.  There is no more important component in the performance management process than communication.

Unfortunately, communication is not the central theme of most so called "performance management" programs.  Yes, in these other systems there are communication meetings, usually once, or even twice a year depending on how your HR group has structured the program.  But these are performance "review" meetings.  What I'm talking about are the on-going dynamic performance "management" discussions that lead to the successful achievement of organizational initiatives.  These must happen at least once a quarter and should happen bi-monthly or even more often.  Who ever heard of managing something by reviewing it once a year?

The tone of these progress meetings is also different than a "review" meeting.  There is an inquisitive, coaching, mentoring, and partnering tone to a progress meeting versus a judgmental, tense and even competitive tone that typifies a "review" meeting.

I am convinced that if you were to go into most any organization and you did nothing more than get every manager and employee to sit down every other month and talk about the employee's performance and how the two of them can improve their working relationship, that alone will improve performance.

Communication is one of the major differentiators between true performance management systems and performance measurement systems (i.e. performance appraisal).

I know you all knew that already, but sometimes the obvious seems to get lost in the structure of the process.