- If our traditional way of thinking
about performance needs an overhaul,
imagine just how much we need to think differently
about performance management.
So let's look at performance management
as we thought of it using what I call the old rules of work.
Traditional performance management has often been thought of
as two sets of activities.
At the individual level,
performance management is about ensuring
that workers perform as expected,
following processes and delivering the results
they've agreed on with their managers.
At the macro level,
performance management is about ensuring
that an organization delivers the results
that are expected by all of its core stakeholders.
Now those are often shareholders for public companies
and boards of directors or other leaders for private
and non-profit companies.
In a completely logical, rational
and highly manageable world,
performance management would be very straightforward.
Very linear.
You'd simply define the kinds of results you want to see
then you'd walk back from those results
to the activities that every process
and person involved would have to perform to be effective.
Done.
In practice though, a lot of the
performance management processes that are in use today,
whether it's at the individual performance level
or at the level of the organization
or even of an entire business ecosystem,
follows learnings from an industrial era
production line mentality.
Now that sounds a little harsh,
but let's look at some traditional
performance management practices.
At an individual level,
many managers usually do performance reviews
maybe once a year.
We treat them like production processes;
evaluating individual capabilities
against a narrow set of deliverables,
but in our rapidly changing world
agreements from a year ago are nearly meaningless
in many kinds of work.
Now we also asses performance in teams
by asking workers to do 360-degree reviews.
Again often on an annual basis.
Without stepping back to look at
what we're actually trying to accomplish
by these kinds of evaluations.
We encourage workers to evaluate each other
just as we'd report on the performance of a product
or a piece of software,
rather than as breathing, growing human beings,
and at the organizational level
we often have performance metrics
that are geared to quarterly results,
especially for public companies.
Yet those results are traditionally
an extremely limited set of metrics,
often geared toward extremely short-term outcomes.
Sure, performance management at scale
for large organizations, it's tremendously complex,
but we often still use that linear, industrial era mentality
to craft how organizations meet their performance goals.
I don't think many of us live in that linear
kind of world anymore, if we ever did.
There are clearly certain work environments
where some linear processes still reign,
such as mature manufacturing systems
with a deep focus on quality production.
Yet even in those environments
there are so many opportunities to rethink the ways
that we encourage the best possible performance.
There are many work situations that aren't or shouldn't
be that linear
and in fact, the application of structured linear processes
can mean that performance can be actually diminished.
As we'll find out in other videos,
too much control can mean rotten results.
Now one way to think of those traditional approaches,
is what John Hagel of Deloitte Center for the Edge
calls Push Strategies.
It's kind of like a shove in the back of workers, teams
and organizations to do what's expected of them.
Instead we have the opportunity
to create flexible approaches to performance management
that use Pull Strategies,
dynamic practices that ensure a deep level of commitment
by everyone in a business ecosystem.
Now it's important to note that performance management
isn't just for people who work in an organization.
In a world where an increasing number
of workers are independent,
there's ample opportunity to learn how each of us
as individual workers,
can better manage performance,
for ourselves, for the teams for which we work
and for the customers or clients
for whom we're working.