- In a world of exponential change,
traditional performance management
has a variety of limitations.
First, one of the most common parts
of traditional performance management systems,
performance appraisals, can be flawed
from the very beginning.
Individual performance management systems
that place the emphasis on being appraised,
that is, being evaluated primarily by others,
are fundamentally limited.
Sure, individuals need to be encouraged
to truly perform better.
They need to be the drivers of
what I call continuous performance inventory,
rather than the objects of a performance appraisal.
Second, performance management systems,
whether for individuals or teams,
can lead us to believe that we're tracking the right things,
when in fact we're focused on processes
that may not be contributing directly to performance.
Analysts call this "false attribution error."
Thinking that relationships that seem
correlated are actually causative.
Put another way, just because you rub your
lucky rabbit's foot before you run a complex calculation
doesn't mean that practice is what generates good results.
And just because you think following a procedure
to the letter will generate high performance,
it doesn't mean that's true.
Third, performance management approaches themselves
usually come from a top-down perspective.
They're an attempt to use an industrial era
approach to structuring the work of people,
using mechanistic processes that are designed
to help manage large-scale organizations.
As a result, enterprise performance management systems
are rarely dynamic enough to be effective
in a constantly changing world.
Now in large organizations,
performance management processes,
which are often supported by
large-scale enterprise software,
can be brittle, with processes infused into applications
that are challenging to change.
There's no question performance management
at an organizational level is complicated,
but that doesn't mean it can't be fluid and responsive
to a constantly changing landscape.
We have a tremendous opportunity to rethink
how we approach the entire topic of performance
and performance management,
with a completely different mentality
that's built on an understanding
of how the world of work has changed,
and overcoming the traditional limitations
of performance management.
We need to start with individuals,
continue to teams, and ultimately change
the overall performance of the organization.
I call this process Adaptive Performance Management.
It isn't just that the way that we think
about performance has to go through constant change.
We also need to continually adapt how we manage performance.
If that sounds like a daunting task,
for ourselves and for those we manage,
there's no question it's challenging.
But it's totally do-able.
It just takes a commitment to continually improve
our organizations, our teams,
but especially ourselves.