INTRODUCTION TO PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

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INTRODUCTION

This chapter is about performance management. Performance relates to the measurable outcomes or results achieved by an organization. Management relates to the actions or activities an organization deploys to improve its desired outcomes. This chapter focuses on three major themes:

1. Key ideas organizations have found helpful in dealing with powerful and fundamental forces of change at work in the world

2. How goal setting and metrics can improve performance at the individual, team, working-group and organizational-unit levels

3. How the formal and informal aspects of an organization each contribute to managing perform- ance in a world of change

We have grounded this chapter in our own extensive experience as well as the writings of leading commentators. Our objective is to provide readers with a blend of best practices. In particular, we seek to avoid—and advise readers to avoid—selecting any single approach to performance manage- ment as ‘‘the best and only.’’ Rather, we promote a ‘‘both / and’’ view of the world, in which readers carefully craft that blend of approaches that best fits the needs and challenges ahead of them. This contrasts with the far too dominant ‘‘either / or’’ mindset that maintains, incorrectly, that performance is best managed by selecting a single comprehensive approach through some debate grounded in the proposition that either approach A or approach B is best. In our experience, it usually turns out that both approach A and approach B are relevant to the challenge of managing performance in a changing world.

This chapter concentrates on providing guidance that can be applied, practiced, and perfected by any individuals and teams in any organization. The concepts and techniques we put forward do not depend on senior-management support. We do not attempt to put forward a comprehensive performance-management system model. Our focus is on performance in an environment of change and on how individuals, teams, and groups can significantly improve their mindsets and approaches to improving performance. You and your colleagues can begin to make a performance difference tomorrow for yourself and your organizations. We will provide some ideas and perspectives on formal aspects to integrating performance management and to formal top-management-driven approaches to change. But by and large, our ideas are for you, and you can use them wherever you sit in an organization and on whatever performance challenge arises.

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