Preface

IS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT ACTUALLY KILLING PERFORMANCE? Seems a little melodramatic, doesn’t it? I’ll admit that the book’s title may be a little over the top, but the fact is, my own personal experience and a great deal of research confirm that a process that was designed to increase engagement and productivity is doing just the opposite, and in a big way. My aim is to help you understand how performance management really is killing performance, but more important, to show you exactly what you can do about it.

In fact, this may be the first comprehensive how-to guide to designing modern, customized performance solutions ever published. But, although it is about performance management, don’t get the wrong impression. It’s really about creating something revolutionary that looks nothing like what we know today as performance management. So let’s say instead that it’s about creating high-performing organizations, promoting individual development, and building on the collective capabilities of a team of people. In short, rethinking, redesigning, and rebooting performance management in a way that recognizes the uniqueness of your people and your organization.

Whether you’re a human resources or talent management professional, a business leader, or a fellow consultant, or you hail from some other corner of the organizational landscape, you’ve come to the right place. I wrote this book for you: that bold individual in any organization, be it large, small, local, global, high-tech, or low-tech, who decides it is high time to rethink and redesign his or her team’s approach to performance management. I aim to give you both the courage to get started and a guide to leading your organization through a thoughtful process to reboot performance management and build a solution that matches your strategy, culture, and needs, as well as the promises you’ve made to your employees.

But my book isn’t just for you. It’s also for your executive team, your business leaders, your managers, and your employees. Why? Because I want to help everyone who has an interest in this topic, or a role to play in the process, understand why our traditional approaches to performance management are not working, and how we can and should shift our thinking to create better experiences and outcomes for all involved.

Building this understanding is the core aim of the first section of the book,Rethink, which was written for anyone who is touched by performance management.Redesign is where the rubber meets the road: an unprecedented step-by-step guide to designing your own customized solution. Finally, there’s the all-importantReboot, which provides tips and tricks for building and implementing your solution and making it stick. As an added bonus, you will find a Toolbox section with guides, worksheets, and other tools to aid you in the practical application of the PM Reboot process. Look for the Toolbox icon for these items throughout.

If you are taking on the job of “lead architect” of your future performance management solution, this book will be an indispensable road map to getting where you want to go. Read through it once, and then return to it as you work through each of the design steps in part 2 for helpful tools, techniques, tips, and facilitation guides along the way.

I strongly encourage you to ask your business leaders and others who play a role in your performance management process to read the Rethink section in particular. Use it to start the conversation within your organization and engage your broader team in the rebooting process.

As you read, you’ll notice that I have a bit of fun examining the pitfalls of traditional performance management from time to time, particularly in chapter 2, but make no mistake: I have nothing but respect and admiration for the talented and dedicated HR practitioners who have worked so hard and for so long to try to make performance management better. I’m on your team and probably have more in common with you than you know; after all, as a seasoned consultant and business leader myself, I’ve been in the trenches with you for decades. In fact, I built a very efficient and thoroughly traditional performance management solution in my role as the people leader at Hitachi Consulting. Beenthere, done that—which helped convince me that it was time to move beyond tradition and find ways to help free HR professionals from a process that’s typically stressful and ineffective and a role that is too often negatively viewed by those they support.

There’s no doubt in my mind that what’s broken here is the system, not the people who are stuck in it. And I’m clearly not alone. In June 2015, I spoke on this subject to an audience of about 1,250 human resources professionals at the National Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Conference in Las Vegas. At the beginning of my presentation, I asked everyone in the audience who genuinely loved their performance management program to stand up.

And how many of those 1,250 people did? Two.

After my talk, a man approached me to let me know that the only reason he had stood up was that his company didn’t even have a performance management program. It was a funny moment, but a little sad at the same time.

Now, how about you? Would you stand up for your current performance management solution? It would be understandable if your first reaction was to defend something that you and your team had invested hours, days, months, and maybe even years in building and improving. You’ve always had honorable intentions, and it is likely that over time you have improved your approach to make it more helpful, consistent, and trusted. Or you might think, “OK, I don’t love our program, but there are elements of it that are not so bad, and there are even bits that are quite good.” I’d expect that there are, and I hope that as you build something new, you don’t throw those good parts away.

Use this book to help you rethink the not-so-good parts and to shift the role that HR plays in your organization’s performance processes to something that’s both more fun for you and your colleagues and more valued by those you support. Your HR team can move away from policing and overseeing what’s likely to be a counterproductive, frustrating process to becoming designers of great tools and content for your managers and your people. Imagine freeing HR from inventorying completed reviews, arguing about rating scales, and hounding people to get their forms in, and instead trading those headaches for more time toteach, coach, and inspire the people within our organizations. Now that would be a reason to stand up.

In a sense, this book is my own way of standing up—for a new and better way of doing things, and for those who are struggling to create richer experiences for their people and more positive outcomes for their organizations. When I first decided to write it, I reached out to a wonderful network of authors and asked each of them to share their experiences in crafting, publishing, and marketing a book. This was unexplored territory for me, and their insights have been invaluable along the way.

One of these authors is Geoff Bellman. He and I passed a lovely late-winter afternoon chatting in his north Seattle living room overlooking Puget Sound, enjoying hot tea and the cookies I had brought in exchange for his time. We had been talking about writing for a while when Geoff asked me, “So, why this book?” I guess I still hadn’t answered that question clearly for myself, so I fumbled a bit for a response. After a pause he said, “I find I write because I have to get these ideas out of my head. I have a compelling need to share them.”

In that moment, Geoff had put words to what was driving me. For years I’d been observing the impact that our old thinking and philosophies were having on people across well-intentioned organizations. Further, I knew the frustration of HR leaders who were trying to find a better way. My personal passion for creating win-win solutions for people and organizations had evolved into an obsession. Like Geoff, I felt an unshakable urge to share my learnings, ideas, thinking, and approaches in hopes that they would help us move beyond tradition to something new and better. I felt compelled to reach those beyond my network and client base, because if enough of us have the courage and the tools to move forward—to Rethink, Redesign, and Reboot performance management—we can lead a sea change in how and why we work.