We love our fads and buzzwords. One of the hottest is “talent management,” even though “talent” is often a code word for “people” and there’s no way to actually measure talent. Talent management is the big picture thing, the one that important people spend their time on.
Not so, “performance management,” which represents the blocking and tackling, in-the-trenches part of getting the job done. Performance management sounds a lot like “performance appraisal,” which everyone knows is a dinosaur just waiting to die. But the truth is that performance is something that you can measure and you can manage
The sad fact is that every boss in your company is doing performance management all day, every day. The only choice is whether they’re doing a good job or a bad job.
I love those people and I think far too many companies pluck them from the ranks of individual contributors, throw them into the pond, and throw a book about swimming after them. That’s why I absolutely loved Mark Vickers’ post, “Do You REALLY Want to Know the Cornerstone to Talent Management?”
Mark points out that, unglamorous as it may be, performance management gets the highest rating among the nine key components of integrated talent management (ITM) systems. Here’s what Mark describes as the basics.
Designing a performance management system that employees don’t hate and yet is accurate
Teaching all levels of supervisors how to manage performance well instead of just expecting them to do it well
Distinguishing between higher and lower performance in your compensation system rather than giving the best employees token raises
Putting performance analysis to work by tying it to individual learning and development plans
This is great stuff and I only have a couple of quibbles. The most important is that simply training managers in a functional performance management system isn’t enough.
You have to select people for supervisory roles who are willing to talk to others about performance. This is a specific behavior that you can observe, not something you test for or quiz candidates about. People who have that willingness can be taught technique to build skill, but people who are terrified to talk to others about behavior or performance usually find reasons not to do it, which means they’re doing toxic performance management by default.
Performance management isn’t that tough and it’s not glamorous at all, but it’s what great organizations do.
