News flash: In terms of workplace performance, employees aren’t all the same.  Yup…bet you had no idea.

Of course, it would be nice if they were all the same – preferably awesome. Unfortunately, we have all seen the employee who has been with the company for ten years but really doesn’t have ten years experience, he just has one year of experience ten times.

Sure, it’s an old joke, but the reason it’s been around so long is it contains a lot of truth.

Extensive research in a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started. (From Talent is Overrated, by Geoffrey Colvin, Portfolio – Penguin Group, 2008)

“Performance management” is one of the buzz words associated with management (although it originates as an HR function), but ask managers what it is and you will get a variety of (sometimes quite interesting) answers. Here’s a look at what Wikipedia has to offer on the subject:

Performance Management (PM) as described here refers to a term coined by Dr. Aubrey C. Daniels in the late 1970s to describe a technology (i.e., science imbedded in applications methods) for managing both behavior and results, the two critical elements of what is known as performance. Performance is the sum of behavior and results, and cannot be viewed as independent of either component. It is an outcome of effective management.

In the context of Human Resources, performance management refers to the ongoing process of setting goals, self-assessment, manager assessment, peer-assessment (also called 360 assessment), coaching, development planning, and evaluation. Research has shown that this process, which is widely used in business (but often called performance appraisal), has two forms: competitive assessment (where employees are rigorously compared against each other), and coaching & development (where employees are evaluated against their own goals and capabilities).

Managing behavior and results. This probably calls for a definition of behavior as well (we’re not talking about managing all behavior, are we?), but I suspect this explanation of performance management means that effective managers train employees in certain behaviors (workplace tasks) that inevitably lead to a predictable set of results.

The second part of the Wikipedia definition reveals more detail. Here, performance management includes things like goal-setting, assessments, coaching, development planning, and evaluation. The interesting thing about all of this is that, while managers are generally required to “manage performance” – by some definition -  that definition is rarely crystal clear to the manager. Further, the manager is almost never provided with the necessary training to be competent in “performance management,” at least in terms of using all of those tools effectively. Quite often, it is simply assumed that, once promoted to management, a manager somehow just knows how to manage performance.

Evidently, the assumption that managers just know how to manage performance isn’t working out that well – at least from anecdotal evidence. Talking to managers from a number of industries and different company sizes, it is interesting to hear their ideas (definitions) about performance management: they range from telling employees what to do, to completing an annual performance evaluation, to correcting mistakes and/or failures, to documenting inappropriate behavior, to providing job skills training, to letting HR do it. Oddly enough, the concept of “coaching and development” almost never arises…

At the same time, the vast majority of those managers feel they are poorly prepared and inadequately trained to effectively manage their employees performance.  How about you? How effective are you at managing performance?

Tagged as: Appraisal, Coaching, evaluation, performance