Performance Management Simply Isn't Simple!

Have the attempts to “simplify” performance management failed to produce effective solutions and trivialized it?

- Clinton Wingrove

Everyone is getting excited about how to manage performance when using outsourced labor and gig-workers (contractors, consultants, freelancers), or when operating in a multi-cultural environment.

Performance Management simply isn’t simple

OK, let’s start by being honest! Performance Management, in any organization, simply isn’t simple! It may have been simple back in the days when you could tell people what to do and then beat or sack them if they didn’t perform well. But we have known since the early ’70s that so-called “traditional performance management” didn’t work, doesn’t work, and never would work. Sadly, it has taken over 40 years of failed attempts for many to grasp that reality, despite almost universal hatred of the processes by both management and staff.

The evidence is staggeringly clear that attempts to “simplify” performance management have failed to produce effective solutions and, in most cases, trivialized performance management. Performance Management simply isn’t simple! But that does not mean that it can’t be easy. The two are quite different. Whether we are dealing with direct staff, indirect staff, outsourced labor, temporary staff, etc., the issues faced are the same.

What does not work?

• Annual or other short-term goal or objective setting. It does provide some means by which to track progress and determine success, but its motivational value is seriously questionable. Indeed, it probably has little effect on those who need their performance to be managed, and a negative effect on those who don’t.

• Episodic reviews such as annual and quarterly reviews. They may create the illusion of working but consume time and emotional energy with little return.