Part 1: Rethinking of Performance Management

Understanding Performance Management

What is performance?

Most of our traditional management practices come from the old rules of work when the pace of change was comparatively slow. But the pace of change is rapidly accelerating now, primarily driven by automation, globalization, and the changing dynamics of business. In a rapidly changing world, many top-down processes no longer benefit many organizations. And in fact, those traditional approaches can actually have the opposite effect. As a result, those traditional management practices don’t work anymore and we have to avoid managing performance through the lens of yesterday’s management practices.

We need a new way of looking at performance, a continually changing way that could match the speed of change around us.

Three levels of performance

First, performance is critical at the individual level. Every worker needs to feel that they have the tools, the resources, and the support to perform at their best.

Second, performance is essential at the team level. Teams need to know about the performance abilities of each member. And understand how they can best perform in concert together.

And third, performance is important at the organizational level. Organizations, as a whole, need to understand how they can perform even at a great scale.