How to Manage Performance: 24 Lessons for Improving Performance (Mighty Manager Series)

Managing performance

Why should you care about managing the performance of your employees? Because communication between manager and employees is essential for increasing productivity, improving morale and motivation, and allowing coordination of each employee’s work with the goals of the unit and the organization.

Many managers dislike performance management. They try to avoid it or they try to cut corners or they simply mess up. It’s often because they don’t understand performance management.

So, they’re focusing on the wrong things. They focus on appraisal rather than planning. They focus on a one-way flow of words (manager to employee) rather than dialogue. They focus on required forms rather than communication. They focus on blaming rather than solving problems. They focus on the past rather than the present and the future.

So they waste time and effort and just don’t get out of performance management the benefits that it can provide—if done properly. In fact, their time and efforts often only make the situation worse.

Performance management is an ongoing communication process, undertaken in partnership between an employee and his or her immediate supervisor, that involves establishing clear expectations and understanding about the following:

   the employee’s essential job functions

   how the employee’s job contributes to the goals of the organization

   what it means, in concrete terms, to do the job well

   how job performance will be measured

   what barriers hinder performance and how they can be minimized or eliminated

   how the employee and the supervisor will work together to improve the employee’s performance

That’s what these 24 lessons are all about.

Performance management is an investment up front so that you can just let your employees do their jobs. They’ll know what they’re expected to do, what decisions they can make on their own, how well they have to do their jobs, and when you need to be involved. Done properly, performance management can save you time and effort.

I can’t give you recipes for success, because it’s impossible to use a cookbook approach to managing performance. No one way will work for every manager with every employee in every situation.

I hope that you’ll find in this little book principles and actions that will help you get more results from the time and effort you put into managing the performance of your employees. After going through these 24 lessons, you’ll have a good grasp of performance management, so you can develop a way of doing it that helps you succeed at helping your employees succeed.

Performance management is, in some ways, very simple and, in other ways, very complex. It consists of lots of parts and requires some skills. But if you approach it with the proper mindset, you can make it work—and pay great benefits.

Stay old school

Modernize your thinking

One of the challenges of making performance management and appraisal work involves leaving behind older ideas of how work gets done, the roles of manager and employee, and the purposes associated with performance management. For example, managers who believe their role is to tell staff what to do rather than work with them to solve problems don’t fare well with performance management. Managers who believe performance appraisal is the venue for bashing employees over the head don’t do well. And managers who refuse to take on the role of helping everyone succeed quite simply don’t get