Performance Management Blog
What is happening in performance management, and what it means for the people who have to run it.
Articles written for managers who carry responsibility for other people's output, and for the HR teams who design the process they work inside. Most of it comes out of the same material as our performance management training for managers.
Certification and training
- Five benefits of online certification
- What certification gives a working manager that experience alone does not.
- The ROI of certification
- How to work it out for your own situation, and why published salary figures are weak evidence.
- Choosing an online course
- What to check before you pay, and how to make sure you finish it.
- What you learn in appraisal training
- The mechanics of running an appraisal that changes behaviour.
- Why appraisal training fails in the wrong culture
- The same course produces very different results in two organisations.
- Building a certified process
- Designing a process that holds up rather than one that generates paperwork.
Running the process
- Developing goals and objectives
- Writing objectives that still mean something in October.
- OKRs and KPIs
- What the difference actually is, and when each is the wrong tool.
- Measurement and improvement
- Two distinct processes that most organisations run as one.
- Performance improvement plans
- What a plan has to contain to be worth opening at all.
- Managing underperformers
- Handling it early, while it is still a coaching conversation.
- Ten questions worth asking in a review
- Questions that produce an answer rather than a reassurance.
- 360 reviews done properly
- Where multi-source feedback earns its cost, and where it does not.
- Building a performance management culture
- Why Adobe dropped the annual review, and what regular feedback asks of managers.
- The cycle of development
- The stages of developing people, and why fast growing companies need a faster rhythm.
- Performance-based compensation
- What happens to behaviour when pay is attached to the rating.
- Fairness and bias in ratings
- Where bias enters, and the parts of the process you can redesign.
- Fast growing companies
- Why a process built for a stable organisation breaks at speed.
Research
- What 300 companies found about their own process
- Almost all of them run one. Very few think it works.
- McKinsey on middle managers
- The people responsible for performance spend most of their time on something else.
Technology and what is next
- AI in performance management
- What it is already doing, what it cannot judge, and what goes wrong unsupervised.
- Technology and certification
- What the tools genuinely changed, and what is still a promise.
- Where appraisal is heading
- What replaced the annual rating, and which parts were quietly reversed.
- Trends for business managers in 2024
- The changes that landed that year, and what each asked of the manager.
The Certificate in Performance Management
Eight modules, about ten hours of study, and an online exam with a 70% pass mark. Passing carries the designation Certified Performance Management Professional (CPMP) from the Institute for Performance Management. A full module is free so you can see the standard first.