Managers as Coaches: The Road to Evolving Performance Management at Goldman Sachs

At Goldman Sachs, we have never been more committed to investing in our people’s development, including by ensuring that each colleague receives robust, timely and actionable feedback to help them grow and unlock their full potential. The challenges of today’s work environment amidst a pandemic underscore the importance of continually examining how we work and build greater opportunity, clarity, communication and connection between managers and their teams.

This week, we announced the launch of a more tailored approach to performance management with a focus on empowering managers to lead as coaches through regular feedback conversations. Rooted in research and our people’s insights, we are (1) adjusting our performance distribution to continue to acknowledge that the vast majority of our people each year are meeting or exceeding our high expectations; (2) delivering enhanced transparency to enable our people to play an even larger role in their development, and have the information and multifaceted, data-driven feedback to do so; and finally (3) enabling our managers, as leaders, to take a more active coaching role with their teams. To support managers as coaches, we will implement a simple framework – The Three Conversations at GS – whereby managers establish goals with their team members at the start of the year, check in mid-year on progress and then close out the year with a conversation on performance against goals and their performance rating.      

These changes reflect our focus on innovating and meeting the evolving needs of our people. In a talent-centric business – we only operate at our best when our people can too. 

 This is just the beginning of our journey. We are committed to continuing to evolve our people practices to enable all Goldman Sachs colleagues to maximize their potential, empowering their personal success and therefore the success of the firm.