Managing Performance

At the centre of a successful organization is effective and efficient leadership. According to John C Maxwell, “Everything rises and falls on leadership”, therefore the pace and ultimately the level of success an organization attains is primarily determined by her leadership structure and system.

The major responsibility of leadership in any organisation is to develop the people working with them in the process of getting the job done. One of the best ways to developing your personnel/staff is to engage the process of performance management as against Performance Appraisal. PA is the formal assessment and rating of individuals by managers at, usually, an annual review meeting. In contrast, PM is a continuous and much wider, more comprehensive and more natural process of management that clarifies mutual expectations, emphasises the supportive role of managers who are expected to act as coaches rather than judges with the picture of the future in view.

Managing performance is about coaching, guiding, motivating and rewarding people to help unleash their potential and improve organizational performance. Where it works well, it is built on excellent leadership and the high-quality relationship between managers and teams (Halifax BOS)

Performance management is a systematic process for improving individuals, teams and organisational performance. It is a means of getting better results by understanding and managing performance within an agreed framework of planned goals, standards and competency requirements. It focuses people on doing the right things by clarifying their goals. Performance management is a continuous and flexible process, which involves managers and those whom they manage acting as partners within the framework that sets out how they can best work together to achieve the required results. It is based on the principle of management by contract and agreement rather than management by command. It relies on consensus and co-operation rather than control or coercion.

The aim is to develop the capacity of people to meet and exceed expectations and to achieve their full potential to the benefit of themselves and their organization. The overall aim of performance management is to establish a high-performance culture in which individual and teams take responsibility for the continuous improvement of business processes and for their own skills and contributions within a framework provided by effective leadership. Importantly, performance management is concerned with ensuring that the support and guidance people need to develop and improve are readily available. Specifically, performance management is about aligning individual objectives to organizational objectives and ensuring that individuals uphold corporate core values.