Parenting, or Performance Monitoring

Lately, it seems that everyone wants to fix performance management. There is good reason for this. By most estimates, between 99 and 100% of workers, managers, HR leaders and executives hate their performance management processes. The problems are legion:

• Restriction of range (only using the middle of the scale)
• Inconsistent standards (managers using different implicit rating criteria)
• Rating inflation (everyone is rated "Above Average")
• No dialogue / performance coaching throughout the year

The list goes on...

So, here is my humble contribution to the discourse.

To me, the performance management problem is analogous to parenting. There may not be a strict / precise measure of "good performance" that we apply to our kids, but there are guidelines (be kind, be generous, share with your friends, have proper manners, don't be too wild). For the most part, parents know when their children are behaving well and the good ones encourage and positively reinforce those behaviors. I think most kids know when they're misbehaving and attentive parents work with teachers, friends' parents and continual communication ("how was your day?") to assess where they can improve. Obviously, no manager will love their employee unconditionally the way that a parent does, but they should be operating from a similar mindset and looking out for their well-being.

In the organizational context, without setting clear expectations for the year (i.e. creating SMART goals, by position) and defining a performance baseline (combination of where you're starting as an organization, and how the rest of industry is doing), one cannot expect to resolve the issue of uneven performance appraisals.

These parametric settings are neccesary, but insufficient. The remaining challenge is the measurement interval. There are, of course, jobs in which performance is measured in days, shifts or even hours (garment workers, call center representatives and factory workers come to mind), but these examples offer little when it comes to professional positions.

For the broad class of "knowledge workers," it is necessary to regularly revisit targets, evaluate their suitability (given the macroeconomic context) and calibrate progress against stated goals. As an example, imagine someone working in the shale industry. The recent collapse of oil prices would, in all likelihood, impact every performance objective and target that they had, but just because nobody is going to hit their original targets, we need not lose all sense of proportion and relativity.

What are your thoughts?