Beyond Performance Management

Why Integrated Performance Support Processes Are Replacing Traditional Performance Management Strategies

By Chuck McVinney
© 2000 McVinney & Company

Introduction

These days the traditional and current approaches to performance management are not sufficient. The reasons are several. Traditional approaches are all too likely to be based on issues that are largely irrelevant today. Such as:

1. Seniority;
2. Inflexible job descriptions;
3. Performance data based on previous years;
4. Political concerns (who you know rather than what you do);
5. Top down decisions from very hierarchical organizations with minimal employee input;
6. Based only on quantitative feedback;
7. Based exclusively on individual performance;
8. Stable work and business conditions;
9. Driven by industrial and manufacturing models of work process;
10. Motivated by centralized and standardized reward and feedback strategies.

Since today's work environments are different from those of the middle and late 20th Century, new concerns are driving our impressions of what makes for successful performance. The rugged individual, step-on-anything-to-get-to-the-top mode of work and source of rewards is quickly changing. The workplace responds now to the more collaborative, influential, knowledgeable worker, who can integrate his or her skills with others in the work team and work more quickly, creatively, and efficiently, all at once.>>