Beyond Performance Management

Why Integrated Performance Support Processes Are Replacing Traditional Performance Management Strategies

By Chuck McVinney
© 2000 McVinney & Company

Moving from Peformance Management to Performance Support

As if to throw more complexity into the equation, organizations and their leaders must also provide performance support and feedback in the learning and listening language of the receivers. Recognizing differentiated learning modes, listening strategies, and communication styles in the diverse working population requires leaders and managers to specify feedback accordingly. Some of us learn and communicate one way or ways, others of us in quite different ways. Ignoring this feature of human diversity, namely the mental differences between us, is probably even more deadly than ignoring the recently acknowledged distinctions between gender, racial, and cultural backgrounds.

Moreover, integration of performance support means that available rewards for contracted results need to be more and more tailored to the motivational profile of the individuals and teams carrying out the work. This decentralization of reward structures forces the organization, however large or small, to think uniquely about how to thank and keep people. More and more often these terms are set as much by the employee as by the company.

All of this spells an evolving context for the feedback and performance processes. The old approach of calling the employee in once a year to the boss's office in order to give her the annual raise and lay out the failures of the last 12 months, is defunct. Today's performance management must be performance support. Organizations through their leaders and managers must provide an opportunity for ongoing and creative dialog for planning about the contributions and development challenges facing individuals and teams. This makes performance support an ongoing process and means that we need ways to activate and enhance the communication necessary to assure it is done well. Performance support in the end is learning support, and the infrastructures built to support it must be learning infrastructures, not the platforms for judgement they have been in the past.>>