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Briefly explain the key performance management concept highlighted in the case.

Human Resource Management

Stories of Successful Performance Management All we usually hear about performance management is complaints that it is not working well and general prescriptions for how to make it work better. For this white paper I wanted to take a different tack. I sought out stories where performance management really had worked well; cases where it had made a meaningful difference to the people involved and the organizations they served. There are many lessons to be learned from these stories, so let's waste no time and peek into those places where people cheered for their performance management process. The Wrong Leader One of the reasons we do performance reviews is to weed out bad performers. This case is about a performance management system stepping in to identify and remove a bad leader. Before we get to the story, we have to face up to how we often get it wrong. Usually companies decide someone is a poor performer and then tell the manager to create a paper trail to justify firing them. Here performance management is not used to help identify bad performers; it is used to build a case against someone. Anyone who has lived through this knows it is an ugly process. The way to avoid it is to have honest appraisals that face up to problems early, and a problem with honest appraisals is where this story starts. This case took place at a very polite and collegial educational institution in South Asia! There was a performance management system in place and, very politely, almost everyone was rated good if not excellent. While criticisms of employees may have been whispered in the hallways, when it came to a formal rating bosses were extremely reluctant to offend an employee by giving them a bad score. Change came when they decided to incorporate anonymous multi-rater feedback into the performance appraisal. We often hear that multi-rater feedback should only be used for developmental purposes, but this case tells a different story. Freed by anonymity and the comfort of knowing their own rating was only one of several, the feedback in the appraisal was, for the first time, brutally honest. One department head got truly terrible scores. This probably was not a surprise to anyone, but now the system had put it on the record. The person was given a chance to improve but a year later his performance appraisal was equally bad and the organization acted. In fact the organization had created a system that had forced itself to act when in the past it had seemed easier to let the poor performance slide. I once asked Helen Handfield-Jones, one of the authors of the famous McKinsey War for Talent book, why she had recommended using the harsh forced-ranking system to review managers. She said it was because facing up to low performance amongst leaders can be very hard to do. Unless you create a system that forces you to confront problems, it just won't happen. This case shows that performance management can identify and remove bad performers. It doesn't do so automatically, you need to enable - even force--tough and honest appraisals. If you do that then the value of the process is readily apparent