Performance Management
7 December 2022
Will people be judged on being able to tick off their objectives, which will make their manager happy (and thus receive their bonus) or will we look together at how we can contribute to each other’s succes and really put our shared ambition into practice?
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In performance management, the two paradigms: ‘containment/control’ and ‘generativity’ are often very clear.
► Contain & Control : one starts from ‘objectives’ that are imposed by the manager, and from there it is ‘evaluated’ by that manager who decides to reward in terms of a bonus, salary increase, extra training, etc. The name of the game is ‘pleasing’ : do what your boss asks you to do. But that doesn’t mean that you are doing the right thing for the organization, that your really contribute to the sustainable development of the organization or to the shared ambition. In order to function autonomously, to innovate or to be flexible, employees must take the ‘risk’ of being punished afterwards because they did not achieve ‘their objectives’. That is clearly not generative!
►Generative : where one does not so much look at the individual, or at goals, but where one asks how one can achieve that ‘shared ambition’ by working differently and working together differently. This is done by real teamwork (more then reporting to the same manager), developing an open feedback culture, taking every failure as an opportunity to learn, improve and chang, actively organizing intervision with each other, actually using after action review to improve performance, etc. More important than ‘being the best’ (on his or her own objectives) or getting the biggest bonus the collective capacity to perform and to learn is key!
And in your Organization? Is it about judging individuals or about getting better as Organization? What could you do differently?