Performance: All Changed in A Decade

‘It is the Bible of organizational performance’ said the mid-MBA manager with enthusiasm. He was holding a book the size of a telephone directory with the words ‘Performance Management’ in big letters on the cover.  

With no more that the title to work on, I guessed the book was up to a decade old – and I was right!  The inside cover revealed that it had been published in 2012.  I thought to myself: How we engage with performance has changed a lot in less than a decade. 

Few today would use the words ‘performance management’ with eagerness or pride.  Most will emphasis the need to optimize and develop, rather than just manage performance… and it is not just a play with words.  Take the annual Performance Review for example.  It has gone out of fashion – abandoned in 2015 or 2016 by some of the biggest and best corporations (e.g. GE, Netflix and Accenture) (1).  

Terms like employee engagement, employee value proposition and employee well-being are commonplace in an era when the ‘battle for talent’ is foremost.  Yet, despite this new enlightenment there is still some way to go, especially, when we know that most organizations are only unlocking just 61% of the full potential of their people(2). 

This then the most exciting era of all – a time when a leader is defined by their ability to unlock the performance potential of their people(3).  Our Pitstop Analytics™ solution combines performance analytics with people/talent analytics and has been designed to measure, model and unlock the performance potential of leaders and their business units/teams.   

(1) Chris Dugan ‘The Annual Performance Review is Going Extinct’, Fast Company, Oct. 2015

(2) Ray Collis & John O Gorman, ‘Pitstop to Perform™’, ASG Group, 2017.

(3) Brene Brown, ‘Dare to Lead’, Randon House, 2018.