23 Insights from the Performance Management Conference

Purpose matters in performance management. A system that merely rates or ranks performance won’t raise performance.

1. Before committing to a functional design for your performance management system, know your goal. Is it to rate people for compensation, to raise performance, or both? How you proceed will depend on the answer.
2. A global tech company names three goals for managers to focus on when evaluating employees: development, movement, and rewards. Replacing ratings, rankings, nine-blocks, and 360-feedback sessions with a single conversation-based framework, they ask two questions about employees: Are they delivering results? Are they lifting their teams? The answers give them data that do more than point out who should be rewarded; they allow for useful lateral moves, say, when an employee is good at X but is doing Y.
3. Calibration meetings can undermine employee development. “People hate calibration because it turns