Performance Management for any Application: Guidelines for Implementation
and Evaluation

Sections of This Topic Include

Guidelines for Initial Implementation

Guidelines to Continuously Evaluate Your Implementation

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Guidelines for Initial Implementation

The activities in performance management are a recurring cycle of highly integrated
activities. Over time, they occur as a very meaningful conversation among leaders
in the organization. The styles in conducting the activities range from implicit
and unfolding to explicit and well planned, depending on the culture of the
organization, the complexity of its operations and the reason for conducting
the performance management process.

1. Be sure to form a team to oversee the implementation. There will be much
   more expertise, energy and wisdom in a team than if one person is responsible
   for it all.
2. Do not view performance management as a completely new set of activities
   in your organization. Realize that you have probably already have been doing
   some of them. Now, you are building upon them, expanding them and improving
   them.
3. Similar to the requirements
   for accomplishing significant change in organizations, the process of
   performance management will not be successful if it does not have the full
   ongoing support and oversight of the top management in the organization, as
   well as the ongoing effective delegation from the supervisors of those implementing
   the process.
4. Follow the Pareto
   Principle that suggests that, in most things in life, the first 20% of
   effort generates the first 80% of success. This is true for first implementing
   the performance management process. Get it implemented during the first year
   and improve it as you go along.
5. Early in the implementation, decide if you will be using the traditional
   approach or the progressive
   approach to performance management. The approaches can be quite different.
6. While implementing the process, be sure that you see all the perspectives
   that are involved. All of us have biases or natural ways that we automatically
   perceive and interpret things in the world, including how we come to conclusions
   about them. Many times, we are not aware of those biases, despite the significant
   role they play in what we see and do not see.
   Understand Your
   Preferred “Lens” Through Which You View Organizations
   What’s
   a Mindset? What’s Yours?

Guidelines to Continuously Evaluate Your
Implementation

As you implement and operate the performance management process, whether it
is for an overall organization, team or individual employee, always be asking
yourselves:

1. How might we be more effective in aligning our preferred performance results
   with the overall goals of the organization?
2. How might we be more effective in selecting our performance measures?
3. How might we be more effective and efficient in continuing to monitor those
   measures?
4. Was our documented performance plan complete and accurate enough?
5. How might we improve our performance appraisal process?
6. How successful were we in improving performance where it was needed?
7. What changes should we make to our performance management process?
8. What changes should we make to how we evaluate the process?

Now, go back and make the necessary changes to how you operate your performance
system.

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Suggested Additional Readings

About
The Role of Strategic Evaluation in Nonprofits

Basic Guide to Program Evaluation
Designing
Assessment and Evaluation Tools

How
to Evaluate Organizations
Employee
Performance Management
Group Performance
Management

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Learn More in the Library’s Blogs Related to Organizational Performance

In addition to the articles on this current page, also see the following blogs
that have posts related to organizations. Scan down the blog’s page to see various
posts. Also see the section “Recent Blog Posts” in the sidebar of
the blog or click on “next” near the bottom of a post in the blog.
The blog also links to numerous free related resources.

Library’s
Consulting and Organizational Development Blog
Library’s
Human Resources Blog
Library’s
Leadership Blog
Library’s
Project Management Blog
Library’s
Supervision Blog

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For the Category of Organizational Development:

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