What's the Goal of Performance Management?

June 29, 2012

By that, I mean if you had to choose one goal of performance management in your company, what would it be? Not a list of 25 things like one of those godawful job descriptions ...

For me, the one goal would be that performance management is there as a process/format to drive conversations, interaction and dialog that migrate the employee UP the performance grid. Bad to good, good to great, etc.

Isn't that the job of the manager? Once you get away from the stale process of handing out merit increases based on ratings and other stale stuff, isn't that really why we have performance management in our organizations? To provide coaching to make people better?

There's a lot that goes into the ability to coach using a tool like performance management, but in my world that's the goal.

Why else would you do it? I suspect the reason so many people call for an end to the performance review is that we've lost sight on the one thing we should be trying to accomplish.

Kris Dunn is a frequent Workforce Management contributor. He is chief human resources officer at Kinetix and writes the blog The HR Capitalist. He is also the head blogger at Fistful of Talent. To comment, email