Armstrong on Reinventing Performance Management ─ Building a culture of continuous improvement

Most organizations have in place performance management systems in one form or another, but these are often based on annual formal reviews, forced rankings and are directly linked to performance pay decisions. These traditional approaches promise so much but in reality deliver very little business impact. The emphasis on formal reviews is often at the expense of ongoing feedback and focuses on looking back at what has or has not been achieved rather than looking forward. Direct links to pay decisions avert attention from people development and line managers often get lost in the bureaucracy of complex forms rather than fully engaging with their people. Michael Armstrong has been advocating a more holistic approach for many years and now draws on E-Reward research as well as recent case studies from global organizations to provide a practical framework for implementing this.

Reinventing Performance Management shows how to build a culture of ongoing feedback and coaching and provides case studies of how this approach to building performance has been effective in organizations including Deloitte, Gap, Expedia and Google. It enables organizations to remove overly bureaucratic and ineffective systems based on top-down judgments and ratings, and shows how to get line managers' support for the process focusing on actionable feedback and growth.

Michael Armstrong is a Companion and former Chief Examiner of the Chartered Institute of Personal Development (CIPD), joint managing partner of e-reward and an independent management consultant.

He is the author of several best-selling HR titles including Armstrong's Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, Armstrong's Handbook of Reward Management Practice, and Armstrong's Handbook of Performance Management.