It seems everyone is finally in agreement – the type of performance management that we have all learned to live with is dead. When I Googled the statement ‘performance management isn’t working’ the top four hits were –
No. 1 – Willis Towers Watson with the headline “Performance Management Isn’t Working: Programs Not Keeping Up With Evolving Business Needs”
No.2 – The American Management Association (AMA) declaring that companies are “Sticking with What Doesn’t Work”
Positions 3 & 4 – Two HBR articles entitled “Why talent management isn’t working anymore” and “Reinventing Performance Management”
The last article, by a “director of leader development” at Deloitte, opens with the admission –
“At Deloitte we’re redesigning our performance management system. This may not surprise you. Like many other companies, we realize that our current process for evaluating the work of our people—and then training them, promoting them, and paying them accordingly—is increasingly out of step with our objectives.”
The opinions expressed in these articles cannot produce a workable solution unless and until the leadership and management are ready for it: mature solutions only work in mature organizations. Immature organizations put up with blunt HR instruments simply because they are not skillful enough to use a more sophisticated, whole system, model. That’s the job of the Maturity Institute; producing workable solutions for mature professionals who will ensure that they are geared to the existing maturity level of the organization. Over time the value of the system installed will increase in line with the organization’s maturity level.
The default OMINDEX rating for any company is currently a ‘B’: this is the very low level of value that conventional HR practices, such as ‘performance management’, produce. That is why MI is launching its latest project – the MI Standard Model for Value Management Systems. Note that we have removed the word ‘performance’, partly because it has become meaningless but mainly because the goal is TSV, not individual performance per se.
If you would like to learn more about how to take part in this project – re-connecting effective performance management systems (PMS) by installing mature Value Management Systems (VMS) – then please get in touch.
Postscript
By pure coincidence Bloomberg covered JP Morgan’s new ‘performance feedback technology story today – but with a very low OMR of ‘B’ JPM are simply not mature enough to make it work.
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