Performance Management & Appraisals: Driving High Performance Culture For Organizational Success
INTRODUCTION
An organization that excels in its business is a result of its Leaders’ conscientious efforts in building a high-performance-driven culture. Each successful organization strives for good to great performance every day.
Efficient leaders will seek to create a culture in which business strategies will adapt with changes in business patterns which in turn will drive changes in the operational behaviours of managers and employees. Hence, performance-driven culture is deep-rooted at all levels in the organization.
Creating a performance-driven culture requires a systematic approach to managing the performance of organizations, team,s and individuals. While leaders are the defining elements of that approach, they are not the only elements.
As a continuous measure to ensure a high performance-driven culture, the crux of business success is the performance of individual, team, and total organization. The tools that organization uses i.e. Performance management, performance planning, and appraisals are theoretically good, however, in reality the focus is too much on them being a report card. They focus too much on weaknesses and gaps and provide little for learning and drown everyone in documenting things, often at the end of the year.
What’s to be done is the ability to bring about desired behaviour change to create a performance culture and core process for effecting such change includes:
Deal with Performance Management holistically, connect the “What’s” and “How’s”, the strategic and operational, at all levels in the organization.
Make the appraisal an integral part of the performance and development system and remove the traditional performance appraisal system which drains time, energy and does not produce the results.
Change the appraisal process by setting expectations, ongoing feedback, coaching, recognition & reward and professional development training
Importantly, focus on the strengths of each individual and capitalise on it, discover what is unique about each staff in the organization
