When people ask me why they should do performance management

I answer

‘Good performance management stops people dying.’

(because it’s  true – read on …)

Think about this for a minute.  Is it that serious? Can performance management really be a matter of life and death?

As a leading performance management specialist, I make it my role to read and reflect on a wide range of research into people & performance, business drivers & behaviour change, management & leadership.  But it is one thing to read, quite another to take the learning, test it in practice, and then be sure it informs your work in future – it’s a hard, demanding game, though very rewarding as you see the impact of your work.

There is one piece of research that I keep coming back to, and that is the fascinating analysis by Michael West into the impact of HR practices on hospital performance.    One of his key findings is that good performance management stops people dying.  Ok – it is written in the language of a statistical reduction in mortality rates, but as extreme as it may seem performance management saves lives.

Ten years ago Michael West, then a researcher and academic at Aston University, demonstrated that the quality of appraisals experienced by hospital staff was correlated with the number of patients dying in the hospital.

West’s research has been published in a number of academic journals and magazines. Here’s an example   https://tinyurl.com/y7k8cfdo    Our clients know that we share these headlines as a wake-up call to senior management – transforming attitudes and securing their buy-in.

So why not get a conversation going, remember

• Good performance management REALLY MATTERS! It can make a massive difference.
• When CEO’s see how transformational performance management They will throw their weight behind transformation and back their HRD’s to the hilt.

If good performance management can literally save lives just think what it can do for your organisation.

But what makes performance management successful?  How can you transform the annual appraisal into a future-focused conversation that actually improves performance and delivers strategy to the front line?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing the research that has informed all the work that I and the 3C team do for our clients.