Managing for Peak Performance (3/3)

Scorekeepers and commentators should not be more important than the players!

Peak performance cannot be mandated by managers or imposed through management systems. Performance management is about leaders, throughout the organisation, fostering the context, culture and climate within which staff can perform to their full potential. Before consultants got hold of his idea and turned it into an overly structured, essentially top-down procedure ("MBO"), Peter Drucker talked about the need for "management by objectives and self-control."

In essence, Drucker was saying that people need to understand what they have to achieve to be successful and then be encouraged, assisted and enabled to manage their own performance to get there. Unlocking the organisation's talent and channelling it for business benefit is the real meaning of performance management. Organisations must not be seduced into thinking that the same effect will be achieved simply by applying a few coats of "Performance Management" gloss (such as updated forms of MBO, 'carrot and stick' reward systems, and reliance on formal, programmed feedback sessions) to their existing management practices.

Leaders must embed the principles and practices of high performance through the language they use, the attitudes they display and their everyday behaviours. Otherwise, efforts will degenerate into little more than a performance cult - kept alive by the 'life support machine' of impersonal techniques, targets and reports.

You cannot collapse the full breadth of performance management into a system of performance measurement.