When I made the leap a couple of years ago to independent HR Consulting, I promised myself that I was going to provide products and services that were not going to contain any HR jargon and were going to be straight, simple and to the point. Which let’s face it… is rare for HR Practioners…quite rare.

I had a hangover from corporate life where I and my colleagues were seen as incidental administrators at best. I grew tired of the heavy sighs and eye-rolling anytime I would bring “the law” to the attention of an employee. I particularly grew intolerant of being dismissed as the “terminator” or worse: paper-pushing, policy-policing, party-planner. I think we as HR people can all say with confidence: not even the most senior people in organizations would want to deal with what we deal with on the employee relations level. But I digress…

Let’s talk about every HR person’s best friend: the annual (perhaps mid-year) performance review. Performance Management is quite likely the most loathed of any company wide program we shove down people’s throats and I do mean shove. Why? Because for the most part, HR folks are guilty (including yours truly) of over complicating the simplest of processes. Somewhere we lost sight of our customers and end users and began to build in levels of complexity and sophistication into every program and new initiative we created. And we paid for it through resistance, avoidance and even resentment.

For the record: I don’t HATE Performance Management…I HATE the reputation it gives HR people as Administrative Whip-Crackers. We have a job to change the mind set of employees everywhere which is to take Performance Management from something HR makes you do to a respected process that is integral to business planning. And that somehow we have got to get leaders to step up and demonstrate managerial courage in having those tough conversations with their people.

How? By keeping it simple of course. By removing the layers of paperwork and administrative intensive steps. We need to promote processes that orchestrate and facilitate conversations between leaders and their people. And we can do so by adapting the basics:

• Write some goals
• get them reviewed and approved
• do some coaching and give some feedback
• have a meeting twice a year (at minimum)
• create a learning plan that addresses your opportunity areas
• start it all over again
  

Performance Management is a business cycle and it requires the presence of leadership and accountability.