Business Performance Management

Are your employees meeting their goals? Is their work improving over time? Understanding where your employees are succeeding—and falling short—is a pivotal part of ensuring you have the right talent to meet organizational objectives. In order to work with your people and effectively monitor their progress, you need a system in place. The HBR Guide to Performance Management provides a multi-step, cyclical process to help you keep track of your employees' work, identify where they need to improve, and ensure they're growing with the organization.

Being a manager is no easy task. You must set and meet team goals that match business objectives while also ensuring growth and development opportunities for your people. You have to be the voice of authority and a key decision-maker while simultaneously giving your employees autonomy and flexibility. How do you navigate these tensions?

Armstrong on Reinventing Performance Management presents a holistic approach to performance management, drawing on Michael Armstrong's vast research and experience. Most organizations have performance management processes in one form or another, but these are often based on formal annual reviews, forced rankings and directly linked to pay decisions. These traditional approaches are often at the expense of ongoing, continuous feedback and focus on looking back at what has or has not been achieved rather than looking forward.

For decades, performance management has been seen as an annual chore by managers and HR alike. But this process is changing, and there are ways to make it more effective for your organization and more useful for employees. If you read (or listen to) nothing else on performance management in your organization, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you assess performance more accurately, have more effective feedback conversations, and encourage the growth of your employees.

There's a bewildering array of management tools out there. And they all promise to help you excel at the toughest parts of your job: defining your organization's strategic direction, managing customers and costs, and boosting workforce performance. But just 30 percent of these tools deliver as intended. Why? As Jeremy Hope and Steve Player reveal in Beyond Performance Management, while many tools are sound in theory, they're misused by most organizations. For example, executives buy and implement a tool without first asking, "What problem are we trying to solve?"

Leadership skills are essential for everyone, and the great news is that they can be learned, meaning that there’s no excuse for poor leadership. This two-book bundle will provide you with concise, powerful advice based on experience and research ranging from neuroscience to social psychology and backed up by statistical data and analysis.

Most people associate performance management with the annual review, which is universally dreaded by employees, management, and HR professionals alike. It's a cookie-cutter, fear-based, top-down approach that emphasizes negatives over positives and stifles healthy career conversations. It's never been shown to motivate anyone to do anything but try to avoid it, but nobody feels like they have any alternative. Tamra Chandler has one - and it works.

Navy Ace pilot and TOPGUN instructor Bill Driscoll demonstrates how his own life-or-death aerial dogfights - and the preparation for them - can help guide high-risk corporate decisions. Interviews with over 200 senior executives and 26 Ace pilots, as well as strategies from Driscoll's own highly successful second career in commercial real estate, reinforce the consistent patterns underlying exceptional performance under pressure.

Better executive health drives business performance and a stronger society. For the experienced manager as well as manager in training, business school professor, and executive coach; Steven P. MacGregor helps you leverage this truth in your life and your business. MacGregor shares breakthrough insights and techniques he's honed through seven years of pioneering the world-renowned Sustaining Executive Performance (SEP) program and working with thousands of top executives worldwide.

An international best-seller from Brendon Burchard – the world's #1 high performance coach, New York Times bestselling author, and renowned speaker in self-improvement, mindset, and motivation. THESE HABITS WILL MAKE YOU EXTRAORDINARY and help you unlock your full potential! "Brendon Burchard...

The Business of Excellence offers a unique and compelling perspective on the drivers of excellence in teams and organizations. The challenges of high performance and leadership are explored in depth and are illustrated with insights, interviews, and case studies from the military, sporting, and corporate worlds. The material includes a proprietary performance model that can be applied to a wide spectrum of organizations.

Our future is written by hopes, fears, dreams, expectations, and decisions made about life. In the same way, organizations have futures written by history, circumstances, culture, aspirations, successes, and failures. These already-written futures determine and shape the level of performance that's possible for individuals and organizations. Authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan crack the code on rewriting the future for people and organizations, elevating performance to unprecedented levels.

Conklin’s audiobook is an interesting and informal discussion with the listener about the five principles of human performance; principle by principle, section by section. These five theories about how humans perform in organizations are principles, the building blocks of human performance, through which we have established a new way to think about safety and reliability in our worlds...and changing the way we think about work is a vital step toward improvement.

If you listen to nothing else on performing at your highest level, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you focus on what matters, manage your energy and attention, and achieve remarkable results. This book will inspire you to improve on your weaknesses, not just your strengths; rise above the pack; take care of your physical health for sustained mental performance; understand what motivates you; use short-term goals to achieve long-term aspirations; and inspire others.

Streamline KPIs to craft a simpler, more effective system of performance measurement.

Business profitability and growth are primary factors in determining business strategy and goals. By utilizing and integrating the two power tools of risk management and key performance indicators you can position your organization to move toward a proactive management style that supports these goals. This book provides practical guidance on how your company can incorporate this approach without utilizing large dollar expenditure for consulting fees and/or internal resources.

One of a manager's toughest - and most important - responsibilities is to evaluate an employee's performance, providing honest feedback and clarifying what they've done well and where they need to improve. In How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, Dick Grote provides a hands-on guide to succeeding at every step of the performance appraisal process - no matter what performance management system your organization uses.

This comprehensive road map for optimal leadership features: breakthrough research that connects increased leadership effectiveness with enhanced business performance; the first fully integrated Universal Model of Leadership; the five stages in the evolution of leadership - Egocentric, Reactive, Creative, Integral, and Unitive - along with the organizational structures and cultures that develop at each of these stages; six leadership practices for evolving your leadership capability at a faster pace; a map of your optimal path to greater leadership effectiveness; and more!

What do astronauts, Olympic champions, and Nobel laureates do differently that allows them to achieve at such a high level? High achievers share the same four attributes: intrinsic motivation, perseverance, strong foundation, constantly learning through informal means. The key to their success is that they do all four of these things at the same time. Based on research and in-person interviews with astronauts, Nobel Prize winners, and Olympic champions, The Success Factor outlines the approach that individuals aspiring to improve their performance can adopt.

Inspired Manufacturing Leadership answers the question of how to systematically incorporate Kaizen, metric management, problem solving, people development, culture change, and many more improvement efforts into one cohesive system of implementation. It reveals to leaders how to effectively and systematically challenge all processes having them to become predictable and repeatable. Once implemented, it facilitates the achievement of breakthrough results.