3 Ways to Increase Manager Impact Throughout the Performance Cycle | Gartner

As performance management (PM) remains vital for enhancing individual, team, and organizational performance, this article explores three ways organizations support managers in developing PM capabilities. 1) Pfizer employs collaborative workshops to achieve ambitious team goals, addressing interdependencies, commitments, and collaboration barriers. 2) SABIC, a chemical manufacturer, integrates sensitive topics like wellbeing and burnout into PM to nurture psychological safety in feedback. Their PM technology offers a dropdown menu of employee-sourced conversation topics, normalizing open discussion of potentially sensitive matters during performance conversations. 3) Thrivent, a financial services firm, trains managers to evaluate performance in uncertain and challenging scenarios, using real-life cases from managers who struggled to evaluate employees. Debates on these scenarios improve managers’ ability to more accurately and fairly apply performance criteria to evaluations. To supplement this article, I’m sharing my PM playlist with five resources that help answer: 1) What PM practices do organizations use (and don’t use) today? 2) How can employee well-being be integrated into PM? 3) What are the triggers for when employee goals might be adjusted? 4) How can we mitigate bias in PM? 5) How can we use PM to enable collaboration across business units and cross-functional silos?