Performance Management Shouldn’t Kill Collaboration | Harvard Business Review

Most organizations rely on cross-functional and unit collaboration to drive business performance and results. And while organizations often include a “team” component as part of evaluating and rewarding employee performance, this article argues that performance management practices can still discourage cross-silo collaboration. The authors offer a four-part performance scorecard for every employee that establishes shared goals for tackling big challenges while holding people accountable for delivering individual results, including 1) Cross-silo goals: broad shared goals that focus on big challenges and can be achieved within a year (e.g., cutting the time to market for new products by half), 2) Team goals: goals that measure team-level results and hold people accountable for raising the performance of their whole working group, 3) Individual goals: goals that measure a person’s individual contribution to higher-level success, and 4) Long-range programs: while the first three goals focus on what can be achieved in a single performance cycle, the fourth component focuses on longer-term, multidisciplinary initiatives (e.g., an initiative to enter a new market segment, developing white papers that showcase the organization’s innovative ideas, etc.) The article shows several illustrations where each goal type is weighted according to its importance in helping the company achieve its strategic aims. Practitioners can determine whether implementing this four-part performance scorecard in their organizations is feasible and if the value gained outweighs the complexity; this determination will be influenced by many factors, from organizational culture, company size, to business model. As a bonus resource, here is a 28-minute podcast where one of the article’s authors, Heidi Gardner, elaborates on many of the points in the article.