Avisen certainly intrigued me with a post called The Achilles heal (sic) of Performance Management. It’s widely agreed that many performance management projects deliver less value than originally promised. The issue is so endemic that a colleague once asked me “Does performance management have any value?”
Imagine my disappointment when, after wading through nearly 1000 words of flight delays and mini stories, the Achilles’ heel was described as follows:
Too many times the intention and underlying drivers of a measurement system are not clearly communicated to the people in the organisation and the reward system is not aligned to drive towards the intended behaviour. Successful implementation of a measurement system correctly often requires a fair amount of change management which is unfortunately too often neglected.
Communicate objectives, not just measures. Align incentives to objectives. Focus on the process, rather than the system. No offense but these are not novel or earth shattering.
They are good advice however so the messages bear repeating. Unfortunately, I doubt the average reader would make it that far. Which is perhaps the real Achilles’ heel of both blogging and performance management: if you can’t engage your audience quickly, you aren’t going to have a significant impact.
Well at least you got him “heal” the title, since it now corrected to show heel.