Summer's Top 150: Last Installment

It's the last day of summer already, and there you have it: the 150+ blog posts, articles, presentations, podcasts and videos I've come across over the last 3 months. Here's the final installment:

1. If there's a single link from this Summer's Top 150 you need to check out, this is the one: a great slide show on company culture, and very relevant to the public service.
2. Forget excellence - Be outstanding!
3. Realigning Your Role
4. Owning Your Career
5. Behavior never lies
6. Execute or die
7. Maybe (New Michael Jordan Commercial) - I just like the implication for employees :-)
8. The New Employee Retention Crisis: Retaining Low Performers
9. What are you thinking about
10. Employee Engagement: You Are Not the Boss of Me.
11. Multitasking, marijuana, managing?
12. When weak management pushes top performers out the door
13. Behaving badly
14. Facebook Friending Policy
15. 5 Ways HR Can Poise a Firm for Growth?
16. It takes two baby!

Summer's Top 150: Supervision & Performance Management

I know, I know. This "dump post" includes way too many articles. But the topic is soooo important!

1. Three Questions for Potential Managers to Ask Themselves
2. New Managers: Alone and Out of Their Depths
3. Middle Managers: The Meat in the Sandwich
4. Caring for Your People: Part of the Boss's Job
5. The Penny Challenge
6. How to Have More Productive Performance Appraisals
7. The Dreaded Performance Review
8. Straight Talk in a Slump
9. What Leaders Can Learn from a Doctor About How to Deliver Bad News
10. 7 Mistakes Bosses Make When Giving Criticism
11. Ask Three Questions to Clarify Expectations
12. Managers Who Coach Ask Questions That Enlighten
13. Managers Who Coach: Overcome Dependency
14. Develop Outstanding Employees Utilizing Effective Feedback
15. Better Mentoring
16. Adding a few points to Seth on leadership
17. How To Inaugurate Effectiveness In Your Project Team
18. If You Want Accountability, You Must Grant Authority
19. It’s Not About FINDING Talent. It’s about IDENTIFYING and TAPPING What You Already Have
20. Promotions and job fit
21. What Alienates Top Performers
22. Rewarded Employees Work Harder
23. The Art of Giving Praise
24. Leading Clever People
25. Nine Ways to Identify Natural Leaders
26. How to Identify Your Employees' Hidden Talents
27. Empowering Leaders: Hand Over Your Keys
28. Handling Quit-and-Stays
29. Problem children: Dealing with whiney, crybaby malcontents in your ranks
30. Management Interview Questions and Answers
31. What makes a good boss?
32. Stop Demotivating Me!
33. Leadership: Intentional Influence
34. Does Your Do Match Your Tell?
35. How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team
    

Awesome Reading Recommendations

I've been away for the last two weeks, both for work and leisure. When I returned I had over 300 articles waiting for me in my RSS reader. I managed to process them all, and here are my top recommendations, arranged by themes:

On Staffing:

1. Interviewing Doesn’t Work
2. The Job Mismatch Problem - The Five Costs of the Wrong Employee In The Wrong Seat
3. Interview questions for a Team Leader

On Thinking:

1. Executive Behaviors, Your Boss Has No Clothes and Revolution from the Bottom
2. Risk, Bravado and Their Consequences
3. Change Your Thinking To Change Your Results!
4. Being Strategic: The Antidote to Fear

On Collaboration:

1. 8 Suggestions to Improve Your Team’s Problem Solving Skills
2. 12 Ways To Listen
3. The Ten Cultural Elements Of Collaboration In [Communities]
4. Collective Intelligence (video)
5. Toe Stepping Up The Corporate Ladder (a satire!)

On creativity and innovation:

1. What is the True Value of Creativity to Organizations?
2. Cultivate A Culture of Creativity
3. The How of Innovation
4. Twitter's Ten Rules For Radical Innovators
5. Prospect theory, risk and innovation

On Leadership:

1. Leadership and the Art of Apology
2. How Do You Spot an Emerging Leader?
3. Leading By Example & Mistaken Beliefs
4. Leveraging Your Strengths
5. Learning from Mistakes Takes the Right Feedback
6. Everybody Knows About Your Weaknesses – Do You?
7. Don’t Gamble On Your Performance Review
8. Three Important Questions
9. Stop Making Excuses
10. Exert Ownership in Your Workplace
11. The Circle of Care
12. 8 Steps for Acting on Inspiration
13. Culture and Engagement
14. Rejecting the Default Culture
15. Trauma Free Renewal
16. 3 Paths to Development
17. Authority, Leadership, and Truth
18. Generals Win Battles but Sergeants Win Wars
19. What Leaders Must Do Next

Miscellaneous:

1. Your Firm’s Values Have No Teeth
2. Going Beyond MBA Oaths
3. Battling it Out During Tough Times: MBAs vs. Entrepreneurs
4. Is it Time to Sell My Management Books?
5. 5 Reasons You Keep Getting Stuck

And my favourite quote of the week:

"If you perform at your personal best, doing everything possible to make a success of the immediate situation, then doing it as a ‘leader’ or a ‘follower’ has no meaning." (Miki Saxon)

A Big One!

Many good articles to recommend this week:

1. The Power of Frustration
2. Supervision: Take the Time for Proper Job Instruction
3. Why I Hate the “Sandwich” Technique for Delivering Feedback
4. What Leadership List Are You On?
5. 5 Tips to Get the Feedback You Need Now
6. Lack of Communication You Say?
7. An Open and Shut Case
8. The problem with Web 2.0 in Government
9. What, Really, Is Employee Engagement?
10. Creating a Winning Culture
11. The Alphabet of Creativity
12. Do You End Meetings On Time?
13. Your Personal Brand Equation
14. Leadership Top 3 Meme in its Entirety
15. Real Leaders Ask
16. Ten Leadership Skills You Need For An Uncertain World

This Week's Recommendations

1. Being a Boss is Two Jobs in One
2. 13 Things You Should Know About Company Culture / Organizational Culture
3. How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic
4. Improving Your Odds of Success in Driving Change
5. Feedback That Works
6. Mom's Supervision Lessons
7. Are You Micromanaging Yourself?
8. Employee Engagement & Excellence
9. 10 No Bull Tips on How to Lead a Team Meeting
10. 65 Things I Believe About HR
11. Is HR Afraid to Fire People?

And some humor:

• Flutter: After microblogging - nanoblogging
• 5 Reasons Why We All Click On Lists
• 33+ Most Amazing and Funny Twitter Comics

The Case for Managing Employee Performance

One of the recurring themes in my presentations (“Bottom-Up Renewal”, “Living Renewal”) as well as in my writings (“An Inconvenient Renewal”, this blog) has been performance management, more specifically: managing the performance of employees.

Today I made a presentation to my department’s PS Renewal Committee on this topic. I have uploaded the PowerPoint on GCPEDIA. For those of you who don’t have access to GCPEDIA, here’s the gist of it:

Firstly, it is important to distinguish between performance management as in “organization performance” vs. “employee performance”. The two concepts are interrelated, but have very different implications for supervisors.

Secondly, despite all the criticism against bureaucracy, the “public service of Canada employee performance management framework” (i.e. legislation, TBS policies and guidelines, collective agreements, etc.) is simple and straightforward. One of the most compelling quotes I came across actually comes from this overview of the Financial Administration Act:

“Performance management is a key enabler of effective human resources management and the achievement of organizational effectiveness and results. Effective performance management fosters integration of employee performance with organizational goals and results; engagement, responsibility and accountability for on-the-job performance and organizational results; and, fairness, consistency and transparency in the treatment, recognition and promotion of people. Integral to performance management are leadership, communication, coaching, mentoring, learning, development and recognition. Performance management results in a work culture in which excellence in performance is encouraged and recognized, and unsatisfactory performance effectively managed.”

Many tools and resources are available to supervisors to manage employee performance and hone their skills. Nevertheless, employee performance management is not valued and practiced as much as other management activities (i.e. financial management). There is currently a strong push for employee performance management in the public service. However for some reason people management in general is still not something that is commonly measured.

But if:

• the management of employee performance and organizational performance are interdependent...
• the management of employee performance is the responsibility of every supervisors...
• the prescriptions and instruments for the management of employee performance are built into legislation, collective agreements, TBS guidelines, policies and directives, and departmental policies...
• and the tools and resources for the management of employee performance are widely available to all public servants...

...Why is the management of employee performance a major weakness throughout most of the public service?

Is it because:

• Organizational performance is possible without employees?
• Employee performance management is less important than organizational performance management?
• We tolerate poor employee performance management where we would never allow poor financial management?
• Employee performance management is just optional?

Managing employee performance management is simple. The hard part is actually doing it, because most: s

• Most supervisors are not appointed in their role based on their ability to manage employee performance;
• Supervisors must manage employee performance every single day (as opposed to once a year);
• Supervisors must be willing to have difficult conversations with employees;
• Supervisors must practice truth-telling;
• Supervisors must make unpopular decisions;
• Supervisors must face their greatest fears.

With this in mind, the rest of my presentation focuses on the steps my organization has taken to make the management of employee performance a priority and “raise the bar”.

As potential solutions, I also offer the following:

• Give employee performance management as much importance as we give to organizational performance management.
• Be as diligent and rigorous with people management as we are with financial management (both of which, ironically, derive their authorities from the FAA).
• Increase focus on day-to-day management of employee performance (not just on the annual performance appraisals).
• Appoint people in supervisory roles based on their people management skills, their ability to manage employee performance, and their willingness to have difficult conversations with employees.
• If supervisors are able to do the single most difficult aspect of their job well (i.e. managing performance of employees), the rest should follow naturally.

I'm considering turning this presentation into a "talk"... Does it make sense? Is the PS ready for this?

Your feedback is always appreciated.

Thanks!

Last Week's Best

I came across lots of interesting blog posts and links in the past week:

1. One 'Bad Apple' Really Can Kill the Company
2. Detoxing Your Team
3. The Burden of Dealing with Poor Performers: Wear and Tear on the Supervisory Efficacy and Job Satisfaction
4. Top ten reasons managers become great
5. How about giving your Boss a Performance Review?
6. Bully boss or victim?
7. New research sheds light on bullying in the workplace
8. Five Sources of Interpersonal Conflict in the Workplace – Part V – Mindset
9. Leadership’s Future: Education And American Idol
10. Is Your Team Diverse Or Just Look It?
11. Pressure, panic and productivity
12. Pay for Performance and the Business Week 50
13. From Strategic Planning to Strategic Conversations
14. What should I do with my life now?
15. 10 Lessons For Life
16. Can You Finish This Sentence: "...Teach a Man to Fish, He..."? I Betcha Can't...
17. Four Ways To Spot Reduced Trust
18. 3 Key Questions for HR
19. Are Goals Evil? Here's my favourite insight from the post:

"My company previously used performance reviews that looked at “soft” skills only. We found through analysis that we could basically determine what an employee’s score would be by knowing who their supervisor was. The score was a reflection of the supervisor, not the employee."

You may also check out the original study. Here's the gist of it:

"In this article, we argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation."

I am waiting impatiently for the released of the 2008 Public Service Employee Survey results. More than four months have elapsed since the survey was administered and it appears it will take another month to get the results. Hum... If you want to know how I feel about this, check out this video.

Please vote for your three favourite posts on ContrarianThinking.ca if you haven't already done so! The poll is in the side-bar, at the top.

A Bit of Everything

Here's a list of the best blog posts, articles, videos and other resources I came across this week. There's some really good stuff in there, so take the time to go over each of them:

1. Moon Shots for Management: Management 2.0
2. On Becoming a Manager
3. The lost art of supervision
4. Rewarding OverPerformers with UnderPerformers’ Work - An Employee Engagement Buster
5. Talking to team members about performance
6. Management’s Achilles Heel
7. Top ten reasons managers become assholes
8. Leaders Need to Challenge Assumptions
9. The Courage To Think Differently
10. 10 Strategies for Building Leadership Optimism
11. Chris Argyris: theories of action, double-loop learning and organizational learning
12. Alternatives to Hating HR
13. Improving Communication
14. 12 Ways To Have "Beautiful" Team Meetings
15. 2 Methods That Help Procrastinators Succeed
16. We Need to Make More "Jobs"
17. How To Fix Business Schools - The HBR Debate: Round 2
18. Essential Education: Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" (alternatively, you can look up Clay Shirky's "Institutions vs. collaboration" presentation at TED)

Also, my friend Asif has put together a video in which he explains a phenomenon bloggers like me are all too familiar with - lurking - and offers some interesting insight.

Misc. Blog, Part 3: Career Advice

Today's selection:

1. Animal House and Supervision
2. Little fish, little pond
3. Make Your Next Performance Appraisal ROCK!
4. 6 Powerful Questions To Ask In Your Performance Review
5. How to Write a Great Individual Development Plan
6. A Guide to Cross-functional Leadership Developmental Moves
7. 10 Ways to Get Off on the Right Foot with Your New Manager
8. 7 Career Advancing Tips To build An Impeccable Relationship With Your Boss
9. 10 Vital Actions To Inspire Others And Gain Respect
10. Top Ten Tips - Getting Your Ideas Heard
11. Networks Change How People Learn--Does It Change How You Teach?
12. Top 10 Annoying Habits at Work
13. The Paradoxical Commandments
14. How to Create a Motivating Work Environment
15. Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask
16. Young, High Potential Leaders - Use Wait Time to Build Character

Misc. Blog Posts, Part 2: More on Management

As you know, this is probably my favourite topic, so I have more blog posts recommendations than usual. Don't panic, it's still early in the week, so you'll have time to read them all by Friday ;-)

1. He who thinks acts
2. Insultants Wanted
3. Are you making room for Mavericks?
4. What It Takes to be a Genuine Leader
5. The Movie!
6. The 6 causes of disengagement
7. The Great Disconnect
8. Leader's Capacity to Sustain Change
9. Make believe world
10. Three Things You (Probably) Won't Learn in Business School
11. When to Change for Change's Sake
12. Beckhard’s Change Equation
13. Fear brings loathing, not harder work
14. You Just May Be a Poor Boss If...
15. Put Away Your Blackberry
16. 10 Rules From The Incompetent Educational Leader's Handbook
17. Meetings: Where You Sit, How You Act, and What People Think Of You
18. Why Centralizing Power May Be Exactly What They Need
19. A Male Engineer's Perspective on Women in Male-Dominated Fields
20. Leadership and the Sexes (video)
21. Documenting Performance Measure Drivers
22. The Seven Fatal Flaws of Performance Measurement
23. The Mis-Misinterpretations of PMBOK
24. A Simple Way to Put PMBOK to Work
25. It’s Time to Make Management a True Profession

Management, Part 2: Managing Performance

More on managing performance:

1. Put Down that Carrot and that Stick and that Hot Dog
2. We Don’t Work for Companies; We Work for Managers
3. How to Manage People in 15 Minutes a Day
4. How to Have an Effective 1 on 1
5. Coaching Self-Assessment for Leaders
6. Improving Communication
7. Do Your Employees Truly Believe That They Can Make A Difference?
8. Supportive Confrontation
9. Challenged!
10. The Right Way to Disagree with Direct Reports
11. How Good Leaders Correct Mistakes
12. The leadership cop-out, the employee hot potato
13. Real Leaders Fire Underperformers
14. Motivation Disconnect: How Organizations Fail to Motivate Managers
15. Truth as a Tool
16. Put Positivism to Work
17. 5 Ways to Have Your Conflict at Senior Team Meetings
18. Find the Creativity Hiding in Your Office
19. Increase Motivation
20. Personal Leadership Practices Survey

Performance Management, Part 5: A Bit of Humour to End the Week

Final post of this series on performance management (hopefully it'll make you laugh!):

1. Study Finds Working At Work Improves Productivity
2. When We Lose Hope, We Cope
3. Performance Evaluation One Liners
4. Five of my favourite Demotivators: Consistency, Dysfunction, Incompetence, Irresponsibility, Mediocrity

Have a good weekend!

Performance Management, Part 4: Poor Performers and Counter-Productive Behaviours

Today, we cover one of my favourite topic: poor performance and poor performers:

1. Three reasons why managers don't do people management
2. People are our Most Important Asset…
3. Are today’s organizations creating hardworking Idiots?
4. How to Manage Whelmers
5. Managers stick with poor performers rather than hire new faces
6. Why Poor Performers Don't Get Fired
7. Make Sure You Chop the Dead Wood
8. Memo From Management to Unhappy Employees - GET OUT!
9. Toxic employees
10. Bristle while you work
11. Workplace Bullying - A Label of Convenience?
12. 5 Ways to Deal with Slacker Co-Workers
13. 10 Ways to Make Office Slacker Pull His Weight
14. Before You Fire That Problem Employee
15. Job-Me Conflict
16. 10 Potential Performance Barriers That Limit High Potentials
17. The Three Cs of Dealing with Under Performers
    

Hopefully, you'll find a ways to prevent poor performance from happening in the first place!

Performance Management, Part 3: Managing Performance

Third installment of this series of posts on performance management:

1. The Importance of Performance Management
2. Performance Management, Performance Reviews and Appraisals
3. How to Think About Performance
4. Matrix Organization Design - Don’t Go There
5. Leading Knowledge Workers: 5 Deadly Leadership Sins To Avoid
6. Why You Need to Tell it Like it Is
7. Giving and Getting Great Feedback
8. What Every Manager Should Know About Feedback
9. Get Rid of the Performance Review
10. Why employee performance appraisals are ineffective, sometimes?
    
11. Where Jack Welch Got It Wrong - The Mandatory, Annual Low-Performer Cut
12. Setting and Resetting Expectations
13. The Time To Manage
14. Six Obstacles to Extraordinary Performance
15. Micromanagement undefined
16. Is Micromanagement Inherent or Contextual?
17. More Talent Management Facts
18. Stop Sabotaging Employee Performance
19. 5 Reasons CEO’s Get Fired
20. Leaders Who Think They Walk on Water
21. Beware of Setting Goals
22. The Case Against Cutting the Bottom 10%
    

And in case you missed it: Performance Measurement.

Performance Management, Part 2: Accountability

A dozen good links for you today:

1. Five Signs That Personal Accountability Isn’t a Core Cultural Value
2. Creating An Accountability Culture
3. Personal Accountability – Who are you Really Pointing the Finger at?
4. Gain Accountability by Passing the Buck
5. Managerial Accountability Is Not Missing; It’s just Misplaced
6. Requisite Organization Resources
7. When Everyone is Accountable, No One is Accountable - The Team Accountability Fantasy
8. Personal Accountability Training
9. Responsibility
10. Accountability and the High-Performance Organization
11. Operationalizing Engagement via Managerial Leadership
12. Leadership Lessons from Geese

Performance Management, Part 1: Education

This week I will share a large number of great blog postings on performance management. I will group them by themes:

• Monday: Education
• Tuesday: Accountability
• Wednesday: Managing Performance
• Thursday: Poor Performers and Counter-Productive Behaviours
• Friday: Wrap-Up
  

So without further due, let's begin with the beginning: the early years, the formative years...

1. Being “special” can ruin your children’s lives
2. You're OK, I'm Fantastic: Management and the New Narcissism
3. Parents’ lousy leadership
4. School sans learning
5. The Victim Mentality

Bonus: A's for Everyone!

Performance Management and Measurement

I've wanted to write this post for a long time. It may never have seen the day if it wasn't for the fact I've been asked to make a presentation on this exact topic in my (formerly undisclosed) Department.

Whenever I need to discuss a subject I know will be controversial (especially when I know my points of views will be "challenging" - and challenged! - by the people in the room), I like to draw extensively on the work of other authors. This way I can say precisely what I want to say, without sounding like I'm the first person to ever make such a statement. True to my habit, this is just what I will do for this post.

First, if performance management is new to you, you must read the chapter entitled "Performance Management : Panacea or Fools’s Gold?" written by Barbara Wake Carroll and David I. Dewar in "The Handbook of Canadian Public Administration" (2002, pp. 413-429). The authors lay the foundations for what performance management is:

“Performance measurement is the collection of information about the performance of programs using some indicator or standard of measurement. Performance monitoring is the review, or tracking, of the measurements. When they are used by a manager to improve programs they form part of a performance management system. [...] Performance management consists of four elements:

• Deciding what is the desired level of performance
• Measuring performance
• Reporting or communicating performance information
• Using performance information to compare actual performance to the agreed performance level”

The authors further explain that there are three levels of focus to performance management in the public sector:

1. “The evaluation of programs or policy at the broad governmental or political level and includes a political consideration of basic objectives
2. The implementation and management of a policy or program
3. The assessment of the performance of individual employees”

(And I would add a fourth level: the management of an organization or business unit.)

Carroll and Dewar then make some distinctions with regards to what can be measured:

• "Process: how something was done
• Outputs: what was done or produced
• Outcomes: what happened in society
• Impact or results: what are the effect of what was done (what has changed as a result of the action) "

(They don't mention "inputs", but I think this one goes without saying as it is typically the easiest to measure and the one that usually gets all the attention.)

Based on my experience in project management, I see four challenges to performance measurement:

1. Availability of data in a timely fashion (i.e. outcomes and outputs sometimes take years to materialize and data is therefore rarely - if ever - available upon completion of a project or implementation of a program);
   
2. Priorities change over time (e.g. ever noticed how budgets become such a hot issue towards the end of fiscal when it's never nearly as big of a deal the rest of the year?);
   
3. Ease of measuring (usually, information relevant to the "management" side of things are easier to measure: inputs, resources, hours of work, expenditures, etc.);
   
4. Linking inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes and impacts (who can really prove that the inputs are directly tied to the outcomes?)
   

For these reasons, critics of performance measurement have voiced similar concerns in different terms (now is probably a good time to resort to quotes!):

• "People revert to metrics out of fear, not out of vision." (Patrick Lencioni)
• "Managers who don't know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure."(Russell L. Ackoff & Herbert J. Addison)
• "Measurement has its pitfalls and dangers, however, as well as its benefits. The first, well-known danger is that you get what you measure. If measurements are attached to some facets of public service work then those are the things that will get attention, often at the expense of other, equally or more important dimensions of work. […] The second danger, which is a corollary of the first, and the one that concerns us most here, is that things that are difficult to measure may be neglected, while things that are easier to measure will enjoy exaggerated importance. Values, leadership and good people management are among those things that are not yet sufficiently valued, on the excuse that they are difficult to measure." (The Task Force on Values and Ethics)
  

As a former manager, I have always found resorting to metrics quite useful for:

• Improving estimates (learning from experience);
• Measuring efficiencies (do more with less);
• Improving visibility of critical activities (what gets measured gets done);
• Identifying problems in real time (and correct them);
• Spot trends (across projects or units, recurring problems).

But recently I came across an amazing article written by Nicolas Berland, Catherine Chevalier-Kuzla and Samuel Sponem, entitled “On ne gère bien que ce que l’on mesure” published in the "Petit bréviaire des idées reçues en management" (2008). The authors offer what is probably the best dissection of the benefits and pitfalls of measurement I have read. Here are some of the highlights:

Benefits of Measurement:

• Measurement allows synthesizing large quantities of information and clarifying the complex.
• Measurement can make explicit relations between phenomena, and foster learning.
• Measurement makes visible many aspects of the organization.
• Measurement provides a common language and allows shared representation, because measurement is considered objective, i.e. detached from the individual.
• Measurement allows the convergence of goals and allows changing organizations. Indeed, measurement is a support to evaluation systems and is a powerful means of incentive.
• Measurement allows to classify actions, objects, and people compared to each other's, and thus determine the respective contributions and their scale, which in turn allows to decide and to act.
• Measurable objectives allow to control from a distance other people's behaviours, to responsibilize them, and to motivate them.
• Measurement is the antidote to ambiguity; it forces to be clear on vague concepts and forces to act.

Pitfalls of Measurement:

• Measurement has a number of risks: simplification of reality, disconnect with the field, short term focus or short-sightedness, orient behaviours in the wrong direction because of a bad choice of performance indicator.
• Measurement is interested first and foremost in the past.
• Measurement omits important elements of long-term performance of an organization: quality, competence, trust, innovation, etc.
• Furthermore, are easily measurable only variables relative to unambiguous objects. But management is often in the domain of ambiguity.
• Measurement is only as good as the systems and people that captured (garbage in garbage out)
• The danger of motivating people through numbers is that they will disregard what is not measured.
• Sometimes, performance indicators take a life of their own. Measurement is no longer synonym with good management but rather out of hand bureaucracy. What was initially a means to improve the functioning of the organization becomes an end in itself: you must increase (or decrease) the number, no matter the underlying reality. Measurement takes over management.

The key point made by the authors however is when they say that the true value of performance measurement is not in providing answers as much as raising questions. They go on to offer the most honest look at what performance management really accomplishes:

• Measurement can be used to move your agenda forward.
• Measurement is a symbol. It doesn't have to be exact, only to influence people.
• When measurement doesn't produce the expected result, the easiest thing may be to change the measurement.
• In the end what counts is less measurement than the result of the action created by measurement.

The authors close on some philosophical questions about performance management and measurement:

• Where does the obsession for measurement come from?
• What are the real ends of measurement for a manager?
• Do we manage better because we measure more?
• Do we manage poorly when we don't measure?
• Is measurement sufficient for good management?

While you ponder these questions, let me recommend you some more reading:

• Performance Measurement
• Implementing the Vision: Addressing Challenges to Results-Focused Management and Budgeting (Section 4 is particularly worthy of attention)
• Making Performance Management Work ... Better
• What Gets Measured Gets Done
• Why Quantitative Measures Often Make Performance Worse, not Better
• Just because you can measure something with numbers, doesn’t mean that you should
• You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure