Results Management: Effective People Management to Achieve Excellent Results

Chapter 3. Performance Management and Review: Managing for commitment, not just for compliance

Convincing People and Moving People

One of my worldly-wise workshop participants once said: "Logic and reason may convince people, but emotions move people."

He was telling his friends in the same workshop that to achieve productivity gains, it was necessary to win people's hearts (and not only their minds) to a new way of working; that is, to be more results-focused rather than just activity-focused. He said that winning minds over the necessity for logically balanced sets of individual targets was not enough to ensure commitment to achieving the desired results.

How wise he was, and that is the inspiration for this chapter on performance management, to enable line managers to achieve desired results through and with people. It is the heartbeat of a results-management system.

Basic Managerial Functions Revisited

After the workshop on performance measurement, the participants went back to their respective divisions and departments to plan how they were going to set targets for themselves first.

It had been thought that setting targets was easy, and getting understanding and acceptance was the only difficult part. Now the participants realized that the expected results also had to be balanced; simply measuring quantity and time was not enough.

Identifying key results areas is the hard-thinking and ...