OVERVIEW

Let's start with an all-too-familiar story. The new director of organization development was riding high. She had just come back from her first meeting with the CEO and, in her view, the meeting could not have gone better. The CEO asked her to act immediately on designing a performance management process. This new process would be deployed companywide. The CEO had just announced a set of aggresive business goals, and he believed that the performance management process would be an important pillar of support to achieve these goals.

In the days that followed this meeting with the CEO, the OD director organized her team and engaged several others in the new performance management design effort. This initiative got off the blocks quickly. There were many opinions about how performance management should be improved, and the OD director was literally working overtime to corral all of these opinions and stay focused on the design effort. It was her intention to design the initiative and present the design to the CEO as quickly as possible.

Sounds great, right? What more could a shareholder of the company ask for: a change initiative being designed quickly, strong support from the CEO, a responsive OD director, and a committed design team that has been quickly engaged in the effort. The answer turns out to be that the shareholder could ask for a lot more. Let's find out what.

For starters, the CEO has assumed that improving performance management will help the organization achieve its...