Performance Management Leadership

Formerly a successful salesman, Jake McKay is now a failing manager. Join him as he races to learn the fundamentals of team and personal effectiveness from his coach before he loses his job—and the woman he loves.

For decades, performance management has been seen as an annual chore by managers and HR alike. But this process is changing, and there are ways to make it more effective for your organization and more useful for employees. If you read (or listen to) nothing else on performance management in your organization, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you assess performance more accurately, have more effective feedback conversations, and encourage the growth of your employees.

Becoming a CEO is a high-stakes moment, whether it's your first, second, or third time in the seat. What you say and how you act in your early days as CEO sets the tone for how you'll be perceived for years to come. Yet, until now, few CEOs have shared their stories on what worked, what didn't, and what they wish they'd done differently. In The New CEO, Dr. Ty Wiggins, an experienced leadership advisor specializing in CEO transitions, explains how to land well as a new CEO, accelerate your impact, and unlock the most affirming experience of your career.

Demand is exceeding our capacity. The ethic of "more, bigger, faster" exacts a series of silent but pernicious costs at work, undermining our energy, focus, creativity, and passion. Nearly 75 percent of employees around the world feel disengaged at work every day. The Way We're Working Isn't Working offers a groundbreaking approach to reenergizing our lives so were both more satisfied and more productive, on the job and off.

We’re in the middle of the most significant transformation in work in over a century. Whether it’s remote work, the rise of burnout and “quiet quitting,” or the changing values and priorities of employees, leading an organization has never been more complex. But through all this, a single factor remains the core driver of fulfilled, high-performing teams—their belief that their work has meaning. In Meaningful Work, Wes Adams and Tamara Myles leverage the science of positive psychology to show leaders why and how to make meaning the cornerstone of leadership practice.

From local coffee shops to the largest Fortune 500 companies, everyone is struggling to make the impossible choice between chasing short-term objectives and creating a secure future for their company.

Providing performance feedback is one of the most challenging tasks leaders face. Feedback often sparks frustration and fear for both leaders and their teams. Why? Because there is a disconnect between what leaders think they are communicating and what employees receive. In this essential book, leadership experts Mashihi and Nowack offer leaders their four-part Performance Feedback Coaching Model, designed to bridge this gap.

In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging "gaming the stats" or "teaching to the test"....

You don't have to do a dangerous job to endure a health-destroying, possibly life-threatening workplace. Just ask the manager in a senior finance role whose immense workload required frequent all-nighters, leading to alcohol and drug addiction. Or the dedicated news media producer whose commitment to getting the story resulted in a 60-pound weight gain thanks to having no down time to eat properly or exercise. These individuals are not exceptions. Every industry is filled with them, and the costs, to both employees and their companies, is enormous.

If you've ever struggled to motivate the young people in your sphere of influence, Answering Why is the game-changer you've been looking for. From the urgent skills gap crisis to the proven strategies to inspire our youngest generations, Answering Why addresses the burning questions faced by educators, employers, and parents everywhere. Author, CEO, and generational expert Mark C. Perna shares his wide experience and profound success as both a single dad and performance consultant for education and workforce development across North America.

What author Margaret Graziano proposes in Ignite Culture is a fundament shift in leadership’s approach to creating an intentional, healthy, high-performance organization. Offering a unique combination of experiential coaching, evidence-based leadership tools, and actionable strategies, Ignite Culture empowers business leaders with the wisdom and insights they need to reshape their company’s culture, increase employee engagement, and grow revenue in a supportive, high-performance environment.

Being a great leader - one who drives massive passion, commitment and engagement - is within your reach. Follow the step-by-step plan in Employee Engagement 2.0 and prepare to be a great place to work.

Clarity is key for any successful leader, so much so that top corporations, such as Micorsoft. Nike, Proctor and Gamble, Kimberly Clark, and many more, have incorporated storytelling into their leadership training programs. These companies know that before you can become a strong leader, you must first master the art of storytelling so you can communicate your vision to your team and inspire them to execute on objectives.

The job of a Chief Technical Officer is broad, ever-changing, and hard to define. Is the CTO an engineer, an architect, a people manager, or an executive? Turns out, in most cases, it’s all of the above—and even the most experienced “techies” often find themselves feeling underprepared for the human and logistical sides of this pivotal role.

It's not enough to build a company full of people with leadership skills. The Performance Pipeline digs deep into the real work of executing business results at each leadership layer. It is filled with lessons and examples from the author's 40 years of experience, and explains how to set performance standards, make sure the right work is being done, and remove performance barriers.

Teams Unleashed provides a map and compass for engaged, sustainable, and improved team performance. This practical approach uses the everyday language of teams to highlight what's working, and uncover what's not, and gives teams the tools to incorporate new practices that build team effectiveness. This is an approach proven in the real world of teams since 2005 and used by thousands of teams worldwide.

Why were the American POWs imprisoned at the Hanoi Hilton so resilient in captivity and so successful in their subsequent careers? This book presents six principles practiced within the POW organizational culture that can be used to develop high-performance teams everywhere. The authors offer examples from both the POWs’ time in captivity and their later professional lives that identify, in real-life situations, the characteristics necessary for sustainable, high-performance teamwork.

In The Scrum Fieldbook, he draws on his firm’s extensive experience in the field to take leaders, managers, and employees deeper into the specific challenges and new opportunities organizations face in an Agile transformation. He shows how the Scrum framework can be successfully applied to any project in any industry, from automobile manufacturers in the US and Europe to nonprofits in Africa, from home renovation contractors in Minnesota to gas exploration companies in South America, from fighter plane builders in Sweden to US Navy Special Forces teams.

Understand and decode the inner workings of great business teams with the more than 30 in-depth examples in Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance. Author Howard Guttman examines and dissects teams at top-management, business-unit, and functional levels and isolates five key factors that drive team performance to offer you insight into the ways these teams achieve success.

Insights from the latest research on team emotional intelligence and TalentSmartEQ’s research trends from working with over 200 teams (with 2000+ team members) combine to bring EQ know-how to the team level. Team Emotional Intelligence 2.0 delivers practical strategies and showcases how an emotionally intelligent team is far more than the sum of its parts. This book delivers 53 strategies and a step-by-step process for increasing team EQ skills so team leaders and anyone who’s a member of a team can achieve peak performance and reach their goals.