The Performance Management Cycle
How expectations, ongoing conversations, review and development connect into one continuous cycle across the year.
11 min
Activities: 0 of 2
Who this course is for
This course is for people who manage other people: team leaders, supervisors, department heads and project managers with direct reports. You probably already hold one-to-ones and write reviews. The course asks you to do these things with more skill: to choose the right approach for each person, to diagnose problems correctly, and to handle the difficult cases fairly.
At intermediate level the focus is on judgement. Most management advice is simple to state. The hard part is knowing which advice applies to the person in front of you, today, and what to do when it does not work.
Performance management is a cycle, not an event
Many organisations treat performance management as the annual review form. That is the smallest part of it. Performance management is everything a manager does to help a person deliver good work and grow: setting clear expectations, talking regularly, giving feedback, removing obstacles, supporting development, reviewing progress and acting when things go wrong.
These activities form a cycle. Each stage feeds the next. Clear objectives make feedback specific. Regular feedback makes the review short and free of surprises. An honest review produces better objectives for the next period. When one stage is weak, the stages after it fail too.
The cycle across a year
- 1
Start
Agree expectations and objectives
Responsibilities, standards, priorities, three to five objectives and one or two development goals, written down and agreed. - 2
Every week or two
One-to-ones and feedback
Short, regular conversations. Problems surface early. Feedback is given close to the event. - 3
Middle of the year
Check-in and adjust
Are the objectives still right? Has anything changed? Update them rather than wait for the year end. - 4
End of period
Review
A summary of conversations that already happened. No surprises. Agree what went well and what needs to improve. - 5
Next period
Development and new objectives
The review feeds new objectives, and the cycle starts again.
Two managers, one process
What the rest of the course covers
The course follows the cycle. You will look first at what drives performance and how to adapt your style. Then you will work through expectations and objectives, feedback, reviews and underperformance. Later modules cover coaching and development, retention and formal obligations, difficult situations, and finally how to run the whole cycle for a team.
Employment law differs from country to country. Where the course mentions formal procedures, it describes widely used principles. Always follow your organisation’s policy and take advice from human resources (HR) before formal action.
Put the cycle in order
Arrange the stages in the order they normally happen in one period.
- 1Set development goals and new objectives
- 2Review the period with no surprises
- 3Check in at mid-point and adjust objectives
- 4Agree expectations and objectives
- 5Hold regular one-to-ones and give feedback
A manager’s year-end reviews keep producing disputes and surprises. Which stage of the cycle is most likely weak?