Employees and managers should be measured as much on their contribution to an organization’s long-term health as to its performance.

SEPTEMBER 2012 • Toby Gibbs, Suzanne Heywood, and Matthew Pettigrew

Source: Organization Practice

Measuring the performance of people, especially managers and senior executives, presents a perennial conundrum. Without quantifiable goals, it’s difficult to measure progress objectively. At the same time, companies that rely too much on financial or other “hard” performance targets risk putting short-term success ahead of long-term health—for example, by tolerating flawed “stars” who drive top performance but intimidate others, ignore staff development, or fail to collaborate with colleagues. The fact is that when people don’t have real targets and incentives to focus on the long term, they don’t; over time, performance declines because not enough people have the attention, or the capabilities, to sustain and renew it.
Yet measuring, let alone strengthening, the capabilities that help companies thrive over the long haul is difficult. These “soft” measures of organizational health—for example, leadership, innovation, quality of execution, employee motivation, or a company’s degree of external orientation1—are tricky to convert into annual performance metrics. Moreover, an organization’s health may not change much in a single year, and an employee’s contribution often comes down to judgments and trade-offs. What risks to take and avoid? Which people to develop, and how? Getting a handle on the employee’s personal contribution typically requires in-depth conversations and a more thorough 360-degree style of evaluation than most employees (including senior managers) generally receive. Because of all this, few companies manage people in ways that effectively assess their contributions to corporate health or reward them for improving i

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