Reinventing Performance Management

The current way of performance review apparently says more about the reviewer than the reviewed and takes a lot of time - 2 million hours annually at Deloitte (completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings):

Objective as I may try to be in evaluating you on, say, strategic thinking, it turns out that how much strategic thinking I do, or how valuable I think strategic thinking is, or how tough a rater I am significantly affects my assessment of your strategic thinking.

It was time for Deloitte to redesign its performance management, realize process improvement and a better outcome. The simpler design for managing people’s performance brought it back to four  questions:

• Given what I know of this person’s performance, and if it were my money, I would award this person the highest possible compensation increase and bonus \[measures overall performance and unique value to the organization on a five-point scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”].
• Given what I know of this person’s performance, I would always want him or her on my team \[measures ability to work well with others on the same five-point scale].
• This person is at risk for low performance \[identifies problems that might harm the customer or the team on a yes-or-no basis].
• This person is ready for promotion today \[measures potential on a yes-or-no basis] From 

We ask leaders what they’d do with their team members, not what they think of them

Harvard Business Reviews

The above could also be used to measure the performance of the tax function and evaluate whether the right skill set from a teaming perspective is available on the long run:

• 'Structure the tax function'
• 'Pitfalls Of Actual To Budget Exercises Especially In The Downturn'