Instilling Company-Wide Accountability

According to a 2007 survey of 317 C-level executives conducted by BusinessWeek Research Services, (and published by Joe Mullich for Microsoft's People-Ready Business Insights,) the biggest obstacles to successful execution of performance management are “lack of accountability” and “a culture that does not support measurement.”

"Too many people think of performance management as an exercise in scorecarding,” says Richard T. Roth, formerly chief research officer of The Hackett Group, an Atlanta-based consulting firm. “World-class organizations focus less on performance metrics than on instilling company-wide accountability.”

How can companies overcome those obstacles and develop winning attributes? Researcher's found the following attributes:

• “Organizations achieve a competitive advantage when they develop a culture that fosters improved performance—one that holds a high respect for facts, is customer-centric, competes from a common playbook, makes data-driven decisions, and promotes cross-group collaboration, alignment, and execution.”
• "Firms that possess a performance discipline align objectives with shareholder value and radiate that message from the top through every part of the organization."
• "Performance management is not a big-bang process. It is a continuous improvement process. You are constantly tweaking, so it has to be something that you do in the normal course of business.”