Stop Managing Performance. Start Enabling It.

Why do so many performance reviews leave everyone frustrated? Edie Goldberg, President and Founder of E. L. Goldberg & Associates, returns to The Courageous Choice to talk about her new book, Performance Enablement (Oxford University Press). She makes the case against traditional performance management, a system she says was hijacked by compensation and built on the wrong assumptions about what motivates people.

Key Takeaways

• Performance management was hijacked by compensation. It became a tool to decide pay, not to improve performance.
• People are far more intrinsically than extrinsically motivated, and tying work to extrinsic rewards can take the joy out of it.
• Managing performance means measuring it at year end. Enabling performance means giving people feedback, tools, training, and coaching along the way.
• Specific, challenging goals outperform easy or absent goals, but only if people discuss progress regularly.
• In one large dataset, only 4% of employees looked at their goals during the year. Set-and-forget goals can't motivate anyone.
• Only 21% of employees say they get meaningful feedback, and more frequent bad feedback doesn't help.
• Task-based, future-focused feedforward beats personal, evaluative feedback. Managers are trained to be critical, but a positive focus produces better outcomes.
• Companies with a strong performance feedback culture outperform others on every financial measure studied.
• People are more than their job descriptions. Internal mobility unlocks hidden capability, and AI curiosity inside your own ranks is a live example.
• Have the courage to stop practices that no longer serve you. Design for the 99%, and use performance improvement plans for the rare real issues.

Timestamps
0:00 – Intro
5:17 – "Performance management was hijacked by compensation"
7:19 – Why extrinsic rewards take the joy out of work
11:59 – Managing vs. enabling performance
15:54 – The undisputed research on goal setting
23:00 – Only 21% of employees get meaningful feedback
26:16 – Feedforward, not feedback
32:46 – Only 4% of employees ever accessed their goals
40:06 – The courage to stop what's not working
44:03 – Edie's own courageous choice

Connect with Edie Goldberg
Edie on LinkedIn
E. L. Goldberg & Associates on LinkedIn

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