If you want better performance from your employees, the following four statements may surprise you:

- Forget about making your managers? lives easier. - Dump your performance appraisal and ?coach? moniker. - Shift accountability away from employees. - Stop paying them off.

While these statements may seem to contradict what you have heard about successful performance management practices, we have found that the following five practices break away from conventional thinking to help solve the age old problem of the cumbersome, ineffective, and often ridiculed performance management process.

1. Train Managers to Manage and Employees to Participate?Don?t Skip Basic Management Practices

Research Performance Management best practices and you will find an abundance of practices described as:

- setting effective goals and aligning goals with corporate strategy - holding periodic performance conversations - giving objective feedback

Though these may be called ?Performance Management Practices,? they are just basic, good management, communication, and interpersonal skills. While these management practices are certainly a prerequisite for effective performance management and coaching, organizations can realize a significant increase in performance simply by applying sound management practices independent of any performance management system.

See Managing Individuals and Teams for examples of key management practices.

In addition to basic, good management practices, specialized management frameworks and tools should be used to expand a manager?s options for addressing more complex individual and systemic performance issues. When management training, frameworks, and performance tools are institutionalized, employees can more clearly identify and communicate what they need to succeed.

2. Eliminate Performance Appraisals, Reviews, and the "Coach" Moniker-Focus on Performance Conversations

The irony of formal Performance Appraisals is that they consume significant resources, produce little value, and impede the kind of collaborative working relationship managers and employees need to improve performance. By design, the traditional process tends to place managers and employees in a confrontational setting. In that setting, trust "one of the most significant factors influencing employee engagement and performance" is undermined.

Even when companies try to create more effective performance management roles for managers as coaches, the legacy of the old, judgmental, and confrontational dynamics often pollutes the process.

A recent study found that despite significant investments in training managers to coach, less than 1 in 4 respondents said that coaching had significantly affected their job performance; and ten percent said coaching had made them less satisfied with their job. There was, however, a strong correlation between performance improvement, job satisfaction, and a positive employee / manager relationship.This points to the single most critical element of a coaching or facilitative relationship - trust.

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