Performance-review time often scares the willies out of both managers and employees. But it doesn't have to be that way. I am currently reading the edited manuscript for Ultimate Performance Management by Jeff and Linda Russell, and I think they may be on to something.... The book is part of a new ASTD Press series, the Ultimate series, which is a spinoff of the ASTD Trainer's WorkShop series and is designed to give you everything you could ever need to train people in a particular area. Other books that are currently planned for the series are Elaine Biech's ASTD's Ultimate Train the Trainer and Christee Gabour Atwood's Ultimate Basic Business Skills Training.

But I am getting off topic, I wanted to talk about Jeff and Linda's book, which deals with transforming the scary once- or maybe twice-annual performance review into an ongoing development tool that enables people to go from "Eh, well, I am doing OK," to "Wow! I am doing GREAT!" The book presents a series of workshop designs that transform the performance review from a single retrospective event into an ongoing, forward-looking development process. Jeff and Linda present a larger performance management framework called the Great Performance Management Cycle, which has much of its roots in ideas from Chris Argyris, Donald Schn, and others. Implementing the framework probably requires a fairly substantial change in the way that organizations manage their people, but has potentially huge benefits for employees, their managers, and the organization as a whole. This is because the ongoing coaching conversations that Jeff and Linda advocate enable employees to feel heard and be encouraged to do great things, managers are encouraged to help their employees achieve those great things, and the organization as a whole reaps the rewards of all those great things.

The book primarily provides everything that a trainer or facilitator would need to facilitate workshops for managers and employees on the new performance management model, including lots of training tools, participant handouts, training instruments, and learning activities--all of which is good, practical, here's-how-get-it-done stuff. However, for me, the heart of the book is chapter 2, which explains the theory and thinking behind the model and is a fascinating read.