1. Focusing Performance Reviews On Future performance
The Importance of Assessing Future Capabilities
Assessment focused on past performance alone limits employees to reacting to the past rather than ensuring their success in future roles. Assessing future capability and career alignment gives you a more accurate understanding of your employees’ abilities to meet future business needs and enables you to proactively address any anticipated gaps.
The table below provides a breakdown of key elements of the performance review discussion and how to incorporate future performance:
Manager-led performance reviews focused on past accomplishments alone correctly identify only 22% of enterprise contributors.* However, when future capabilities are discussed in addition to past accomplishments, 67% of enterprise contributors are correctly identified.
Discussion Category
Capabilities
Career Interests
Network
Definition
A strength or ability that has potential for development or use.
The employee’s plans and aspirations.
An employee’s ability to make useful connections and manage those effectively.
Typical Focus of Performance Discussions: Past Performance
How the employee has demonstrated capabilities in past work.
The employee’s career interests are typically discussed in a separate conversation.
How well the employee has worked with others in the past.
What You Should Emphasize: Future Performance
How to work on these capabilities for future success and organizational needs.
Whether career interests align with the direction of the organization and how these interests can be fulfilled in the future.
What networks the employee should connect to for future success.
Benefit of Discussing Future Performance
Prepares employee for future organizational and role needs.
Ensures that employee’s career interests fit with future role and organizational needs.
Ensures that the employee is connected to the networks most useful for his/her future performance and organizational needs.
*Defining Enterprise Contribution
An employee’s contribution to others’ performance in addition to their effectiveness at their individual tasks.
By increasing enterprise contribution in your business unit, you can achieve improvements
in business outcomes two
times greater than those
achieved by business units
that only improve individual
task execution.
Source: Driving Breakthrough Performance in the New Work Environment, CLC Human Resources 2012
“Disruptive” Performance Management, Juniper Networks, CLC Human Resources, 2012

2. Focusing Performance Reviews On Future performance
Introduction: Listed below are future attributes of performance that you as a manager can discuss in the performance review discussion.
Timing of the Discussion: In a performance review discussion, managers should discuss future attributes of performance first (listed below), setting the stage for a more honest, balanced conversation and minimizing the stigma associated with negative feedback.
Capabilities
Ask the employee about skills he/she wants to learn in the future.
Talk about the skills the employee must learn and the development areas the employee needs to work on in order to continue to provide value in their role.
Discuss how the employee’s strengths can contribute to the organization’s vision and future goals.
Motivate the employee to change a past negative behavior or an under-developed skill and discuss the outcomes if the employee changes his/her behavior.
Career Interests
Ask the employee about their future career interests and aspirations.
Discuss whether the employee’s future career aspirations align with the organization’s vision and purpose and, if not, then how can the two align.
Discuss the possible career paths available to the employee given the organization’s vision and strategy for the future.
Discuss how the career progression would look for at least two positions above the employee’s current position.
Network
Ask the employee about the types (role-related, technology-related, process-related, etc.) of networks he/she is interested in being connected to based on his/her future career aspirations
Discuss the types of networks the employee needs to be connected to in order to be successful in future roles and how the organization can help him/her connect to them.
Discuss the employee’s current networks and how they can contribute to a high level of future performance.
Discuss the peers and senior leaders who could have a positive impact on the employee’s future performance as mentors and coaches.
Source: Driving Breakthrough Performance in the New Work Environment, CLC Human Resources 2012
“Disruptive” Performance Management, Juniper Networks, CLC Human Resources, 2012
CLC Human Resources