Organisational Performance Primer

We're used to thinking of ongoing performance management for employees, for example, setting goals, monitoring the employee's achievement of those goals, sharing feedback with the employee, evaluating the employee's performance, rewarding performance or firing the employee. Performance management applies to organizations, too, and includes recurring activities to establish organizational goals, monitor progress toward the goals, and make adjustments to achieve those goals more effectively and efficiently. Those recurring activities are much of what leaders and managers inherently do in their organizations -- some do them far better than others.

When seeking to improve the performance of an organization, it's very helpful to regularly conduct assessments of the current performance of the organization. Assessments might be planned, systematic and explicit (these often are the best kinds of assessments) or unplanned and implicit. Well-done assessments typically use tools, such as omprehensive questionnaires, SWOT analyses, diagnostic models (we often use these models without recognizing or referring to them as such), etc., along with comparison of results to various "best practices" or industry standards.

The tools in our Organisational Management section can help you evaluate your organisation.

Source: Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD