Not performance review!  Performance Plan.  This is the third step of effective performance management...and it is the most important.  A review is reactive, a performance plan is proactive.  This is the fundamental document which establishes task clarity and it is, without doubt, the most underutilized element of performance management.  Often the performance plan includes a valuable element commonly referred to as a “scorecard”.  The scorecard can be a customizable component of the performance plan to establish task clarity for each group member individually.
 Here’s the breakthrough - No other means of leadership is as powerful in focusing an organization as the collective power of each group member’s performance plan.  This is leadership’s tool for ensuring that each person in the institution is pulling on the oar in the same direction.  These documents create focus, redirect to higher value activities, and even influence your organization’s culture.  Each performance plan should align behaviors with the organization’s core values, mission, current objectives, and establish unambiguous task clarity specific to each associate. Historically, this process has been highly labor intensive, paper based, quite subjective, judgmental, and sometimes even completely reactive.  But today, effective HRIS systems include performance management and improve the efficiency and quality of the process.  Integrated human capital management systems exist which create an online environment for performance plan execution and documentation, workflows which add discipline to practice, and goal management systems which align expectations and results throughout the work group.  Science and the art of leadership merge when an automated performance plan environment is established by the coach and group member and together they analyze outcomes, conclude the elements needed to improve, and practice new tasks for the next measurement period.