This year I’m launching a new White Paper series that takes some of the key ideas in Humanize and gets practical and concrete with them. Today, I’m launching the first one: Making Performance Management Work.

I’m calling the series “Making It Work,” because as much as I love to blog and write about cool ideas, I think we desperately need to start actually DOING SOMETHING about these ideas in our organizations. I say it a lot when I speak about Humanize: Maddie and I are activists. We want you to take these ideas and run with them. Let’s take these ideas and make them work. I am writing this series of White Papers with that in mind. I want to get rid of the excuses, and make it easy for you to start changing  your culture. Today.

I started with Performance Management for a couple of reasons. First, more people hate them than like them. Those are the processes that I think are MOST relevant to the ideas we are talking about in Humanize. For Pete’s sake, why do we keep doing the things that we already know don’t work or at the very least annoy vast numbers of employees?! If we can’t figure out how to change those, then we’re in trouble.

But the other (and more important) reason is that performance reviews, which are frequently looked at as a boring HR process, have a huge potential in changing culture. They’re not used that way, but they should be. The organizations that figure out how to shape their culture in ways that drive performance and engage employees are the ones that will thrive in the social age. In the paper I talk about how we can do that (with examples).

So please download and share the white paper freely. The link on the White Paper page will ask you for your contact information first, but it then takes you directly to the PDF.