Porter Novelli Performance Management at Porter Novelli

For Porter Novelli, even as the company advanced its objectives and improved its market orientation, its Human Resource strategy appeared to lag behind. It is for this reason that the firm began to investigate ways of linking its Human Resource orientation with its overall business strategy. Among the key objectives within the scope of the proposed strategic improvement would be more effective performance management, clearer opportunities for professional development and a shift toward client-centered HR strategies.

Leadership Roles:

At the center of Porter Novelli's change process would be the use of a Leadership Pipeline model. This would be constructed to enable Porter Novelli the ability to assign meaningful leadership roles at every level. As this relates to performance management, the approach would be aimed at created tiered levels of accountability. Leadership roles would be especially important in effecting change through the three level system around which the Leadership Pipeline is designed. The first level calls for a clear definition of leadership duties at different levels of the organization to the end of strengthening the stake and sense of empowerment experienced by talent throughout Porter Novelli. Accompanying this level would be the improvement of performance incentives and sufficient training and support to the end of achieving these incentives. According to the text by Goldsmith & Carter (2009), "pipeline-based definitions of senior roles would more explicitly define management and leadership accountabilities for reinforcement with coaching, performance management, and revised incentive compensation...

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This denotes that it is incumbent upon senior leaders at Porter Novelli to ensure that proper performance management oversight is provided. Performance assessments of leaders are more closely staked to the performance of their subordinates. This contributed directly to pursuit of the second level of implementation. This would be the construction of a completely overhauled performance management approach. Previously, the case history reports, Porter Novelli had operated on a competency-based performance management system that was largely unused in the real-world setting. Its definitions proved static, its evaluation process complex and the training support available for it highly limited.

By contrast to the competency-based approach, the strategies for performance management in the new system would work according to both goal-setting and results-oriented approaches. In order to hone these new foci, the role of leaders had to be inserted more directly into performance management. The case history would denote the need to "align with Leadership Pipeline principles; provide both specificity and flexibility in defining job requirements and personal accountabilities; and be as easy to understand and use as possible, for people new to both goal-setting-based performance management as well as the results-oriented approach." (p. 236)

The third level of the Leadership Pipeline implementation would append to the performance management framework, overhauling the processes of recruitment, training and pronunciation of performance duties. Streamlining, consistency and reliability would be sought in this part of the process, all stemming from the direct contribution of newly…