5 Ways That Good Performance Management is like SRE at Google

What managers of people can learn from managers of production systems

Photo by Kolleen Gladden on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking a lot about performance management lately. How do I do it? How have I seen it done? How is it done well? Performance management is all about growing the capability of your organisation. When thinking about developing the capabilities of an organisation there are two levers you can pull.

• Hire more people. This is the first lever people usually reach for and it’s the weakest you have available. At best your capabilities scale linearly with number of people. In reality it’s less than that because every new human brings communication overhead. It’s expensive and scales slowly.
• Grow your people. If your capability to get things done is the sum total of the capabilities minus the friction of them working together then this should be the place where you start. Give your people opportunities to grow, teach them how to remove friction, facilitate them in doing so and you have a lever that can see orders of magnitude improvements without costing you much more. You’ll still wind up paying more because you WILL be promoting these people as they grow. This is a good problem to have.

So why isn’t the second option the one that most managers choose? I think a big reason is that most managers…