For any leader with responsibility for establishing a performance management strategy or facilitating a performance management process, I believe one thing is true—it takes continuous action and interaction to generate the “right” results.

Effective performance management can drive you more quickly toward success, but it takes an around-the-clock commitment year over year. It takes effort and attention to manage employee performance. And there are no instant masters in this space; it takes time, preparation, and practice. If you’re driven by helping others to succeed and by delivering exceptional experiences, performance management shouldn’t scare you one bit. How do you rate then? Is there more you can learn about performance management triggers?

Some leaders manage performance with the following—expertise in setting clear objectives, ability to assess skills and competencies to enable development, and evaluation (quantitative and qualitative) that distinguishes levels of performance. Does your in-house performance management process stand out among the rest? What is your key differentiator? Do your managers and staff look forward to annual, semi-annual or even quarterly opportunities to document performance through self-assessments and manager dialog? Or does your team adhere to a more creative process for chronicling performance?

While I can’t say with certainty that my entire in-house team anxiously awaits all aspects of our review cadence, our annual-objective process has been a clear indicator of how best to connect our staff with their day-to-day work and business unit drivers. Setting measureable expectations in a forward-moving, positive environment that focuses on success and values failure (as a coaching platform) can open doors to a winning process.