I've been musing on the traditional approach to performance management, and how management-by-objectives could release so much more value if it was more transparent. I've seen so many examples where people rely on serendipity to discover a colleague or a project with an aligned objective. And they often discover it too late!

OK - most of us know our own objectives, but Dilbert has a point...

Perhaps this is all a bit obvious, but, inspired by a recent talk from Euan Semple not to eschew stating the obvious, I thought I'd pose the question:

Why is is that even in enlightened organisations who emphasise collaboration and connection, personal performance objectives still seem to be treated with the same level of protection and secrecy as personal salaries? It's like we are asking people to complete a jigsaw with all of the pieces upside-down.

What if everyone's profile page carried their objectives by default?

You know the kind of thing: "This is me and this is what I'm directing my energy into, to make our company more successful this year. Are you doing anything that might complement or align with me?"

Naturally you'll need to conceal the ones which are commercially, personally or legally sensitive - but I would suggest that the majority of individual objectives could be shared, but remain barricaded into performance management silos.

Do you know of any examples of organisations where individual performance objectives are generally visible to all, and where people look for synergies? I've started to discuss this on the Gurteen Linked-In group too - getting plenty of agreement, but no mould-breaking examples yet.

Grateful for pointers or examples from anyone.

So let's push this a bit further...

What if not just our objectives were visible, but also how we're progressing in meeting them?
What if I could reach out and offer to help a colleague to prevent them from missing a target?
What if we could remove the perceived need to out-perform and compete with our colleagues, focus on being greater than the sum of our parts, like the HBR article on T-shaped management, but on a truly corporate scale?

And to be truly revolutionary,

What if we could bury forced-ranking and focus on releasing best from our people; start managing talent collectively rather than individually, and reform closed performance management into collaborative knowledge sharing?

Now that sounds like the kind of courageous company which I'd like to work for.

Perhaps it's time we discussed some what-if questions with our allies in HR?