Lessons on How Evidence-Based Performance Management Changed Practice, Policy, and Talent Decisions

Abstract

For years, performance management was a once-a-year event—an assigned performance rating, a form sent to human resources (HR)—and soul-crushing meetings that produced little value for managers, organizations, or employees. Our work over the past two decades has sought to replace that ritual with something closer to real conversation: regular check-ins, clarity about expectations, and explicit connections between individual and team performances and a firm’s strategic goals. Through sustained teaching, cumulative research programs, and extensive outreach activities, these evidence-based ideas reached classrooms, government offices, corporate leadership teams, courts, and the media, shaping both managerial practice and public policy. The path was neither easy nor linear and included many rejections, frustrations, hurdles, and disappointments—particularly when phenomenon-driven insights challenged entrenched assumptions and publication norms. The “impact journey” begins with studying an important, consequential managerial problem and conducting rigorous and credible research. Critically, impactful and relevant research requires a two-way conversation with practitioners (i.e., “absorptive capacity”) and deliberate dissemination across multiple outlets (i.e., “transformative capacity”). I describe remaining managerial challenges in performance and talent management, explain why they persist, outline how they can be addressed, and distill 14 lessons learned for improving scholarly relevance and sustained impact in performance management and other domains.