Whatever your leadership role in a school, you will always need to know how the people you lead are doing.

You will need an understanding of where they are at in terms of progressing towards your shared goals, as well as their personal ones, and you will need to be aware of their unique strengths and weaknesses, along with outside factors that are affecting their work.

So, what is the best way to tackle performance management?

The lowdown

From a leader’s perspective, the ultimate purpose of performance management is not to judge or grade staff but really to determine if there’s anything you can do to better support them. It is this that should be the guiding light when considering your approach to the process.

You may find that you are bound by an existing framework or that you have the freedom to implement your own approach, but keeping sight of that purpose is crucial to ensure that your team understands the benefits that performance reviews can bring for them and their work. It also avoids it becoming a dreaded tick-box exercise.

What we know about what works

Bogdan Costea, professor of management and society at Lancaster University Management School, cautions against the kind of performance management that makes people feel personally judged.

“There are certain things in business that are now extremely fashionable that leaders should never do,” he explains.

“There are frameworks that have been deployed increasingly in the past 10 years in major corporations, with people scrutinised for their personality, which can be extremely corrosive.

“Questions like: ‘Are you the right type of person? Are you a good team player? Are you approachable? Do you have integrity?’…What does that even mean?

“These frameworks are extraordinarily toxic because they scrutinise the character of the person and can make them feel that they’re being compared with their colleagues on measures of personal qualities.”

Instead, he says, it’s vital that the areas of performance to be measured are focused on the work itself and are clearly understood in advance of conversations.

More from Middle Leadership Essentials:

• Budget management for middle leaders: a guide
• How to navigate tricky conversations
• How to improve individual performance

Costea says: “One of the basics of exploring how people are doing is to know what we’re looking at. Is it the results of the class or the subject? Are we also looking at the effectiveness of the instructional climate? Are we looking for the development of children as people? Staff have to be clear about what is being measured.”

He also advises caution when considering the kind of performance management systems - also popular in business - that bring in feedback from colleagues and thus can feel like “everybody judges everybody all the time”.

“They call it 360-degree feedback because it comes from everywhere. But if every conversation is potentially a performance management conversation, then there is the risk that everybody will start posing. When is the truth going to come up?

“Again, the question is whether we are talking about the work that we do or talking about the kind of people we are. Because if we start judging each other for the sort of people we are and whether we appear to be committed, whether we appear to have passion, whether we appear to be oriented towards the pupil - or anything else that you can think of in a school setting - that is a very different thing.”

Ultimately, he continues, it is “quite fundamental that you have to respect people and respect their decisions in the classroom”.

And so performance management needs to be a matter of supporting and developing those staff and their work, rather than berating or creating a damaging sense of competition between them, particularly around relationships.

He says: “It can’t become a public measure of ‘oh, look how much better this person is doing than this person’, ‘this person’s pupils like them so much more than this person’s’. That isn’t helpful, it doesn’t mean anything. That is a game and we aren’t there to play games on school grounds. We don’t do that to people.”

Instead, Costea concludes, a constructive approach is key, steering away from the “apparently ideal forms of performance management language, all sounding very positive, but whose effect can actually be extremely negative”, and thus supporting staff to genuinely identify their areas of strength and improvement in a proactive and collaborative way.

The experienced leader view

Jon Hutchinson is director of curriculum and teacher development at the Reach Foundation. He writes:

“Great, I have to performance manage people, so now nobody is going to like me any more.”

This was one of my first thoughts when I became a middle leader.

It’s fair to say that performance management is not usually a favourite activity of middle leaders. It’s likely that you’re still teaching yourself, and so have a keen awareness of the multiple pressures, lack of resources and increased challenges that teaching brings.

You might even feel guilty about judging others when you feel that you still have plenty to work on yourself.

So, it is completely natural if you feel conflicted at the thought of having to make judgements about the effectiveness of your colleagues.

However, it would be reckless to run any organisation without some form of scrutiny and accountability.

That means performance management is an important part of your job - with added responsibility comes, well, added responsibility, and you are part of the infrastructure that is in place to make sure that all pupils get the education that they deserve.

This doesn’t mean that you have to suddenly transform into an adversary of your team, though - far from it. Although there will inevitably be times that you have to hold a dreaded “difficult conversation” (and we have a whole article on that coming up), the overall approach needn’t be framed in a punitive or deficit manner.

One way that you can flip the narrative is by actively searching out and celebrating strong performance among your team.

Have you noticed that someone in your department sets up partner discussion really effectively? Let everyone know in the next department meeting.

Does one of your Reception teachers deliver flawless phonics sessions? Ask them to showcase for the first 10 minutes of the next staff meeting.

There is a risk here with creating “toxic positivity” and the caution from Costea around competition is well made, but being the biggest champion of your team and highlighting great practice can be an extremely effective way to manage performance. Everyone enjoys being recognised for stuff they do well.

It’s also worth remembering that while there will be formal milestones, such as end-of-term reviews with targets and so on, performance management shouldn’t be a staccato affair. Instead, think of it as an ongoing process through which you emphasise strong practice, create conditions for development and guide your team to gradually address areas for growth.

Remember that in the rare instances of very poor performance - the sort that might trigger the dreaded “support plans” or capability proceedings - you will receive plenty of support yourself.

Every school, rightly, has clear and objective policies for such circumstances, so remember that you won’t be solely responsible for major decisions about people’s careers.