One of the most common elements where new PIs feel they are lacking knowledge and experience is performance management.  It is one of the most important elements of your role, and one that you may not need to have engaged fully until now. 

As a new PI, you are now responsible for a group of people with different experience, skills, personalities, motivations, and career aspirations. No one approach will suit everyone, and you will find yourself in both joyful experiences where your group surprise you with their independence and creativity, as well as challenging times dealing with conflicts and poor performance.  Successful PIs approach performance management with curiosity about what enables individuals to thrive, flexibility to try a variety of different approaches and courage or determination to address challenging situations.     

For this reason, we have put together a wide variety of insights and resources to help you to navigate this crucial element of group leadership.     

In this section you will gather insights and tools to try out that will help you enhance performance in your team through effective goal setting, delegation and feedback. 

About performance management

Performance management is a process, or a cycle, with which you as group leader should be constantly engaging.  It is not a task to tick off your list and it is not something that only happens when there is a new opportunity or a challenge, or when it’s the time of year when we conduct annual performance reviews.  Your group are navigating an ever-changing landscape and the individual members are continually developing on both short and long timescales.  

The performance management cycle:

Think of performance management as a cycle.   In the sections below, you will find a variety of resources to help you to be effective in managing individuals in your research group in each of the stages of this performance management cycle.