Page 11 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

EDITORS’ NOTE

today, is widely recognized as the single biggest obstacle to improv-
ing health care delivery, because it rewards the quantity rather
than the quality or efficiency of care. What we need is a system that
rewards providers for delivering superior value to patients—for
achieving better health outcomes at a lower cost. In “How to Pay for
Health Care,” strategy giants Michael E. Porter and Robert S. Kaplan
argue that a “bundled payments” model is the right one, because
it triggers competition among providers to create value where it
matters—at the individual patient level. They describe robust proof-
of-concept initiatives in the United States and abroad that show how
the challenges of transitioning to bundled payments are already
being overcome.
Another system that’s overdue for reform is annual performance
reviews. Emphasizing individual accountability for past results,
traditional appraisals give short shrift to improving current perfor-
mance and developing talent for the future. That can hinder long-
term competitiveness, say Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis in “The
Performance Management Revolution.” To better support employee
development, many organizations are dropping or radically chang-
ing their annual-review systems in favor of giving people less-formal,
more-frequent feedback that follows the natural cycle of work. The
authors explain how performance management has evolved over
the decades and why current thinking has shifted.
Goal-setting and evaluation are one way to motivate your
employees, but how to engage them is another long-standing issue
for managers and organizations. Francesca Gino, a professor of
business administration at Harvard Business School, conducted
groundbreaking research and found that whether consciously
or unconsciously, organizations pressure employees—including
leaders—to reserve their real, authentic, nonconforming selves
for outside the workplace. This pressure to conform, she writes in
“Let Your Workers Rebel,” can have a significant negative impact
on engagement, productivity, and the ability to innovate. To fix
this problem, she says, develop a culture that supports “construc-
tive nonconformity”: encourage your workers to break rules and be
themselves.

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