HR Knows How to Measure Performance. But Can It Develop Leaders?
Performance frameworks can assess delivery well. Developing leaders also requires real opportunities, manager follow-through and honest career conversations.
Building Stronger Teams · Potential & Development · Building Leaders not Followers · Coaching
This article is inspired by real workplace and leadership experiences. I do not use real names, company names or identifying details. Roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context may be removed, generalised or combined to protect the people and organisations involved while preserving the underlying leadership reflection. Where conversations are referenced, wording may be edited for clarity and anonymity.
I think we ask performance management to do a job it cannot do on its own. We get better at defining expectations, recording outcomes and deciding how someone performed, then assume we have also become better at developing the next generation of leaders. I am not convinced those two things move together as neatly as the process suggests.
A well-designed performance framework can be genuinely useful. People should understand what is expected of them. Reward decisions should have some basis beyond who happens to be most visible, and a manager should be able to explain why work meets a standard or falls short. I have no interest in replacing that with a vague feeling that someone has potential.
But evidence that a person performs their current role well does not tell us everything about their readiness to lead others. Nor does documenting their performance give them the opportunities they need to develop. A carefully completed form is still a record of a conversation, assuming the conversation was any good to begin with.
Leadership requires judgement in situations where the answer is not completely specified. It asks people to build trust, coach someone through uncertainty and give others enough autonomy to develop their own judgement. It may involve challenging a process that is working beautifully according to its own measures while making the actual work unnecessarily difficult.
Those contributions are harder to reduce to a neat score. That does not make them impossible to discuss or assess. It means we need to look at what people actually do, the choices they make and the effect they have on others, rather than treating the measurable parts of the current job as a complete description of their future capability.
I also think career conversations become strangely narrow when we conduct them entirely through the needs of the employee's present role. Someone may be performing well and want a different kind of work. They may be struggling partly because their longer-term ambitions no longer fit the position they hold. Neither admission should automatically be interpreted as a lack of commitment.
I want a manager to be interested enough to hear that honestly. If an employee wants to develop towards another team or a different profession, telling me should not become evidence against them at the next review. Otherwise I have created a conversation in which the safest career ambition is whichever one makes my staffing plan easiest.
There is still a job to do now. Being interested in someone's future does not remove the expectations of their current role, and an ambition does not make every missed commitment acceptable. I think a useful manager can hold both parts of that conversation: what we need from each other today, and what this person is trying to become over time.
That might mean helping them practise a skill that is not immediately useful to my team. It might mean finding an opportunity elsewhere and accepting that I will eventually need to replace them. The point is to make development specific enough to affect what happens after the conversation, including when their preferred future is inconvenient for me.
HR can help create the conditions for this. It can give managers useful tools, make development visible and challenge reward systems that overlook it. But the responsibility cannot be handed over with the form. A manager still needs to know the person, care about their ambitions and follow through on what was discussed.
So the question in the title is deliberately uncomfortable. I do not mean that HR professionals cannot develop leaders, or that performance management is a failed idea. I mean that we should stop assuming a framework designed to assess individual delivery will automatically produce the relationships, opportunities and judgement that leadership development requires.
I would be interested in a different kind of review after the review: what did this person get to practise, what responsibility did they receive, and what did their manager actually do to help? If the answer is that the development section was completed, I think we still have some work to do.
