​​By Sonja Armbruster, in collaboration with Amanda McCarty and Jack Moran

 

As we’ve all spent more time at home this spring and summer, I’ve found myself in the kitchen often. I’m pretty comfortable there - confident with my cooking and baking skills. But when yeast was absent from the store, I decided to try my hand at sourdough. As this involved new skills and techniques, I turned to YouTube, called friends, and read several blogs and webpages to build my confidence. However, after the first attempt, I realized I needed reinforcements; so I did some research, reached out to my local bookstore and bought a permanent resource – ready in the moment to remind me of the next step. Already, the book is stained with my flour- and water-covered hands.

 

Now what does this have to do with performance management​? 

 

A couple of years ago, Amanda McCarty, Jack Moran, and myself were discussing the difficulties of sustainable change in health departments. We have provided performance manage​ment workshops at many conferences and have trained and coached dozens of health departments to support their design and implementation of performance management systems. We all agreed that one of the challenges of learning about performance management in a workshop setting is that it is a bit like the confidence one feels after the teacher has explained the math problem or the YouTube baker has shown the 24-hour sourdough bread process in 12 minutes. While the learner has the basics from the trainings, it sure is handy to have a book to refer to as the concepts move from the general explanation to the specific details.

 

So, we wrote Collaborative Performance Management for Public Health: A Practical Guide. This book carefully explains what public health performance management is – and makes a strong case for why performance management is needed to successfully tackle the long-standing health issues plaguing communities and states. This book offers practical insights and case studies that may be immediately applied to public health organizations, from assessing an organization’s needs, introducing a performance management system to the organization, developing an agency’s goals and targets, to implementation of sound performance management systems and plans.

 

“Often, implementing performance management is not easy. Moreover, it is not for the faint of heart or the timid. It is for leaders who genuinely are attracted to leadership roles, who seek to maximize the health impact of the scarce resources the public has entrusted with our agencies. If that is what motivates you, read this book and learn from the straightforward lessons of your experienced colleagues.”