Driving performance results at American Express

The American Express Company, also known as Amex, is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Three World Financial Center in New York City. The company was founded in 1850 and is best known for its charge card, credit card, and traveler's cheque businesses.

Performance management practices followed by Amex:

Adopting a performance management approach is a structured process designed to increase the likelihood of successes in managing the human variables associated with major change. Change management is a process that strives to move people from the current state through transition to arrive at the desired state.

The American Express Performance Management Process provides a systematic and disciplined process for managing change. The process is broken down into major phases of change and the key issues that need to be addressed in each phase.

Performance from the change process could be improved employee satisfaction, increased readiness/capacity to change, improved cycle time to implement the change or lowered cost of delays. Key results and/or measures from the change process should include:

• Awareness and understanding of the change.

• Skill attainment.

• Commitment or compliance with new way of working.

• Improved project completion rate.

The key to adopting this change model is to work from fact and develop a structured approach to ensure end results are achieved. 

As humans, it’s difficult to be fully objective. We can all be biased in one way or another as much as we try to deny it. So we can’t approach an employee’s performance review without bringing in our own experiences, views and expectations to the table. 

A common error managers can make is mistaking personality for performance when, in fact, they’re two very different factors. Personality is someone’s characteristics. 

Performance is about results.

Submitted by: Arjun Dhir