Whether you are setting Performance Leader up for the first time or taking over from a colleague, the first job is the same: understand how the platform is put together and where the controls live. This guide gives you that orientation, then points you at the right path for your situation.

If you are implementing Performance Leader, you are making decisions from a blank slate — what to measure, how the review should run, what the data model looks like. Your Customer Success Manager will work through this with you alongside your onboarding guide and project plan. Sequence matters, because some decisions constrain later ones.

If you are taking over an existing instance, the decisions have already been made, often by people who have moved on. Your first job is not configuration but orientation: understanding what exists and why. Start with the New administrator current-state checklist.

Both paths converge on being able to run the platform confidently and both use the same underlying knowledge below.

Performance Leader has two halves.

The modules are what your people use: Objectives, Feedback, Check-ins, Reviews, and Training Diary, depending on what your firm has enabled. As an administrator you see these in your own left-hand menu as an employee would.

The admin areas are where you configure everything:

If you are looking for something and cannot find it, the usual answer is that firm-wide settings live under Settings and module-specific settings live under Manage Apps.

A few things underpin everything else.

Attributes come first. Departments, roles, locations and custom attributes are the vocabulary the whole platform uses. They drive who appears in which filter, how to enrol users, and what leadership views can see. Changing them later has knock-on effects, so they are worth getting right before you build much on top.

Users carry their structure with them. A person's role, department, location and supervisor determine what they see and where they appear. Most data problems trace back to a user record rather than to the module you were looking at.

Review cycles have a lifecycle. A cycle moves through Draft, Active and Complete, and can be locked to prevent breaking changes to its structure once people are using it. Some configuration stops being editable once a cycle is live, which is why testing before launch is critical. Users only see reviews they’re added in, and changes to user details (roles, department etc) flow immediately into live cycles.

Access comes in levels. A super admin sees everything. A restricted admin manages a defined population — scoped by department, role profile and location — and sees a noticeably narrower platform. A leadership view is different again: visibility of a group's data without administrative rights. Matching the level to the need avoids giving people more access than they need.

Some analysis happens after the fact. Parts of the platform analyse data in the background once a process completes, rather than in real time. If a view looks empty immediately after a cycle closes, that is often why.

Your CSM leads this with you, and your onboarding guide and project plan cover the decisions in detail. The broad order the platform expects is:

Each step assumes the one before it. Loading users before your attributes are right, for example, means correcting them twice.

Work through the New administrator current-state checklist. It walks you through ownership, access, data, active processes and the operating calendar — and prompts you to record not just what is configured, but why.

Then use Practise common administrative tasks to get hands on, ideally with test users and a test cycle.

Building or changing a review is the largest single thing an administrator does, and it has its own set of guides covering cycle creation, the reviewee and reviewer steps, rating scales, tooltips, PDFs, email notifications and duplicating a cycle for the next round.

If you are new, do not start there. Get oriented first, understand your data and your access model, and then take review building as a deliberate piece of work with your CSM alongside you.

When you are ready, these are the places to begin:

From there the collection covers the reviewer step, rating scales, tooltips, PDFs and email notifications in sequence.

If you have been given restricted admin access rather than super admin, your menu is narrower — Settings and Utilities will not appear, and some routes are unavailable to you. That is expected. See Introduction to Restricted Admin for what your role covers.

Your Customer Success Manager is the right first call for anything involving a decision — how a process should work, whether a configuration is a good idea, how to approach a launch. Support is the right call for anything that looks broken. Knowing which is which will save you time.