The choice every firm faces - all in one or best of breed
July 3, 2025
July 3, 2025
Having worked for nearly 10 years at Performance Leader, I’ve been reflecting on the one topic that HR Directors and Managing Partners raise time and again. It’s this: ‘should we manage performance and feedback from within our all-in-one HR platform, or invest in a best-of-breed solution?’
It’s a fair question – especially when you’re juggling competing priorities, firmwide IT projects, and the desire to keep systems streamlined. After all, most firms have a core HR platform in place to manage employee data and records, and all-in-one platforms now offer everything from onboarding to payroll to workforce planning. The business case for an all-in-one platform from IT or procurement is simple: one system, bundled pricing, centralised data and economies of scale.
But when it comes to something as nuanced and strategically important as performance and feedback, the decision needs to be informed by broader factors.
Performance management tools are not just software solutions– they are ways to shape behaviour. Numerous studies underline this point. For example, Locke & Latham’s research on goal-setting theory has shown that specific and challenging goals lead to significantly higher performance than vague or easy ones. In other words, when great performance systems make the process of setting meaningful, structured goals engaging – and, now with the support of AI, even more exciting – they drive better outcomes, not just better compliance.
Over the years, I’ve seen more than 80 firms make the decision to use a best-of-breed solution with a clear focus on what’s best for their people and culture. I’ve also seen other firms give the all-in-one approach a try, typically under pressure to do more with less. While every firm’s situation is different, the key considerations are common to all, including what matters to stakeholders, where the trade-offs really lie, and how AI is changing the game.
Before you identify the best solution, it is always helpful to clarify the problem.
Most all-in-one HR platforms aren’t designed for performance and feedback. They were built to track data, not drive behaviour. Compliance, payroll, time and leave – these remain their natural strengths. All-in-one systems might be consistent, but they often deliver a ‘clunky’ experience where the user experience isn’t intuitive, and the workflows feel rigid. That leaves partners and leaders disengaged and invariably leads to poor compliance.
Losing the engagement of your key stakeholders is a real problem, especially if you are trying to shift your performance culture. In our experience, when frustrations around the system and process – not the conversations – have become the focus of performance management at the firm, it may be time to reassess your approach.
Here’s a summary of what HR leaders across the legal, consulting and accounting sectors tell us when discussing their challenges around performance and feedback at their firms.
We must engage our partners in the process. Partners are role models in our firm. To ensure we get their discretionary effort and buy-in we need to make their lives easier, at every step. We must engage our partners or our aspirations to shift the performance culture won’t get off the ground.
We don’t want to compromise our approach. We need software that follows our firm’s culture and structure, not the other way round. Whether it’s non-hierarchical feedback, complex partner review workflows or trainee rotations, we don’t want to compromise our approach.
We need tools that will support change. Building a feedback culture is not easy, neither is operationalising collaboration around our firm strategic plans. We need thoughtful application of tools that win both the hearts and minds of our people to affect change.
We want AI to create value, not just save time. We know AI tools can create more capacity, but we want AI that supports better conversations, energises our objective focus, and supports decision-making.
Best-of-breed platforms aren’t just user-friendly, they’re grounded in well-evidenced performance principles. Decades of research show that structured performance systems with regular feedback loops and aligned, challenging goals significantly improve motivation, role clarity and productivity. When firms are aiming to lift partner engagement and drive culture change, these aren't nice-to-haves – they’re essential foundations.
Purpose-built for the nuances of partnerships, best-of-breed platforms translate these principles into practice. They combine intuitive, time-saving design with a high degree of configurability, shaped by years of product innovation, and deep understanding of professional firms.
The client feedback I’ve heard, combined with the known strengths of best-of-breed solutions, map directly to the challenges HR leaders face.
Engaging your partners. With design focused for the time-poor, best-of-breed delivers an intuitive, partner-friendly experience that saves time, builds trust, and drives regular engagement. A success factor in the design process is addressing partner needs and the ‘what’s in it for me’ question. We estimate our system offers as high as 300% ROI on partner time saved (see our blog on Business Case for Partner Performance Technology).
‘Performance Leader enabled us to refocus our approach to partner performance on the conversation, not the technology, by creating a positive, frictionless experience for partners that supported self-reflection and introduced more rigour.’
John Schorah, Partner, Weightmans
Aligning with firm culture and structure. Deep industry expertise and years spent understanding people and their specific challenges shapes best-of-breed design. It includes sector-specific features that solve challenges for professional firms, such as matrix structures, audit/matter feedback, practice/sector plan collaboration, sensitive 360 reviews, regulatory compliance, and RemCom access.
‘The system is the best I have seen, allowing us to track the consistency, connection, and quality of objectives to build and embed a culture of continuous and timely feedback, both have improved as a result.’
Irena Molloy, Executive Director, Howard Kennedy
Supporting change. Design conversations with clients yield multi-year plans to tackle strategic issues like building a real-time feedback culture or fostering more partner collaboration. Best-of-breed solutions deliver the high degree of configurability required to adapt reviews, feedback and objectives to the structure, culture and cadence of the individual firm (and groups). It means the software will work the way you do, and will evolve with you.
‘From the outset we received great feedback and uptake from colleagues and partners, despite the project launch coming at a time of considerable technology change. Performance Leader has won over the most unexpected of people.’
Kirsty Weller, Head of People CSG, DAC Beachcroft
How AI is changing the game. The specialist way AI is applied and weaved throughout the Performance Leader platform is redefining what best-of-breed platforms can deliver over and above an all-in-one capability. This ranges from creating actionable feedback summaries and drafting contextualised, aligned, high-quality goals, to generating manager check-in agendas and uncovering unconscious bias. Generative AI automates the heavy lifting and creates and enhances quality. It can connect people through shared goals, support evidence-based reward decisions, and give HR real-time access to performance insights that were previously locked in reports. The result? Better conversations, more strategic alignment, and a step-change in the way people feel about performance and feedback.
‘The AI-generated feedback summaries have been impactful, allowing managers to quickly access high-quality, balanced and concise insights. This has led to more efficient and effective conversations between managers and employees.’
Amr Sultan, Group Lead People Operations, BrunswickGroup
If you’re navigating this decision and could use a sounding board, I’d be happy to share what I’m seeing across the market.
You may also find these questions useful in clarifying some of the issues:
Book a discovery meeting with us to explore your firm’s approach to building a sustainable high performance culture.
