Feedback Is the Breakfast of Champions: Deadly Disease #3, Evaluation of Performance, Merit Rating or Annual Review

 

Your project is underway and you are monitoring all the right gauges, conducting earned value analysis, monitoring the scope, schedule and budget of the project, proactively managing your subcontractors and ensuring materials are being delivered as needed. But deep down inside, you have this nagging itch that you forget something. What is that nagging itch? Since most project managers tend to focus on the measurable numbers, we tend for forget the most important element of our projects--our individual teams members.

One of the Dr. W. E. Deming's Seven Deadly Diseases, Deadly Disease #3: Evaluation of Performance, Merit Rating or Annual Review, is by far the one disease we tend to look the other way on. While volumes have been written on this topic, essentially, Dr. Deming believed that it is wrong to focus on rating performance on the end product, which is at the end of the project or process, rather than focusing on leadership to help people. Focusing on the end product is a way to avoid the people problems and in effect makes us managers of defects. Huh? You mean I should not focus on the end product? That is what I get paid to do!

A typical scenario Dr. Deming described goes like this: Folks get their performance reviews by someone who doesn't have a clue what they do. The employee feels dejected for weeks after the review. Nobody wins.

While Dr. Deming was death on…

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