Performance Reviews: Supplementing With Something That Works

 

How do we design a supplement to performance reviews which, as noted in my last post, do more harm than good?

First, we managers have to abandon the "Manager as Omniscient" philosophy. Assume you do not know exactly everything about every employee's day. Assume you can easily make more than one of these performance evaluation errors that you yourself have been a victim of:

• Focus on a small number of incidents you just happen to hear about, for example a great review provided by someone who gained greatly from something that employee did
• Focus on small number of pieces of info provided by the employee, e.g. problems you had to solve, which you interpret as inadequate performance
• Apply obsolete initial assessment of employee which has never been objectively updated
• Misinterpret behavior of the employee or the motivations of the employee
• Misinterpret the results of employee actions
• Confuse subjective characteristic definitions like "shows initiative" with "doesn't take direction"
• Fail to recognize where the environment or culture keeps employees from doing their best, then blaming them for the problem.

Because of this ineffectiveness of the manager's understanding and interpretation, Allan Polak recommends "feedforward" rather than feedback. A performance "preview" rather than "review." Polak says the manager should help the employee with development needs and providing perspective for the future success instead of focusing on the past.

But you have to also actively pass more control to the employee. The employee has no control over the conversation and cannot have if the "event" is controlled by the manager and especially when the meeting involves salary discussions. A great way to give the employee control is to remove critical performance discussions from any major annual event. It must be the opposite of an event:  more timely, more common, targeted to employee need, developmental, casual, informal, positive, interactive, with mutual understanding. It is a continuing conversation. A conversation that benefits both the manager and the employee.

What You Said

• Elizabeth reminded us in this economy that we are often conducting evaluations for no material/financial benefit to the employee. She says we should use performance reviews to motivate employees. Wouldn't it be motivating if your manager switched to an approach like the continuing conversation?
• Which organization, which team, which individual today can wait a year for performance feedback meetings? None! That's why SFControl said that the year-long meeting should be a rubber-stamp, certainly not a surprise. That is exactly what happens when you have the continuing conversation. By the time the awful "annual review" comes around, both parties have effectively discussed performance, responded and discussed the results in several iterations.

More Thoughts

• Even during the continuing conversation, get away from behind the desk - that just sends the wrong signal. Talk in a neutral, comfortable spot.
• Managers aren't often allowed enough time to perform employee development duties . There's usually a fraction of the management week sliced off to meet employee needs, which is not enough. Perhaps this continuing conversation will be easier to fit into the busy manager-week.