Performance Appraisals
Jurgen Appelo has a new post up about the trials of performance appraisals. I think we can all agree that performance appraisals are a time of the year (or multiple times of the year) that is full of feelings both good and ill for managers and employees alike.
I found this near to my heart since this is the first year I’m doing performance appraisals for other people. I’m having the same experience as Mr. Appelo: “I had too little information to produce reliable performance appraisals.” The three people I had to appraise were on a team that I had only joined in July, so first off I was only able to appraise them for half the year. Second, even as team lead I was not in a position where I knew everything that everyone was doing or had done. This was especially difficult for evaluating individual goals, since I frequently didn’t have a complete picture of what they had to done to achieve those goals.
Still, I got through it as best I could. I still couldn’t help the trepidation of feeling like I might be judging some people too harshly and others not harshly enough. It doesn’t help that our performance appraisal system is based on a bunch of arbitrary 1 to 5 ratings. I was pretty stingy with higher numbers, but I know some others (especially the appraisees themselves) rate much more loosely.
The idea of 360 degree feedback sounds good on paper, though. I would love to be able to consult with multiple people on an appraisal so that I could get a more complete picture. Unfortunately that’s the sort of change that will be difficult to sell from the bottom up, and as Mr. Appelo points out, it won’t be received well if it’s not consistent across the organization.
While following the links from Mr. Appelo’s post, I stumbled across another article that I found interesting: What Great Managers Do Differently. It’s actually a short review of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s book, First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (which I will now need to add to the ever-growing pile of books I want to read). In particular, this passage caught my attention:
The traditional performance improvement process identifies specific, average or below performance areas. Suggestions for improvement, either verbal or in a formal appraisal process, focus on developing these weaknesses.
What great managers do instead, is assess each individual’s talents and skills. They then provide training, coaching, and development opportunities that will help the person increase these skills. They compensate for or manage around weaknesses.
This struck me as something both equally intuitive and obvious, yet something I had not considered before (“Why didn’t I think of that?!” moment). In every performance appraisal I’ve ever been a part of, it tends to generate a lot of negative feelings since the appraisee feels picked on—the appraiser points out their biggest flaws and then tells them that they must change.
The idea that the manager should instead pick up on the employee’s strengths and foster those whilst all but ignoring deficiencies is brilliant. The employee doesn’t feel worthless and can focus on those things they do well, and the manager can improve performance by directing subordinates to roles where they will excel.