‘Tis The Season For Performance Reviews
Well, at least for my own organization. In my association experience, it tends to depend on your budget cycle. And there lies one of the great problems with the whole performance review: money and performance are tightly linked. So, what’s wrong with that? Everything.
I could go on and on about this, but greater and more experienced minds have already offered some brilliant writings on this issue…
Lisa Haneberg at Management Craft has long made some compelling cases against the use of reviews:
Scrap Performance Appraisals - Parts 1 2 3 4 5
And another post for good measure…
More recently, Don Blohowiak at Leadership Now has a chilling post on how some companies game the whole 360 evaluation process.
Both Lisa’s and Don’s posts offer more links and opportunities to tumble down the blogosphere rabbit hole.
Currently, I’m working to overhaul how my organization thinks about evaluations. From dialogues I’ve had with the CEO and the staff, I think one central question lies with the actual purpose of a performance evaluation. Like so much in the workplace that mirrors our elementary school classroom beginnings, we need a report card. We want to see if we got that much sought after ‘A’ in math or teamwork. We need the strokes from our teacher/supervisor. We want to tack it to the fridge at home. We need someone else telling us we should be proud of the work that we’re doing.
Okay, so what happens when we take responsibility for our own development? Instead of complying with what the organization unilaterally says we should be valuing about our work, let’s try building the performance agreement together. Let’s develop a process that builds on the best of the organization and the employee. Let’s make this a frequent event (at least once every three months) that generates excitement rather than devolves into groans of apathy and frustration.
And to a certain Fortune 500 executive, if you think your employees are just there for the money and they don’t want to develop their skills and make something of their life, perhaps this is a good time to shut up and start listening.
Hi Chris.
You have touched one of my “buttons” and it’s hard to resist weighing in.
As “Mr. Performance Review” in several of my corporate gigs, I have had the opportunity to deal with this process up close, for many years.
There are two chief flaws in the way performance review is typicaly executed.
One is the linkage between performance and pay. While an organization should insist on people performing, the annual determination of who performed better is subjective at best. At worst, it is a flawed exercise in how to distribute a finite bucket of merit money that leaves folks feeling like they weren’t adequately recognized or rewarded.
The other is the weak focus (or lack of focus altogether) on development.
If I had a magic wand, I’d wave the whole thing away and replace it with something that I believe would be quite different…..
Terry
Terry
You are so right! It’s past time someone produced a better system and we dumped the current flawed mess. Like Lisa Haneberg, I wrote extensively about my deep concerns about performance appraisals in The Coyote Within.
This is a great post, Chris, and you deserve much kudos for being courageous enough to tackle the problem in your own organization. Keep up the good work, buddy.
Adrian
Terry, welcome and thanks for the comment. I couldn’t agree with you more on the two points you make. It’s rather interesting…when I talk to folks about their appraisal process and ask whether they tie it to pay, a common answer is no. However, when I dig a little deeper, I find that they really do, but just don’t like to admit it. This was the case of one of my previous organizations. Rather than admit that they attach performance and pay, they chose to create a soft lie for themselves. I’ve always wondered why.
Adrian, thanks for the link to your posts on appraisals. I’ll check it out.
I’m liking where Peter Block is going in his book, Stewardship, concerning performance reviews. Hopefully more on this book to come…
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