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…

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

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