'Tis the season for annual reviews! As end of year looms ever closer,
and planning how to ensure hitting targets becomes a top priority, most managers and staff are being asked to also find the time to complete individual performance appraisals.
As a manager, how do you feel about appraisals? If you asked your staff to answer that question honestly - what do you think they would say?
For some managers and staff, the annual review is simply a chore detracting from their more immediate concerns of hitting year-end targets. As an executive coach working with numerous managers, Shona Garner reveals some possible reasons why the appraisal process can sometimes be less than effective.
What does performance management mean to you?
If you're working within Human resources, or you're a manager, you might say they are ideally about: - Setting standards - Recognising (and rewarding) good or outstanding behaviour - Identifying potential - what are this individual's real strengths, and how can they both develop and use these more? - Encouraging individuals to become more aware of their own performance, and more accountable, and responsible for their own development. - Identifying areas where we could become more effective - Planning targeted and meaningful, individual personal development - Motivating people
All good stuff. However, the reality is sometimes far removed from this.
Dr. Aubrey Daniels, a specialist in motivation through positive reinforcement, and author of "Bringing out the Best in People: The Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement", comes to this conclusion:
"Over the years, I have seen the performance appraisal programs of hundreds of companies. And I have finally come to this conclusion:
Apart from documentation for legal purposes, the annual performance appraisal is a waste of time.
The managers who do the appraisals don't like them, nor do the performers receiving them. It is a masochistic and sadistic ritual of business."
Strong, perhaps controversial words - considering almost every organisation I know right now is about to spend one hell of a lot of time going through this very process. And yet my own experiences, as an employee, a manager, and now a coach, specialising in helping managers get the best from their people, echoes that of Dr. Daniels.
Performance by numbers - measurement gone mad?
Often, performance is appraised on some form of rating scale. Three, five, seven and sometimes ten-point scales are commonly used. The highest number on the scale represents outstanding performance, the lowest, poor performance. Each employee has to fall somewhere on this scale, and one common technique is to give a rating for each performance factor, then take the average of those scores as the final score . In some cases, that score gives a whole number and a fraction, (3.15, for example) so is "rounded" up or down to the nearest whole number to reveal that employee's rating.
So starts a rather complex "game" - in which employee and manager "negotiate" (therefore focus) over scores. Both parties have a sense these scores are relatively meaningless in terms of representing real differences in performance, but they are also keenly aware these scores do have other, real consequences.; specifically in terms of pay.
Worse - almost every organisation limits the numbers of empoyees who can fall into each rating group, to fit some "normal" distribution curve. According to this curve you are forced into placing 70 per cent of your staff to be average or below.
What organisation can afford to have only 30 per cent of it's employees above average?
So, in reality, most organisations skew the figures to the right a little, allowing more employees to be rated "above average" in order to minimise complaints and maintain morale.
All too often, instead of a meaningful and genuine discussion about individual skills, achievements and challenges, the system creates a communication built around a cynical manipulation and negotiation which is focused around numbers and not around standards or skill development.
So, if you're a manager, faced with appraising your team over the next few months, what can you do to make the process less about form-filling and cynical manipulation of figures, and more about what the process was orginally, and ideally designed to achieve?
Whilst you're going to have to accept some of the spurious form-filling right now, there are some things you can do to rescue this process so it becomes a more meaningful and useful discussion.
1. Review the list of ideal outcomes from an appraisal, outlined at the top of this article. Whilst you may have to rank someone using a scoring system, this should not be the main focus. Ensure the session provides an opportunity for the individual to genuinely reflect on their own performance, and encourages a sense of ownership in terms of how they might become even more effective. Giving some idea of the structure of the meeting up-front, helps remind both of you of the main areas to be covered - of which rating is an extremely minor part.
2. Spend some time building rapport. Don't forget, however much you feel these meetings intrude on your "getting on with the tasks in hand", they do provide "protected, possibly, quality time" with your staff. Managed well, this offers an opportunity for greater mutual understanding, and better relationships. And better relationships do translate into better perfomances.
3. Make sure you do more listening than talking, and use your questioning skills to probe and develop any ideas that emerge.
4. Try some of these "killer questions"
a) What have been the highlights of your achievements this year?
b) What aspects of your work have not gone as well as you'd have liked? Why?
c) looking at the competences for your role, how well do you feel you have met them?
d) What do you think are your strengths? How are they being used? How could we build on them?
e) What do you think are your weaker areas? How could we improve them?
f) How do you want to develop in the longer term? What would you like in terms of development to help you get there?
g) What can I do more of to help you succeed in your role?
If you take the time to allow your staff the opportunity to talk through these answers, with little intervention from you, you might just encourage more openness, less defensiveness, and less obsession around scores.
