Get Responsible about Performance Reviews once and for all

Preface: This was an article I initially wrote as a guest author on another site, and I am bringing it to MWAC with a new title because it seems to belong with Kuleana: Managers everywhere have got to accept their personal responsibility for improving that way-too-broken dark ages practice in workplaces called the Annual Performance Appraisal. Nearly everyone hates them, and all of you who are Great Managers Reconstructed CAN get them right — one employee at a time, one day at a time.

I also bring this back to update it with a couple of new links to some extended discussions we have had since this was first published two years ago. Yes... it has been two years. Really time we got to work with this! I am quite sure your employees will agree.

Everyday Performance Reviews

I have written about and talked about the need to reinvent Annual Performance Reviews pretty often, and I’m not alone in doing so. Still, the discussion rages on, and there continues to be much talk and not enough action when it comes to improving the processes associated with them. Dreaded as they are by both givers and receivers, and as ineffective as they are, Annual Performance Reviews remain a staple of workplaces everywhere.

If the first thing that comes to mind for you when you hear “Time for our annual Performance Reviews” is anything remotely like this picture, chances are the system has wreaked havoc on the way you look at this... the word ‘chore’ come to mind?

My short and sweet advice has been this: If you have to review someone within a form-mandated process, and for some valid reason can’t reinvent them, at the very least make the best out of them. Do your due diligence, be honest and be consistent with the process so it has integrity, but dispense with it as quickly and as expeditiously as you can, making the experience as positive as possible for the person reviewed.

By “expeditious” I don’t mean you cut corners and disrespect the person you are reviewing; I mean for you to make quick work of the archaic, sacred cow, ‘can’t remember why we even do this’ parts of the annual review process which leave you tongue-tied, simply annoy everyone and have little to no redeeming quality: Stop belaboring the motions you don’t believe in and aren’t equipped to handle well. Frame the discussion forward and not backward: Concentrate your discussion on strengths which can be built upon.

However, the reality is that you still will hate to do it at all, and you will probably still hate receiving one, unless you add some value to the process.

Second, it is only in adding value to the process elsewhere, at the right times, and in managing well, that you truly can achieve the “expeditious” and “positive experience” part of my advice.

Plain and simple, when you are a manager, you have to work on reviewing and taking action with the performance of those you manage virtually every single day, and not just annually or semi-annually. Folks, that’s what management is, and it’s your whole job.

What you’ve got to do, is turn annual performance reviews into everyday performance reviews.

Let’s consider a few of your opportunities:

• First The Daily 5 Minutes: Bar none, THE single best management practice I know of.

• Every single time someone makes a mistake, because for you, mistakes provide opportunities for learning and coaching.

• Every time you assemble a project team, by conducting interviews of those who want to be part of the gig, and setting some inspiring goals with them.

• With every debrief after a project, change initiative, or mission comes to fruition — or fails, so you can talk about how to “fail forward.”

• When you mentor with personal and professional mission statements. Said another, less formal way, having right-timed discussions in the vein of “Tell me again why you here, and what lights your fire when you’re here. Let’s do more of that!”

• Once each year, you can interview your “old timers” just as you do candidates for hire. Their lives have changed, and their dreams probably have too; how current are you on their news?

• With counseling and discipline as soon as it’s called for, because you are always on the alert for the damage which can be caused with tacit approval.

• With management by walking around and following through to the nth degree, because you are determined that no one will ever say you don’t honor your word and walk your talk. Hence, you walk into opportunities for on-the-spot performance coaching all the time, and you seize them.

• Every time you share with employees how a customer feels, what a customer expects, and how a customer dreams, because customers continually talk to you about your staff and how they impress them (or don’t).

• Every time you hold a meeting because your meetings are about rigorous, “this stuff counts” engaging dialogue, where whole-team performance is talked about all the time because everyone wants excellence.

• Every time you catch someone doing something right, and you start cheering and celebrating about it, because you want to call attention to the great wins you need repeated by everyone.

• Every time you shift roles, recast, and experiment with new energy applied to processes starting to slide into complacency and mediocrity, because those things aren’t gonna happen; not on your watch. You know what your people are good at, and when they’re in their strengths zone, and that’s where you work with them— always.

Lots and lots of everyday opportunities abound. I’m sure you can think of more.

Consider this: If you coached an employee about some part of their performance for just 5 minutes every single week, you’d be giving them the equivalent of a 4 and a half hour annual performance review. And the one you have to officially turn into the HR office at annual review time? You and that employee would be so in sync, and their performance will be so off the charts, it will take you all of 15 minutes tops.

If you have to live with a Performance Review process in your company, decide on the quality of your ‘living with it.’ Better yet, Kuleana: seize responsibility for leadership, and make the improvements that are the everyday work of great managers.

Related articles:

1. 5 Questions for your Performance Appraisals (on Talking Story)
2. Adding Value to Performance Reviews (on Talking Story)
3. 12 Rules for Self-Management (on Say Leadership Coaching)
4. For the BEST 15 minutes in the workday, Huddle (on Talking Story)
5. You need Aloha to Learn on the Job (on Managing with Aloha)

Photo of Work to do found on Flickr by ®ominitä.

Comments

[John G Agno]

Many employers struggle with providing performance feedback to correct workplace issues, like tardiness and absenteeism.

What’s performance feedback all about?

The word “performance” makes it seem as if we are on stage. Success at work is our applause, the managers and leaders of our organization are the directors and producers, and our successful performance run is obviously the bottom line. Very few actors walk away with a Tony or an Oscar for mediocre performances. That is also true in the work world. Survival as an organization rests on the quality of our work. Without stopping to playback our performance, we might find that our run will be much shorter than we anticipated.

As leaders, we need to get people on a positive course by helping them face and then manage weaknesses. How this is done is through the feedback process: honestly, respectfully, openly, thoughtfully and with a sense of purpose.

[Rich G.]

Unbelievable.
I am doing a performance evaluation tomorrow with a new manager and a new employee and was planning on using it as a spring-board for a blog entry. I only JUST printed a duplicate copy of our corporate mandated form to use as a practice run with him.
Your post is timely and great. I'll be printing it out to give him along with a printed copy of your daily-five post.
Uncanny timing on your part. Great stuff as usual.
I have always told managers that evals, good and bad, should NEVER be surprises to the employees as we have opportunities all the time to talk to our employees and encourage good behavior and coach on other ways we could handle things we don't particularly want to see more of.
If an eval or termination is a surprise to the employee the manager's not doing their job IMO.

[Rosa Say]

Aloha John, thank you for sharing your thoughts. You point out the reason that “everyday” performance reviews can be so helpful – if feedback on work performance is more immediate, timely and consistent, they cease being such a struggle for managers: I think a big part of the struggle is pulling the trigger confidently and in a no nonsense, straightforward way aimed at behavior glitches and not feeling you are “fixing a bad person.” I like how you describe the great manager’s technique; a “feedback process: honestly, respectfully, openly, thoughtfully and with a sense of purpose.”

Hi Rich! I so agree with you as the degree of “no surprise” in an employee’s reaction to a review being the acid test on just how healthy their everyday work coaching by their manager happens to be – or not. Frequent feedback loops also bring out much more positive reinforcement and acknowledgement of those behaviors we want to see repeated.

Rich I’d still love to read that blog entry and how it goes! We learn so much from you and the peeks you give us to your real time laboratory :)