Better appraisals might raise your teams’ performance
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Jun 2005
I recently completed a performance review cycle and was left thinking about how much room for improvement there is in the processes we commonly follow in organisations when we try to evaluate people's performance, yet how important the results are to those being reviewed. Almost every organisation has performance reviews and their lack of success and lack of popularity is almost as universal.
Performance management seems to suffer from too much process. It is common to see organisations start off with a good process through which they manage the performance of employees and teams. It is also common to see those previously effective processes become increasingly bureaucratic and ineffective over time.
However, having no process at all might not be the best option either. With no process at all, you risk running into inconsistency and possible unfairness. Since as a leader it is your responsibility to establish a basis for selecting, developing and directing people in your organisation - the so called "talent" that became such a common way to describe people during the internet-era in the late nineties.
In their book Abolishing Performance Appraisals, Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins discuss several surveys and views indicating the formally structured performance appraisals as are commonly used in organisations today are ineffective. They also propose several new ways to look at performance management that might be more effective. In a way, they propose a back to basics approach that reminds organisations that the objective of performance appraisals is to increased performance and help people excel. Building this philosophy, what then are some of the ideas that we could think about when establishing performance management processes?
Ideas to improve performance management.
To start with free managers and leaders from the some of the formality of the performance management process - don't make it a form filling exercise. And don't wait for the annual or semi-annual review cycle before providing feedback to your team. Immediate feedback is usually much more effective.
Avoid trying to remove all objectivity from the feedback process. It is natural that our experience of someone else's performance is subjective. Think of moving away from numeric ratings. Numeric ratings can provide a narrow view of performance and can lose the subtlety of the contribution of each team member. In addition, set individual goals for people and measure them as individuals.
Focus on feedback and coaching rather than telling people what to do and trying to measure them against goals that only managers set. Consider involving employees in agreeing the goals.
This is not the same as expecting managers to work to goals set only by employees, but rather involving employees in the thinking, conversations and decisions that lead to the organisations objectives. Previous columns have discussed making dialogue a more important part of your strategy execution – and this is a great place to start. Feedback is most effective when there is a mature team environment that is capable of open communication based on a high degree of trust and honesty. If you don't have that in your teams, then focus on building those characteristics rather than on building a more complex performance management process.
Think of uncoupling feedback and coaching from decisions around pay increases and promotion (and recognise that promotion is not an objective process either). Many organisations over emphasis pay and position as motivators of performance so it is useful to recall that there are surveys supporting the idea that making the work meaningful is amongst the best motivators. In addition, ideas such as the degree of control a person has over their work environment, or the degree to which their voice is heard might matter far more than pay.
One way to increase the meaning of work is to give employees choice and control. Giving teams a compelling vision that provides them a meaning in what they do is also useful.
Purely financial or activity based measures common in performance management systems often don't provide many meaningful ways for team members to feel that their performance counts.
Stop letting your management team's focus on performance management blind them to the real challenges of the business and of leading its people - tackle the real issues. Performance management processes at their worst give management plenty of opportunity to manage the symptoms rather than address the real causes. For example, dealing with poor performance should be done directly, rather than in some general way through a performance management process.
Some of these ideas may strike you as too radical - or may strike your human resource team or boss as too radical, but then remind yourself that as a leader you are there to create an environment where your people can contribute the most to the organisation and to themselves. Doing this will mean thinking outside of the established norms. You might find that your people take a lot less time to manage – and this is an important consideration when so many managers complain of the large amount of time they need to spend counselling their people. So take control of your people management and performance reviews - start a revolution
Better appraisals might raise your teams' performance was published as Strategym #27 in June 2005
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