Make Performance Evaluations Useful

photo by sassyart

When have you ever come out of a performance evaluation more energetic and ready to kick some serious ass for your company?  Doesn’t matter if it is glowing, that one negative (because there always has to be something) will sit with you and fester.

This has been on my mind for a while.  It is, after all, a multi-month process that is only this month coming to a head for many companies.  After running across an old post from Bob Sutton, the head of Stanford’s d.school, where he wondered about the usefulness of performance evaluations it was time to chime in.

Performance evaluations, as most are implemented, could not be more detrimental to our organizations.  Period.

Showing incredible restraint, I’ll limit my rationale to ten reasons.  They,

1. create internal competition amongst people who need to work together
2. give manager’s an out for not giving consistent on-going feedback
3. deliver ‘feedback’ that often comes completely out of the blue
4. mandate we stack rank everyone on the team, even high-performing teams
5. often use misaligned goals as a yardstick (or defunct goals established 12-months prior)
6. are not consistent between groups under different managers
7. are useless for promotions since those are often dictated by the manager who fights hardest for their employee
8. often measure the interpersonal intangibles for which training and support is rarely offered
9. reaffirm an ‘us vs. them’ mentality
10. are highly susceptible to the failings and neuroticism of the evaluating manager
11. bonus: are incredibly subject to recency biases

Not just useless, but counter-productive.

Try holding a weekly review instead.  Set aside 15-minutes at the end of the week for some two-way communication and focus on the individual’s own goals and their effectiveness within the team.  I’d suggest knowing and reviewing goals on both sides weekly and then answering questions that will help make your relationship more productive and keep the employee engaged.

Some starters:

• How much progress was made in helping the employee reach their stated goals
• How could you be more effective in helping the employee accomplish, learn, progress
• What opportunities would the employee like to take on
• What did you appreciate
• What went really well
• How effective was the team (team success or lack thereof is also the individual’s)
• What didn’t work for you (keep this short, provide a clear example and demonstrate why it wasn’t the most effective approach)
• What did other team member’s do that helped the employee be better

That said, if you lack sincerity, don’t come prepared to these meetings or are just looking out for number one then these will still be worthless.

Being a coach (translation: manager in today’s archaic vernacular) means prioritizing your employees and helping them reach their goals in the context of the company’s.  It’s not easy.  You’re serving two masters.  But there aren’t too many people who can do it well so it’s a huge opportunity for us to differentiate ourselves and our companies.

Some performance evaluations may work for what they were designed to do.  Regardless, I’d still suggest they be done weekly instead of annually.

Optimizing Teams for Engagement

Part 4 of a mini-series on employee engagement.

1. The Case For Engagement
2. Hiring for Engagement
3. Developing Engaged Players
4. Optimizing Teams For Engagement

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As I offered up in ‘The Case for Engagement’ optimizing our relationships is the knowledge economy’s equivalent of the post-industrial revolution’s time-motion studies.  If we expect to continue to grow our businesses we need to do more with less and do it better.

photo by tobyadamson.co.uk

The system we’ve set up has created micro-niche specialization.  The consequence is that we’ve all become dependencies for others.  In order for our system to operate smoothly we all have to communicate and do our part like never before.  Therefore, to do more and better we require not just engaged employees but engaged teams.

I’ve just started exploring this concept so please disagree or add your thoughts in the comments.

For my money, the starting points to engage a team are:

1. Know the connectors on your team.  When on-boarding new team member’s hook them up with a connector.  Create a buddy system where the connector realizes the value of her strength and the new employee gets to meet the team and learn how to navigate the system.  By accident, I was fortunate to have the greatest connector I’ve ever met as a peer at Yahoo! who did just this.  My first three months were vastly more productive than learning the ropes cold and having the super connector as a wingman instantly bought me credibility with the external groups.
2. Ask everyone on the team to identify the strengths of the others (both functional skill sets and interpersonal dynamics).  While there isn’t yet agreement on how to build hot teams you can begin creating teams that compliment one another.  Not just in terms of functional role, but also in terms of the role they play within the team.  Some will be natural sales people, others will be problem-solvers, etc.  But you’ll be able to avoid pairing people up who can’t use their full skill set because it is duplicated or overridden by another.
3. Communicate early, often and universally.  This one is obvious, but not done often enough.  Making sure everyone knows the same information prevents disagreements caused by information asymmetry.  Doing so provides the added benefit of creating norms within the group that selflessness rules and information is not a commodity to be hoarded.
4. Cede responsibility. Everyone needs to know the destination but there are always different routes to get there.  Give the team the authority to choose the route so they can optimize their strengths.
5. Reward selflessness. Overcome your urge to listen to and praise the loud voice or the all-to-confident contributor.  Look a layer deeper to see who is clearing the way for the rest of the team to do their piece better.

This is just a start.  I hope to return to this topic again soon.  I’m convinced we need to pay more attention to optimizing our human relationships.  The company’s who get this will have a significant advantage to those who continue to treat their employees like cogs in the wheel.