A Manager's Easy Performance Review

Performance reviews rank second on the list of management duties that managers dread - right behind firing someone. The problem with these reviews is that they are left up to the manager to once a year prepare something to say to the employee.

Performance Reviews: Why Scrapping Them Makes Sense

I am of mixed emotion on Performance Reviews because first and foremost, I do NOT believe in formal employee performance reviews as a whole. I think that if a manager is engaging his/her people daily, there is no need for a formal review quarterly or annually. Many employees view the annual review as a legal requirement for the organization to defend itself should need be. That stresses the employee.

Too many managers are lazy in speaking regularly with their employees and they depend on a few sheets of paper once per year to be the one time that their is any meaningful dialogue between manager and employee. The truth is that an employee's performance review is more indicative a manager's effectiveness at communication and coaching. The only upside to formal reviews is that it forces "absent" managers to communicate with their people - which, on the downside, can create animosity based on a poor review because of poor management.

Employees will engage only as well as managers engage the employee. If the manager is engaged with the employee, performance can be guided daily so that any need for a formal review becomes obsolete. A manager should have a conversation with his/her individual team members daily, no excuses, to hand out an "atta-boy," something to work on or just even having a heart-to-heart - but something that touches the real person inside.

Rarely do you see a document handed to a new employee which clearly states the metrics in which they are to be measured over the next year. In all fairness to employees, having a document that they can post at their desks which outlines the very things they are being measured on makes it easier for the employee to work toward achieving a good score. In other words, "tell me what I am going to be measured on and I will do only that."

But the most crucial part of a performance review, if you're going to do them, should be the employee's review of their immediate supervisor. This is far more important than the review of the employee. The employee is only ever going to perform as well as his/her manager. That's a given. Rarely do you find the magnanimous manager who encourages the employee to perform beyond the manager's ability to coach. So the most important document becomes the review of the manager by the employee and NOT the other way around.

Look, people don't leave their jobs. They leave their bad managers. So, it would stand to reason, purely by the numbers, that the department with the highest staff turnover and lowest performing employees would have the worst manager running it. Conversely, the department with the lowest turnover and highest performing employees would likely be run by the most engaging manager.

Employees are only ever going to perform as well as their managers allow. Poor employee reviews all coming from one department are more indicative of the manager than the employees. And it is for this reason that employee reviews should be scrapped. If you have a lousy manager, you will have unhappy, disengaged, poorly performing employees who get a poor review as a byproduct of their bad manager. Mediocre managers = mediocre employees. Managers who engage with their staff fully will likely have staff who are fully engaged - more productive, higher achieving and more fulfilled in their work.

Making the employee the sole person responsible for performance creates a lose-lose scenario and hurts performance Culture. You cannot review the employee until you have fully engaging, openly communicating, strong managers who are able to derive high-performance from their employees. You don't need a formal review if you have daily interactions and conversations one-on-one with your employees.

Annual Reviews were designed by Baby Boomers who, at the time, believed in only communicating with employees if and when something needed to be addressed. So, why do them? Organizations do them because it's what they've always done - which certainly doesn't make it right. It just makes it old. With all of the advancements in gadget technology, we're still using old, outdated HR technology in trying to get people to perform better.

Performance Reviews are old-school. They are the equivalent of a high-school report card - which, unless you had all "A"s, you were afraid to show your parents. Same rules still apply. Everyone wants to get an "A" but it's hard to get if the teacher sucks. But the best teachers, and the best managers, are the ones who encourage high-performance and equip their people with the tools to do it for themselves. That doesn't happen in a formal environment annually. That happens by engaging every single day.

How To Deal With Disappointment

Everyone gets disappointed at some point. Moms express their disappointment at the actions of their 6 year-old when they hit another boy. Fathers express their disappointment to teenage daughters in the hopes that the outward expression becomes a lesson to make better choices. Bosses express their disappointment on performance reviews in the hopes of motivating the affected employee. Teachers express their diappointment because they know the student isn't applying him or herself.

These are all expressions of outward disappointment in someone else. But what happens when disappointment is focused inward - when things don't turn out the way we had hoped?

There are some things in life that you just don't have any control over and there are other things that are within your control. Understanding which is which will help you to bounce back quicker from disappointment - to develop a resilience attitude.

Planning for months to visit the Grand Canyon only to be turned back by a snowstorm, a rained out family picnic, a power outage during your wedding reception or a cancelled flight to an important meeting are all things out of your control. You have no control over the weather, the electric company or the airlines. It's fine to feel disappointed for a short while but it isn't the end of your life. You can try again tomorrow.

However, disappointment about how much you get paid, your job-performance review, your golf score, that promotion you really want, your relationships at home and how your money is budgeted are all within your control. Only you determine how valuable you are to the company, how well you do your job, how much you practice at golf, how you self-improve to be the logical choice to be promoted, how hard you work at your relationship and how you spend your money. No one else is to blame for your results.

You have no control over other people, things or events outside of yourself. But you have complete control over your reaction to those things. You also have ALL of the control over every part of your life that involves YOU and your results.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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The Annual Performance Review

Why do people have to wait until there's a performance evaluation to find out how they're doing? Why would any organization torture their own people like that? What's wrong with talking to your people informally and having conversations instead of remaining arm's length from the people who do the work? Oh that's right, the department manager recently went to a leadership course and now he's no longer a manager, he's a "leader." (You are required to make the quotations marks with your fingers when you read that word "leader." Go ahead. Try it.) Their graduation to "pretend-leader" (finger quotes again) is supposed to preclude managers from doing any of that icky, hands-on managerial stuff. They're apparently above that now.

"We're leaders, not managers," the old manager/new leader might say armed with their fresh, new (fingers) "pretend-leadership" attitude.

(Cue the harp music) "We don't have to manage anymore. All we have to do is lead our people and they will magically follow us to where we want them to go. If we lead, people follow. No really. We learned that in the course. We're leaders so people HAVE to follow us. I don't have time to give "my people" feedback. I've got people to lead. Let someone else work on that employee's performance. I'm too busy (fingers) leading."

The truth is too many employees stress over performance evaluations. When people are stressed they are not productive. When they are not productive they get poorer performance evaluations. So why not simply get rid of them - the performance evaluations not the people. Instead, open up your communications and have good two-way conversations on a regular basis. Any manager who doesn't want to do this would FAIL my performance evaluation. I don't care that he/she is a recent pretend-leadership course graduate. Get your head out of your .... er ... uh ... clouds, and get back to managing. Get over yourself. It's real people you're dealing with.

ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT: Look, the way I see it, if you can talk to your neighbors over the fence, you can talk to your people over the cubicle wall. They'll do better work for you if they don't think that every little screw-up is going to be entered into a file to be unleashed at the next performance review. All people want to know is if they're doing it right, if their work quality is OK and that their efforts are being noticed and appreciated.

Talk to them. If they're not doing a good job, they'll get the idea right away. They'll probably just move on before you have to force them to. Seriously, if you want to accurately assess an individual's performance, then daily communication is a far better way to do it than to spring the annual "surprise" on them. In fact, most managers end up scrambling to put something together for an annual performance review anyway. It's not like they've been keeping notes. So, if you haven't been keeping notes then manage them - don't scare them.

Oh, and for the recent pretend-leadership course graduates, leadership is not something you get in exchange for money. If you're a manager, manage. Now get back to work. Your own annual performance review is coming up too.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE

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