Anyone with at least a bit of experience within the corporate world or any bigger organization knows that this period of the year is reserved for two major things: financial year closing and employee evaluation. Lack of my proficiency in speaking the financial language suggests that it would be perhaps wiser to write about the employee evaluation here. Not promising any proficiency or magic formulas how to approach it. There are plenty of articles already available. My intention is to share a couple of insights gathered throughout nearly two decades of experiencing it as an employee.
Conceived in the beginning of the last century and widely accepted and popularized as a structured and ‘objective’ way to assess employee contribution, performance appraisals are nowadays so common and widely spread that realizing some isolated cases of its absence comes across as weird. It is not my intention to dig into its history or evolutionary path here. Rather to draw the attention to common fallacies that I had the opportunities to observe recurring year by year. They are driven primarily by the organizational design and human biases.
While we could name numerous examples, I would focus on three that I personally see as the root causes for unpopularity of performance appraisals and all skepticism around it.
#1 Calibration
This word certainly rings some bells in an organizational context. Figuratively and literally. Calibration is the usual ingredient of performance evaluation. In theory, it should ensure that the consistent set of criteria is used to rate performance across the organization. In reality, criteria are hard to be standardized and there are many reasons for that. Each department plays a different role within the organization - some are business crucial, others supporting, some are strategy oriented, others purely operational, some require in-depth knowledge and are focused on one set of competencies, others perhaps on a broad set of technical skills. Pretty easy to distinguish, pretty difficult to assess in the same manner. And this is just one angle to it. Let’s add an additional layer of complexity by experimenting with your assessment of this year. How would you rate 2020? Some or perhaps many of you would say that it was a disastrous year. Some would rate it as ok. Perhaps there are those, like me, that see it as a very good year (at least on a personal level). It is clear that our assessments will depend on the points that we would make as references and our benchmark.
While these references are relatively easy to define, as when it comes to business objectives they can usually be quantified (volume, number of contacts, market share, growth rate etc. - what?), complexity flourishes at latest when the behaviors get their turn on the agenda.
How do you measure team spirit? Can you ensure that the same unit of measure is used to measure it across the departments? Sales vs. accounting? IT vs. marketing? Or that it is equally deployed among all supervisors irrelevant of their seniority level or years of service with the company?
You can’t. Even if you could remove all biases of humanity this venture would be so exhausting and complex that it is easier to immediately call it out as impossible. Whenever there is something impossible-alike on our horizons, what do we do? We reach for something that fits into usual, standardized patterns. This adds to the persuasiveness of the whole concept so the majority buys into it. It is how both, you and me end up as the dots distributed under the bell curve. Victims of the forced ranking deployed in many organizations around the globe. Certain percent of employees end up top ranked, certain bottom ranked (and thus serious candidates for layoffs), while the majority remains in the middle.
How does calibration work in practice?
Imagine you are supervising ten people. Usually seven of them will meet expectations, two will exceed them and one will need to improve. You may claim that you have three or four strong performers that really pushed the envelopes, made the difference and achieved results beyond expectations. Would they all be exceeding expectations? Maybe. And if it would happen, it would be an exception. Normally it would be your tough luck and you would need to pick the ‘lucky winners’. This is how the calibration is performed in majority of the cases.
It all comes to the statistics. And we know from Stallin that there is no major drama involved when we talk about statistics. It is objective and straight forward.
For what I know, there were years when I really gave my best and results were confirming it. Nevertheless I ended up being placed in the middle of the curve. On the other hand, there were years when I really could not understand the reasoning behind the decisions to rate me as an overachiever.
Had no experience with improvement needed so far, thanks for asking.
#2 Mindset
You are sitting in the meeting with your supervisor. She is wrapping up the conversation:
‘As I already said, your performance this year was remarkable. Project X ended up with success beyond any expectation thanks to your determination & persistence. Your team also performed strongly, your leadership style is obviously inspiring and sets an example. Excellent work. Just continue that way and stay as you are. ’
How would you feel receiving it?
Proud? Thrilled? Happy? Accomplished?
Think twice.
I have felt completely misunderstood. If it would be the other way around, my supervisor would have never told me ‘stay as you are’.
Some people believe that the performance is some kind of summit that you reach from time to time (obviously depending on how the cards split during the calibration). So they assume that wishing you to stay the way you are represents the key ingredient to boost your motivation as you are obviously doing it right. Other people, those who nurture the growth mindset, see this advice as if it is a curse.
If you are led by the credo today better than yesterday, tomorrow better than today, your determination to advance and grow is in a strong collision with the view of your supervisor. And this is just one side of the medal.
Another one is about the development plan and career progression. Fixed mindsets see things as very linear: there is this career path that is usual (‘usual’ is typically referring to their own career story). There is a certain number of years that has to pass till you can advance and there is a sequence for everything. It is the way it was always done. And it will stay so until the end of the time.
The worst expression of it could be imagined in the form of a supervisor who has the exact vision for your career including the key milestones in the short to mid-term. In this sense, your performance evaluation becomes not only the compass indicating your success assessed relative to where your organization wants you to go but an evaluation versus your supervisor’s vision for your career.
Fixed mindsets are fixated on the goal. The peak of the summit. Growth mindset is focused on seizing the circumstances no matter how they seem to look and is determined to enjoy the journey. Definitely not excited to stay stuck at a single point of it.
It would be great if some supervisors would finally understand that the greatest summits are not reached by the very act of climbing. It is about the months and years of preparation, studying and evaluating, practicing and experimenting.
#3 Follow up
Majority of the people within large organizations dislike performance appraisals. I assume the main reason for that is that they see it as a procedural thing that they have to do, as a task that they have to tick-off prior heading for a holiday break at the end of the year. Consequently it turns into a sort of procedural anniversary called ‘End Year Review’ in many instances. Without any follow up and related conversations in-between.
I know that generalizing is dangerous but the sad truth is that I have witnessed the cases when the objectives were not defined nor aligned at all but the performance evaluation was done. And it was not the case with the employees that joined the company in the last quarter of the year so they did not have to do it.
I happen to have twenty one supervisors in my career so far. More than 90% of them took our performance reviews as a bullet point on their to-do list. We have never had any follow up sessions or have touched base on any of the objectives January through to December. They did not take it seriously. I did not take it seriously either. But we did it anyway.
'What is the purpose then?' you may ask.
As any system deployed and utilized by the people, the quality of performance appraisal systems (no matter which interface, approach or metrics are used) is determined by its users.
Quality of inputs determines the quality of outputs. Shit in. Shit out.
If you want for you to further develop as a supervisor and a leader, you are most probably looking for the opportunities to help your people to learn, to develop and to perform. To grow into great leaders. You know that usually everyone despises performance evaluation and rarely anyone gives it much of attention nor follows up on the content. You could take the same approach.
But you don’t. You give it attention it deserves. Not to calibrate, evaluate or impose your visions for the careers of the others. Instead you ask them about their visions, goals, aspirations, interests. You listen to what they have to share and make sure you hear it. Then you discuss with them how can you help them to get there where they see themselves. Even if it means that they would need to leave your team or perhaps the organization to achieve it.
This is what makes the difference between the performance appraisal as a task and the performance appraisal as an organizational framework to develop the people and yourself.
That is the purpose.
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