These are all of the great expectations everyone looks forward to enjoying. Wrong.
We hate them. How do we learn anything from getting a speeding ticket? We already knew it was wrong. We just can't believe our timing. How could a cop be where we were when we were driving 10 miles per hour above the posted speed? What luck!
How do we learn anything from a performance appraisal?
We hate them. We hate receiving them. We hate giving them. Nobody likes them so nobody actually does them. Performance appraisals are not completed on a timely basis, are they? Rarely does a business leader stay on a clear schedule to do the performance appraisals on time and routinely. Rarely.
They are hated as much as any other life fear. When a business leader tells an employee that their performance appraisal is due, everyone goes into a panic mode of thought. The business leader hates to plan them, the employee hates to receive them. This is exactly how relationships breakdown.
Here is my business take on all of this. Get the law out of my business. Do not force me to protect my business relationships by demanding that I perform this unwanted service with my employees. Here is my true evaluation of this process...quit doing them.
Performance appraisals have never worked to help build a great business model. In my 38 year history of business relationships I have never seen a performance appraisal pattern work well enough to contribute healthy progress to the relationships a business needs to build. Never. My history of watching performance appraisals at work is littered with fear, tragedy, damaged relationships, mis-understandings, frustrations, broken expectations and destructive results in the leadership models. A good business leader should always be participating in healthy employee development during the course of daily operations, already. There should be no need to pull aside a designated time chip once every six months and tell an employee what is or is not happening well. If that kind of business and employee relationship is occurring, I will pray for that leader to improve their management style. If a performance appraisal is necessary to inform the employee what is not working well, you are either employing the wrong person or becoming the wrong leader. Get someone else or improve your leadership. Do not wait six months to figure that out. It is silly what we believe we need to be doing. Absolutely silly. I see it every day. Amazing stuff.
I know this is not a popular stance I share. However, it is the right one. Quit doing performance appraisals. They suck. If you need to schedule performance appraisals because it is the law, you are already on the wrong page to expect to build a healthy working crew. Give up, you have already failed. Great employee relationships do not come from policing their performance like the IRS sends out its notices. You will not get good results with that kind of environment. Will not. Forget trying to shove it down someones throat because it is the law. Forget trying to shove it down someones throat because it protects your butt. Forget trying to excuse your actions because it is what "they say" is a part of good leadership practices. Hogwash, hogwash and hogwash.
Let's clear this mess up.
I know the law requires that a better set of employee treatment patterns must be performed in order to help protect the employees from some wrong leadership doings. I completely understand how this is necessary. I am not writing this blog to talk to failures of business models who need to protect themselves, from themselves, and their wrong doings. Terrible leaders who perform terrible business model techniques need to go read some other blog to support their wrong actions. I am writing to help business leaders perform healthy growth. Period.
Performance appraisals are not recognized as being a great tool for helping business leaders perform healthy employee relationships. Those healthy relationships are developed from the right things done on a daily spectrum of routine activities. Getting together every six months to review how that process is going is only there to serve the protections provided by the law. If an employee and a business leader do not truly know how things are going with each other from the daily interchanges they share at work, that leader is already out of touch. Getting together once every six months to do an appraisal of that daily requirement will do nothing to change that pattern. Face it, the leader has already failed. The only thing a routine performance appraisal provides, at this point, is protection from unwanted employee treatment when the time comes to deliver bad news to the employee. That is the bare truth.
However, since the law requires a leader to perform proper performance appraisals, why not do them well?
Every business leader who decides to follow the law and perform proper employee appraisals should work hard to develop a healthy pattern for performing this process. A great business leader will know what they want to see their employees do. A great business leader will define clearly what types of things they prefer to witness in their business model. With these things in mind, a great leader will be able to 'list' what those things are. When appraisal time comes, why not cover how everyone is doing with that 'list' of those things a great leader prefers to see happening. How simple can it be? Why not have a discussion about how the things on the 'list' are happening with the employee that is being reviewed? Who needs to 'grade' anything? Who needs to set strict requirements at this point? Who needs to ask for favors, or improvements that the employee is already not doing? Get real. If this type of discovery has waited for the six month review to be discussed, it is already too late to shut off the bad performance patterns. The allowances for wrong doings are already set in place. They are already part of your leadership pattern. Get serious. You cannot cut them off after six months of permissions. You cannot cut them off later and expect something good to come out of the process. A leader is better off sitting down with each employee every six months and asking them to teach the leader how the model could run better. That is the only healthy performance appraisal that will work well with developing stronger teams. Anything less than that is a poor excuse for following the laws of liability protections.
I think your team will become what you always wanted them to be, primarily because you became what they always needed to see.
Performance appraisals suck...when they become about you. Make them become about your business success. Perform the appraisals about how you can improve the business model. Work on discovering what it will take to improve your business model. A great leader will soon discover how well the employees will follow. You are their current shepherd. Quit hitting them over the back of the hand with a little ruler.
Until next time...
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