JUNE 2013

IN
THIS
ISSUE

FROM THE TOP

• 2013: It's June now

STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP

• Performance Appraisals

MUSINGS

• Leadership and the Gerbil

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Performance Appraisals:
-- Pain in the seat, or panacea??

Oh, crap! Another performance review...

How many times have we heard--or ourselves--this common lament? I'm guessing "lots" is a fairly accurate response.

The better answer, however, is "way too often." The performance appraisal process is the key to organizational improvement. To give that process the short shrift simply because someone has abused the effort sometime in your lifetime (maybe right now) is to say that, in effect, improving organizational performance is best accomplished by guesswork, hope, and good intentions. And by believing every supervisor who tells you, "Oh, yeah, I'm having regular performance feedback conversations with everyone who works for me."

I was born at night, but not last night.

One of the scariest things I've read lately--in the long list of ill-advised approaches to leadership--is this talk of "getting rid of performance reviews."

What a load of bunk.

We don't need to, nor should we, get rid of them. In fact, it's about time we doubled down and sharply increased the attention and use of this valuable process.

A puzzling part to me, is that most organizations attribute a poor performance review program or process to their Human Resources function. Another load of bunk. I'm not defending your HR department per se, but if your performance review efforts are anything less than successful, senior leadership--up to and including the chief executive--are squarely accountable.

Managing organizational performance is a leadership issue, not an HR function.

Some brief points to ponder:

1. Why do them? Done correctly, performance reviews align individual efforts with organizational goals and objectives, provide a scorecard or barometer for performance (think pay, promotion, training), and act as a solid vehicle in an employees' developmental journey.
2. Who leads this process? Senior leadership. It must--simply must--begin at the top. This top-down responsibility is as much a core responsibility as cost control and managing margins. Let's be clear: If you, senior leader, don't take this process seriously; if you don't complete them timely; if you don't enthusiastically support these efforts within your organizations, then their ineffectiveness is on your shoulders, no one else.
3. Best practices include casting due dates in stone--no exceptions. The latter part of the review should spell out and discuss--in clear, unambiguous language--the expectations for the future review period. Use objective measurements whenever possible. Subjective analysis should be a severe exception, not a rule. If you really can't measure it yourself, what makes you think an employee can?

Performance reviews are dead. Long live performance reviews. I'm fine with burying the old, HR-driven process that included so many cumbersome "extras" and "qualifications," as long as we replace it with something that clearly defines expectations, provides measurements for those expectations, and follows up on the performance to those expectations.

Anything else is simply accountability avoidance. Let's don't do that, ok?

Leadership and the Gerbil
-- Too busy being busy to take care of business

I was recently facilitating a group of mid-managers in an industrial organization; we were discussing performance management (apropos given the article above), and I asked them to identify one or two specific people challenges they were facing. Now, by this I meant specific challenges, e.g., a specific person, not just a generality like "we need training."

As you can imagine, interesting dialog--and not an inconsequential amount of hilarity--ensued. These leaders actually led first-level managers in the course of their business, so they had stories to tell. Lots of stories to tell.

One was particularly memorable: this manager described a staff manager that worked for him as someone who was diligent, fairly committed, and reasonably intelligent. He knew what needed to be done. The problem, however, was that he frequently didn't complete tasks and accountabilities in a timely manner.

When confronted with this shortfall, he inevitably spoke of getting sidetracked, something taking longer than expected, a particular effort grew out of proportion, or he simply just got engrossed in an a task at hand and lost track of time. He wasn't making excuses--he didn't try and shirk his accountability for the misstep. He was just too busy.

Now, this employee was part of a group of employees (think project manager) that had similar responsibilities. Others were getting their work done timely, just not this manager. He was simply too busy being busy at other things to get to everything.

His manager called this the Gerbil Effect. Running in circles, getting tired, putting in a full day and feeling like you've really been working. In reality, this employee was more like the ill-fated gerbil, racing furiously in his wheel-shaped cage, becoming breathless but not gaining ground on a target or objective.

The Gerbil Effect. I like it, and believe strongly we have many who fit that within our charge as leaders. Let's help them break free from the evil wheel of business, get them focused on a real objective, and allow them to put that same level of effort and commitment into succeeding, instead of just the busy-ness of running.

But that's just me...

(Thanks, Mike and Ryan)