No, that’s not a typo.

The Wrong Way To Do The Right Thing

I read yet another formulaic, extremely detailed performance evaluation the other day. It was everything I detest about human resource management these days. Oh sure, it had lots of buzzwords and high sounding aspirational phrases – pages and pages of them. And it was devoid of any substantive clarity…or hope. It did such a great job covering the supervisor’s butt that I suggested he write a book called Toasty Buns: How to Completely CYA by Managing Without Leading. It set up the organization to have the flexibility to take whatever action it wanted to without getting itself in legal hot water, while simultaneously leaving the employee confused and demotivated. In my opinion, it was a complete waste of a perfectly good tree.

Welcome to your annual review, Mr. Simpson…I’ve been asked to co-present with lawyers for the Community Association Institute on employment practices three times now. Before that, I thought insurance and risk management were the most challenging areas in community association management. Not anymore. Employment law is one of the most complicated and landmine-ridden areas in business. It can be intimidating and it is very easy to run afoul of the law with no malice whatsoever in our heart. Documentation of performance evaluations is a big deal. I get it.

Here’s the problem. Evaluations like the one I just puked through can easily become a vicious cycle and part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The process breeds defensiveness, which kills motivation. It demoralizes team members. It reinforces bureaucracy and cripples leadership. It protects the organization against lawsuits while simultaneously protecting it against a workforce ever reaching its potential. It discourages staff from helping the organization to become wildly successful, which then requires more negative comments on evaluations, thus completing the cycle. Essentially, the process of evaluating and documenting performance can actually work against what the exercise was supposed to achieve in the first place – optimal performance! The lawyers are the ONLY ones who are happy.

Is it any wonder that, according to Gallup, upwards of 70% of American workers are classified as either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged”?

Is it any wonder that companies like Adobe, Dell, IBM, Deloitte, Gap and even GE (yes – the GE of the famed Jack Welch era “stack ranking” evaluation system ) have walked away from traditional performance evaluation models?

Evaluations, as we’ve known them, are EVIL. Hence, the title of this blog.

Can We Get This Right?

I think so. I think you can protect an organization and benefit it by setting the stage for team members to be at their best, thereby contributing to the success of that organization.

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of one way to accomplish the task:

1. Have an intentional culture.
2. Memorialize the values and the culture in writing. Make it the FIRST part of your butt-covering, legalese-saturated personnel manual. Explain The Why, and how it’s an awesome thing.
3. In the FIRST paragraph of every position description, memorialize how each team member contributes to those values and the culture, and ultimately to the success of the organization in a win-win paradigm.
4. Make sure every new hire has a goal list of time-sensitive and key ongoing deliverables that relate to values and culture in order to create a metric and mutual expectation. Help everyone to see what success looks like.
5. Engage in regular discussion about how things are going. Find people doing things right and reward it. Set dates in your calendar to make it happen. MBWA (look it up).
6. Plan to have a conversation about how team members are doing, based primarily on the stated values and culture, and highlighting goal list items or other specific, clearly communicated deliverables. Everybody writes down some talking points so they can remember them.
7. Have a conversation, NOT an EVILuation. Reach areas of agreement on areas of success and celebrate them. Note opportunities for improvement and set a new metric. The goal of the collaboration is agreement, a plan, and ownership. If there are disagreements in some part of the assessment, allow the team member’s dissent to be recorded. Just make sure the expectation moving forward is clear and included in the plan.
8. Type it up.  Review it together for accuracy. Everyone signs off.
9. Execute the plan.
10. Rinse, repeat.

Performance evaluation by discussion and collaborative action plans make sense when it’s in the context of culture. It makes sense when that culture is founded in shared values with personal and group accountability. Culture and the other best practices that set the framework for this model will be the topic of other blogs. But you don’t have to wait to get those things lined up perfectly to change the way you think about and execute your evaluation process. Do that now. The process can help to kickstart an intentional culture.

This is NOT fluffy feel-good stuff. This is hard. And it works. As Tom Peters comments in The Excellence Dividend, “Effective evaluations emerge from a series of loosely structured, continuing conversations, not from filling out a form once every six months or year.” PREACH, Mr. Peters, PREACH!

It’s not a Pollyanna. It’s about getting things done and being grown-ups. You’ll still be able to figure out if people are working out or not. And the written part will keep the lawyers happy. Most importantly, the evaluation process will actually do what it is intended to do – make sure everyone is clear about the organization’s goals and their role in achieving them.

Let’s get this done!