I Never Did Like PE

 HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Performance Evaluations — If You Must

Competencies: performance appraisals, performance management

Who benefits: managers and supervisors, especially those who are new to management

Consultant Usage: good basic tool for coaching employees on how to manage performance and the performance appraisal processes 

What’s it about? Let me go on record as saying I don’t like PE (performance evaluations, performance appraisals).  As much as I disagree with almost everything UCLA Professor Sam Culbert writes or says, I find myself in violent agreement with him about the need to abolish the performance appraisal process and system.   For further support, I recommend Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What to Do Instead, now an elderly books.  But respect your elders!

However, most organizations still insist on PAs or PEs.  So what are you going to do?

Well, if you have to do them, and most of you do, I recommend a good, solid, basic book How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals.  It is new book, just out. The ideas aren’t new.  Just well written. 

The author has two themes that resonate with me.  First,he tries to take PE out of the realm of specific time-bound events.  Instead he writes about good management practices that include coaching, feedback, development, and more.  He puts the PE in the context that it is just a natural extension of what supervisors and managers are hired and expected to do.  He says we can all adapt to an organization’s formal processes and requirements, but we should never abandon good management practices.

His second theme is found in this quote: “A performance appraisal is a formal record of a manager’s opinion of the quality of an employee’s work.  The operant word here is opinion.”

How right he is!  Since inception, PEs have tried to sell themselves on being “objective”.  Trying to defend that position is … well, indefensible.  Yet most organizations persist.  Forget “objective”, go with “opinion”.  The real question is how valuable and how valued is the opinion.  That is the question and the answer lies within the manager or supervisor.  How skilled are they in communicating their opinion? 

I am still no fan of PEs.  But if you are new to supervision or need a refresher, this is an excellent resource on a topic that could use a good book.

Catch you later.
 
[tags]performance management, performance evaluation, performance appraisals, performance evaluations, envisia, envisia learning, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.