Many of you are filling out performance reviews. You evaluate yourself, then your boss disregards what you wrote and does whatever he feels like doing. Didn’t wear enough white shirts this year? That’s a deduction for “Professional Development.” Didn’t meet one of your goals because your boss changed the priorities? Doesn’t matter, you get dinged for “Not Meeting Expectations.” Disagreed about how a project should be rolled out? You get demerits for lack of “Teamwork.”
I have many questions about performance reviews. Here are 10 of them.
10 Questions About Your Performance Reviews
- What evidence do you have that your performance management process gets results?
- If you dropped your performance management process completely, would business grind to a halt?
- How many of your people think your performance management process is fair?
- How do you account for bad managers who rate good people poorly?
- How can you get employee engagement when you rate your people?
- What ever made you think that forced rankings were fair?
- If you were in charge, would you design a system like you have?
- What’s the theoretical basis for performance reviews?
- Have you ever known someone who got a good rating but really needed to be fired?
- Have you calculated how much money you could save if you didn’t do performance management?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Brilliant. I just wrote about why forced ranking must die, including this story from a member of my team:
What does forced ranking look like in reality? A member of my team related this story to me last week of her husband’s performance review (I’ll call him Jim). Jim filled out the self appraisal form, only to have his words returned to him verbatim in his manager’s “appraisal” of his performance. But that’s not the real story here. This Fortune 100 firm conducted several rounds of layoffs in the last year, resulting in Jim’s team being diminished by about half with only the true stars remaining.
Jim was informed by his manager that, since the team was so much smaller now, there could only be 1 “exceeds expectations” employee on the team. All the rest would be marked “meets expectations” because senior management was also not allowing any “needs improvement” out of fear even more employees would walk out. Even worse, the lack of managerial skills on this team results in each employee simply keeping his or her same ranking designation year after year.
So, despite the fact that every member of the remaining team is a true star in the organization, each pulling double the work after the rounds of layoffs, only one could be marked as exceeding expectations for the year. How is that an accurate assessment of performance, much less fair?
My follow up post included reference to this list of yours as well as links to others who have recently written on the topic of terrible performance management practices. Thanks for always elevating the conversation, Frank. The post you’re included in is here:
http://recognizethisblog.com/2012/02/4-lessons-from-the-best-what-to-do-instead-of-forced-ranking/
Derek, thanks so much for stopping by with such a well considered observation. Sad how forced rankings do what they do with guys like Jim. (Powerful story.)
And thanks so much for the shout out on your excellent site. I really appreciate that!
My personal favorite…
Should company performance lower a mid-level employee’s individual rating simply because their isn’t enough money to pay high bonuses? Very demotivational
You know what I say…Debbie S is no Sarah Chambers.
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