As we approach the end of the year, let me offer you the most powerful question you can ask your team:
WHAT DO WE DO BETTER NOW
THAN WE DID AT THE START OF THE YEAR?
Prepare to be underwhelmed. I've asked that question many times and the most common response is to change the subject. (Changing the subject is one of the great talents of skilled bureaucrats.) Your job is to make sure that doesn't happen and that everyone is either reinforced for innovation or forced to admit that it hasn't happened.
What is leadership if not getting better?
If your group didn't go anywhere, what possible "leadership" could there have been? If there's no progress, there's no leader.
After the discussion, I'd suggest telling your team that, starting in January, that you'll be asking "What do we do better now than at the start of the year?" every month. Make it clear that appraisals, raises and bonuses will reflect answers to that question, no excuses accepted.
Do so and you will put a Zippo lighter to complacency and make 2012 a year of true improvement for your team and your customers.
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December 2011: What's In This Issue
Managers: Have you ever had anything good out of doing performance appraisals? The answer is, of course, "no"... unless you count the pleasures of a few weeks of employees going out of their way to be excruciatingly conscientious and helpful. And that is what undermines the whole process - those sneaky employees being conscientious and helpful just before appraisal time.
A WORD TO THE UNWISE
By Dale Dauten, The Innovators' Lab
From UCLA professor Samuel Culbert's "Get Rid of the Performance Review!"
"In fact, if firms did nothing else but just kill off this process they'd immediately be better off. When it comes to performance reviews, there's no question that nothing is better than something. That's how bad they are."
"HR professionals exploit the performance review to provide them a power base they don't deserve"
It's no surprise, given the title and those quotes, that much of the Culbert's book is devoted to bashing the performance review, and this is familiar ground for those who have given thought to the process. However, Culbert makes two contributions to the discussion.
First, the book makes the case that performance reviews are anti-creativity. Not just that the process is formulaic, but that the process of scoring employees on attributes tends to force them in to pigeonholes. Culbert goes so far as to imagine a performance review given to a young Steve Jobs, prior to starting Apple.
BOSS: You don't seem to him be making much progress in creating that circuit board.
STEVE JOBS: I've got a great idea for a computer that would revolutionize this company, not to mention the world.
BOSS: But that's not what you're supposed to be working on. You're weeks behind schedule on the circuit board.... We need to get this project done. I have to give you a 2 at this point.
STEVE JOBS: I understand. I'll try to speed things up.
BOSS: I hope so. Also, what's with the black turtlenecks...?
An interesting point, but nothing compared to Colbert's Big Idea, giving a name to the alternative to the performance review: the "performance preview." The idea here is to replace the typical review conversation - you know, the boss offering opinions on what the subordinate has and hasn't done -- with a conversation about what the boss and employee could accomplish together. As Culbert writes, "In reviews, the boss spouts self-serving interpretations about what already has taken place and wasn't fixed. In previews, the focus is on problem-solving, about how we, as teammates, can work together even more effectively and efficiently then we currently are."
Whether boss or employee, which conversation would you rather have, review or preview? I know there are plenty of employees who would answer "Neither." These are the people who believe in "let sleeping bosses lie." And in that remark is both a review and preview of a career, of an employee who has never experienced the joy of working with a true leader.
Dale Dauten, Author and Publisher
E-Luminations
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