Appraisals that Result in Collaboration rather than Confrontation

One of the main questions HR decision makers and professionals should be asking themselves is why it is that arguably the most powerful tool available in the HR arsenal is yielding such poor results. In any other discipline, a tool with such a poor track record would almost certainly have been ejected or transformed long ago, but we appear incapable or unwilling to formulate alternatives that leave employees feeling motivated to raise their performance and exert the discretionary effort organisations are so eager to extract.

The reality is that most appraisal systems in use across organisations today are highly mechanistic in nature and involve a lot of tedious form filling which typically takes more time than the conversations themselves. As pointed out by the late management guru and author, Peter Drucker, both manager and employees dislike the process. Managers hate it because of the mounds of paperwork and the fact that they are set up in a way that requires managers to spend a lot of time criticising others. This is because their main purpose (which is often implicit rather than explicit) is to satisfy the requirements of the reward manager and finance department for a fair and objective reward process involving annual adjustments to base pay, bonuses and other variable forms of remuneration. Employees generally dislike the process because they know their manager is compelled to criticise them to justify any pay increase which is average or below average and because most managers are ill-equipped for this type of confrontational discussion, which leaves the employee feeling demotivated and devalued.

So is there a better approach we should be putting to the test? Although I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, I would like to offer some guidance along the lines of that originally put forward by Drucker in the late 1960’s, when everybody was too preoccupied by scientific management (or management by control and numbers) to pay attention. Drucker maintained that in order for appraisal discussions to be effective, they should first and foremost focus on bringing out “what a man can do”. In other words, the appraisal should focus primarily on successes and strengths (or underlying characteristics that are natural to the person and energise them to achieve something extraordinary).

This is the way most coaches of performance artists and sports people operate. They recognise that the players’ strengths need to be honed and perfected to achieve mastery. However, this doesn’t mean weaknesses should be ignored. They need to be surfaced, discussed and addressed, particularly where they are critical to role performance. However, the discussion should recognise that everyone has vulnerabilities and many of those that are deeply ingrained in the person’s core personality are unlikely to change much. Of course the person can learn new skills and behaviours. But trying to develop mastery in someone who doesn’t have the base potential is a rush for fools gold. It simple doesn’t work. It is much easier to find someone else with the right natural strengths to perform the work or to mitigate the negative implications of the weakness as much as possible to prevent the person from failing. There are numerous way to do this, from helping the person to find partners (s)he can pair with who have complementary strengths and capabilities, through mentoring and coaching, to outsourcing parts of the work or finding technology-based solutions to lessen the impact of the weaker area.  

Translating this all into a structure for an appraisal conversation is simpler than one would imagine. Using Drucker’s approach as a start point, we have developed the following key questions:

1. What has the person achieved against the expectations set for them?
2. What has (s)he done particularly well and what strengths or capabilities have underpinned this success?
3. What does (s)he have to learn or acquire to get the full benefit from these strengths?
4. What frustrations or blockers need to be removed to ensure the person is able to perform at his/her best?
5. What weaker areas or unproductive habits need to be managed and mitigated to ensure any vulnerabilities or weaknesses are avoided?
6. How energised and confident does the person feel by the end of the conversation. 

However, all this doesn’t help to deal with the direct and counterproductive linkage most organisations choose to have between their appraisal discussions and the annual pay round. Our prescription for this would simply be to pay for contribution and forget trying to tie pay to competencies and behaviours. So the main question is focused around the specific outcomes the person has achieved and the extent to which these are below, in line with or above expectations. Organisations would in my opinion also benefit from separating this conversation from the main appraisal and development discussions for all the reasons outlined above.

A fascinating 2005 Corporate Leadership Council study involving data from over 90 000 employees in 135 organisations found that focusing on personality and performance strengths had one of the strongest impacts on employee performance of all line manager actions. They found that this focus reinforces performing-enhancing behaviour, increasing employee engagement and promoting stronger identification with their work. However, to achieve these positive effects, most organisations will need to radically rethink the way they structure their appraisal systems and training for line managers. To engender high levels of openness, empowerment and collaboration in appraisals requires implementing strengths-based thinking and practices. Managers will then regard their role less as judge and critical parent and more as facilitator and enabler or productive use of strengths.

References

Drucker, P. (1967). The Effective Executive. Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann.