What Have You Done for me lately?

By this time of year, managers will have finished writing performance evaluations and assigning some kind of rating to employees' annual performance. Those employees who receive high performance ratings think the system is fair. Those who don't ...well they will think the system or to be more precise, the manager, is not fair. There is such controversy over this process especially if there is a lot of subjectivity associated with measuring performance in today's organizations.

In the simplest business, performance will be rewarded by repeat business, increased sales and efficient work processes: I bake a great biscotti, price it right, sell it with a smile and I am likely to pay back the cost of making it and pay myself for having made it. But when you work in large corporations where there is a lot of distance between what the employee does and profits, what performance is measured, how do you measure it and how do you reward it?

Managers get themselves into a lot of trouble when they are not clear on performance expectations and ways to measure performance. There are managers who "know it when they see it." I actually heard a manager say as he was preparing to write his evaluations at year end, "What have they done for me lately?" My guess is, his employees know this and spend the weeks leading up to performance evaluation sucking up to the boss and making him or her look good.

At the end of the day, I am not an advocate of performance appraisal or annual reviews because I think the process perpetuates a parental approach to work. It reduces ownership. It gives managers unfair power over employees. It turns employees into victims. But you might ask, how will you reward performance? Without the reward, how will you keep employees committed and engaged? All good questions. So let the debate begin.