The Four Hundred

The most important annual event in the life of any employee is arguably the performance evaluation. Get a good one, and you may keep your job for another year, and perhaps even merit a raise. Get a bad one, and your life will be full of anxiety and stress. Why, then, is the evaluation process so often trite and shallow, void of substance or meaning? Even positive observations border on being vapid. "Bob communicates well with others." Wow, that's deep.

The opportunity to compose such profound insights notwithstanding, as a rule managers find performance evaluations burdensome, because they are time consuming, potentially confrontational, and almost always formulaic. After about the fourth employee, there is really nothing new to be said, no clever way to answer the same set of dull questions on the one-size-fits-all evaluation forms that are so broadly designed as to be monumentally irrelevant to what most people actually do on the job.

By design, the process of being evaluated breeds employee tension, especially among the ranks of underachievers. But if the intent is to jump-start marginal employees with the threat of termination, a session devoted to scrutinizing their failings is just as likely to result in defensiveness and resentment. And not just marginal employees are apprehensive about being evaluated. Few people relish being judged, especially by someone with the power to damage their career. Most tolerate the process because they are obliged to. When the news is good, they breathe a sigh of relief and forget the platitudes the moment they leave their manager's office. When the news is bad, they remember it for a long time, as they would a slight, and sometimes find ways of getting even.

Employees who believe they were unfairly treated have a tendency to spread discontent throughout the department and undermine their manager by giving only the minimum effort required to avoid dismissal.

We all know the traditional reasons for having to endure formal evaluations. Employees, we're told, have to know how they're doing, and there must be some criteria for awarding promotions and pay increases. That line of reasoning would be sound if the system worked as advertised. But it doesn't. The underlying assumption is that managers have a profound insight into their employees' work habits. Some may. But many managers only have a peripheral understanding of what their employees do each day.

And how could they hope to know more? After all, managers already have full-time jobs: attending meetings, answering endless e-mails, budgeting, planning, setting objectives, tracking multiple projects. Circumstances force most managers to focus not so much on employees but on results. The work either gets done or it doesn't; it gets done well, or it gets done poorly. When results are unsatisfactory, managers hear complaints that in many cases become the only predictable impetus for employee/manager interaction. Generally, work proceeds on the basis of trust. Few managers actually have the luxury of having intimate contact with the day-to-day activities of their employees.

Granted, there are some jobs that lend themselves more easily to evaluation. Sales, for one. A manager may not care what an employee does all day, as long as he meets his quota. In IT, operations goals are largely statistical and are therefore simple to track--the availability of a network, for example. But such tracking is objective-based, while the performance appraisal evaluates a person. If an employee fails to meet his objectives, his performance (and by extension the employee himself) is judged to be unacceptable. But when contact between employee and manager is limited, and empirical evidence is slim, performance evaluations have a propensity to range far beyond yes/no, did do/didn't do, into the realm of rumor and fiction. For example, determinations about a person's ability to relate to coworkers are often based on a glimpse of behavior, an isolated incident, or third-party talk.

But even if the justifications for evaluations were true, how useful is it to find out how you're doing once a year? Summarizing a year's worth of effort in 45 minutes of banalities hardly qualifies as a useful experience.

Besides, employees with even modest introspective tendencies already know how they're doing, regardless of what their manager may say. And as for performance determining pay, that's a concept courting bitter irony. How could employees be unaware of the hypocrisy of corporate compensation policies? For the average worker, "performance" is the flow-restictor on the compensation pipe. But at upper management levels, the more lavish the compensation, the less likely it has anything to do with performance.

A more plausible reason for clinging to this failed system is that employee shortcomings must be documented so that they can be fired without fear of legal reprisal.

If so, that's enormously inefficient, because it makes no sense to evaluate performance after the fact. That's like doing quality assurance after the product comes off the assembly line, when it's too late to correct the defects. For managers, it makes far more sense to build quality into the process, especially knowing they will ultimately be judged by the accomplishments of their employees. The question the astute manager will ask himself is, "If my reputation and career are dependent on the job you do, why would I wait until you've completed a year's worth of work before I evaluate it?"

What's needed is a shift in priorities. Managers would do well to forgo the meetings and the e-mails, and begin having contact with their employees--daily if possible, but not less than weekly. In any given moment, there should be no doubt in employees' minds as to what and how they are doing. Feedback should be constant and behavior-specific. "I like your design of our Web site. It's informative and easy to navigate." Or, "I know you are busy, but you are consistently late to staff meetings. I expect you to keep your time agreements." If managers are truly doing their jobs, performance evaluations become unnecessary.

Imagine, if you can, a workplace where there is no failure, only feedback and logical consequences. The bottom line, both economic and interpersonal, is that coaching for improvement is more valuable than judging performance. Even if performance evaluations are mandated by company policy, at the very least coaching ensures there will be no surprises.

Perhaps the most useful evaluation for a manager is the one he invites of himself. Employees may not always know what their manager is doing, but they do know how he is performing in relation to them. Managers, like most folks, tend to interact with people who are either most useful or most pleasant. Potentially, that leaves a lot of employees on the fringes who receive little of their manager's time and attention. It takes courage, but gathering employees and asking for feedback will not only be informative but also help to achieve management's goals by encouraging employees to speak to those issues that impede their success. And, perhaps most important, soliciting feedback serves as an example of leadership that is unafraid to be enlightened, management that does not affect omniscience, but is self-correcting and open to learning.

I've worked for managers with whom I've had daily contact, managers who interacted with me only when there was a problem, and managers who stayed safely behind their office doors until forced to emerge. It's no coincidence that I was most successful when I received in-the-moment feedback and was able to make necessary adjustments before problems arose. At the same time I was able to give my manager the timely information she needed to address issues before they became crises and to request the resources I required to complete my objectives.

By substituting continuous feedback for annual evaluation and accepting feedback themselves, managers have an opportunity to become the rarest of individuals: leaders who embody the change they wish to see in their employees.