Appraisals

The coachee appraisal question

I was asked recently by a coachee what my worst experience was when doing annual appraisals with employees? 

It was a great question and one that took a few moments to go back through the memory banks and recall ones that hadn’t gone so well.

An appraisal goes wrong

My first management role with full people and performance accountability was in the late 1990s, when I was promoted from within an existing team to manage 10 support engineers. Not long after being appointed the annual appraisal process started. One of the first appraisals I had to do involved giving an individual feedback on their communication skills, specifically the lack of them. This resulted in poor feedback from customers and on occasion caused issues with the rest of the team.

My recollection on the appraisal some 26 years later is not a good one both in terms of how I went about it, and the time it took me to recover the situation. I do recall that my biggest mistake was to go straight in with the feedback on the communication issue without preparing suitable specific examples and starting from the position of the individual's strengths.

The session quickly deteriorated, and the individual became defensive and tried to blame others, the pressure and demanding nature of the customers etc. As it started to unravel, I realised I had handled the session poorly so stopped the discussion and suggested we reconvene a week later once we had reflected on the session. 

A week later we met again, and I opened with an apology for how I’d run the previous session and then the individual also apologised. They went on to say that having had a chance to think about it they realised that there was some truth to the feedback. The session became a constructive discussion and we eventually settled on a plan to help them improve.

Lessons learned

From this experience I learned that an annual appraisal is an opportunity to take a step back from the day-to-day interactions with employees, Through assessing the overall performance that captured the key achievements and development areas from the full year the discussion more naturally moves to the longer-term development goals for the next period. 

The importance of preparation and taking the time to think about the overall feedback cannot be emphasised enough - you might be pushed for time with 10 or more to do but the employee (assuming they are not themselves managers) gets to do one so give it the necessary amount of time and attention.

The importance of regular 1-2-1s

Regular 1-2-1s dealing with specific feedback that may or may not be performance related is the better way to help and support employees. Saving feedback up for the annual appraisal is missing the opportunity to course correct at an early stage and provide much more specific benefit for the employee. The overall goal should be that there are no surprises in the annual review.

Top 5 Tips

Here are my top 5 tips for managing an appraisal.

1. Self-assessment

Most companies provide a tool for the employee to self-assess and then their manager also assesses using the same criteria. The self-assessment usually covers objectives, ideally both soft and subject matter skills, and normally specific attributes related to the role. Use this as a starting point and expand where appropriate.

It’s a very good exercise to understand how an employee feels about their performance if they complete the self-assessment before the manager does. 

It never ceased to surprise me that most people have a lower perception of their capabilities than how they are seen by others. This provides a good basis for discussion and any development or support an employee might need going forward. 

I’ve managed a total of 96 direct reports during my career and I found this exercise to be the most valuable discussion with an employee. Taking the time to ask open questions, listen, and understand what motivates, as well as what frustrates an employee will help you going forward.

If you approach it this way you will usually find the development and mentoring needs are intuitively identified.

2. Strengths and highlights

Always lead with the strengths and highlights from the year. This will provide a solid basis for both manager and employee to move to anything that hadn’t gone so well and what might need to be put in place to develop and support the person going forward. Building on strengths and going further in those areas is a very good way to motivate and build confidence with an employee.

Recently I was discussing strengths and weaknesses with a friend who held several senior positions with a major US based Technology company. He revealed that during his career he was often asked to review and provide commentary on spreadsheets of data. He had little competence and no desire to spend hours poring through spreadsheet data. 

His strengths centred around explaining complex technology to customers, presenting at large conferences and being a thought leader and ambassador for the company. For the spreadsheet work there were highly capable people in his team that could analyse and draw conclusions on data sets in the fraction of time it would take him.

By focussing and building on his strengths and encouraging his team to do the same it created a culture of excellence and motivation for everyone.

3. Up-skill and Enhance

As you have probably concluded I’m an advocate for building on strengths and enabling people to achieve even greater things that they are good at and enjoy doing. Spending hours upon hours to focus on areas that are not a strength unless core to the role, or business, strikes me as a waste of talent and inappropriate use of a company’s assets. 

Therefore, the approach for acquiring new skills and building on existing strengths should be the priority when setting objectives or development areas for the coming period. This doesn't always mean structured training courses, it could be a project to research and learn about something outside of their comfort zone.

4. Team Balance

The appraisal process enables you to look across all your employees and determine where you have strengths in the team and also importantly where you might be missing capability. This can assist with prioritising any hiring to be done as well as skills development and or mentoring.

5. Feedback

Ideally during the preparation stage feedback from individuals peers, project leaders and other collaborators would have been sought to use in the appraisal. If this has been provided then the feedback is likely to be very objective based on specific examples. If this hasn't been done and you are using material that has been previously discussed during 1-2-1's it's still a great opportunity to remind, discuss what has moved forward and generally consider together what needs to happen going forward. 

Avoid perception based feedback without specific examples. The issues that can arise if you use perceptions as a way to give feedback is that it can be hard for the recipient to understand and therefore there is a much greater propensity to reject it.

Although the appraisal is all about the employee it is an opportunity to solicit feedback on how well you are supporting them. What would they like to see more or less of from you?

Chat GPT Insights

Whilst a little long to publish here I liked how Chat GPT responded to the question

- What are three tips for providing performance feedback?

Go ahead and try it!

Closing Remarks

The danger of writing a short blog on giving appraisals is that it minimises and seemingly over simplifies areas that require much thought and context, given each individual employees circumstances. 

It's tempting to follow-up with further blogs to discuss in more detail the giving and receiving of feedback or for example how to plan and set objectives for the next 12 months. There are many more important areas for detailed discussion which together would be enough to publish a book! 

I hope the insights provided here help you to consider and/or question how to approach your appraisals and if you are pushed for time then at least you will have a minimum viable approach!

Acknowledgements

The need for review and constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement in everything we do is true no matter how experienced or knowledgeable we think we are. I'd like to thank my friend and former esteemed colleague, Mr William Brown, previously SVP GCC at Software AG. Finally a thank you and shout out to a long standing close friend and sparring partner, Mr Steven Abrams, previously at Microsoft.

These individuals have and continue to be sources of inspiration in the pursuit of improving what I do, the teams I have managed, and the organisations I have been fortunate enough to serve!