7 Sins of Performance Reviews
Sin No. 1: Playing the Parent
Psychology 101 teaches us that all human beings have to struggle at one time or other to free themselves of parent-as-authority figure. Most people do, which is the foundation of maturity. Unfortunately, however, many workplaces substitute a new parent in the form of a “boss.” This person is responsible for molding your behavior on the job, encouraging/coercing you to reach your goals, then standing in judgment of how well you have done so.
Sadly, almost everywhere you look in the job performance review marketplace, you see variations on the "boss-as-parent-and-judge" theme. And if you want to know why they don't work, just ask any parent of a teenager. They.ll tell you that once a person reaches a critical age (ranging from about 12-18, depending on circumstances), they're not too keen on having their parental figures doing a top-down evaluation of their behavior, however well-intentioned it might be.
Forget for a moment the question of whether a manager can ever do a truly "objective" appraisal. (We.ll address that question in Sin No. 3.) Even assuming that such objectivity was possible, there's a major problem with the authoritarian format. By positing the manager as the all-knowing evaluator and the employee as the hapless listening child, top-down reviews make it virtually impossible for the employee to "hear" the review with open ears and an open mind. The parent/child model simply re-activates the natural defenses we slipped into as teenagers. and which we fall back into whenever we find ourselves cast again in that role.
The employee performance appraisals forms from www.exxceed.com are but one example of the well-intentioned employee performance reviews that falls into this parental trap. Though its allowance for "competency management by self and manager" at least opens the door to some manager-employee dialogue, it is still mostly a one-way conversation focused on the employee performance evaluation, which is discussed after the manager notes "observed behaviors" of the employee. If the idea of "observed behaviors" being reflected back to employees by their boss puts spring in your step, then perhaps these are the forms for you. If, on the other hand, "observed behaviors" brings to mind field research on primates in the zoo setting, you may want to move on to less hierarchical pastures in the vast flowering fields of job performance appraisals and effective job performance evaluation.
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