Appraisal time approaches in the day job. We’ve just all been given a glossy book of over a hundred pages (with lots of cool graphics) to give everyone guidance on performance management. The day job is sparing no effort to ensure its process is world class and its people managers are exemplars in its application.

However, the more I read from the agnostic wing of performance management thinkers, the more I’m inclined to wonder whether all this effort is really well spent. Take this from John Seddon, an occupational psychologist turned management guru:

I began to wonder about appraisal quite early in my career. I noticed it was something that was evamped and relaunched from time to time – a tell-tale sign of problems. If I asked what the issue was, people would tell me managers were not doing their peoples’ appraisals. It occurred to me that perhaps people didn’t like doing them. Perhaps they saw them as of no value. Sometimes I was told that the reason managers were not fulfilling their duty to develop people was a lack of know-how. So the answer was more appraisal training for managers. I continued to harbour my doubts.

…what we rarely see is questioning of the very value of the exercise. The truth is that appraisal leaves people bitter, bruised, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, and severely depressed. … Talk to people in organisations who have been through appraisal. They tell you how they waited for the ‘bad news’. It is psychological torture. In the perennially reinvented courses on how to do the appraisal, managers are told how to deliver bad news – there will always be bad news, since the whole idea is to hold the individual accountable. Some organisations compound the problem by insisting employees are ranked in a normal distribution – you can’t have all ‘A’s; you have to have proportions of each group, including, therefore, some losers. The emotional pain caused by appraisals is incredible, particularly when money is tied to the rating. For substantial periods everyone’s emotional energy is consumed by something that is flawed and counterproductive.

Seddon, John Freedom from Command and Control: a better way to make the work work Vanguard Education Ltd., 2nd edition, 2005

OK, Seddon goes a bit OTT, but his message does ring true. The day job uses the normal distribution (“bell curve”) approach. The last performance management course I attended recommended a three-stage approach to discussions: give the employee some good news (top slice of bread), then the bad news (the filling), and finish off with some more cheery news (bottom slice of bread). As an aide-memoire, we were told this is affectionately known as the shit sandwich technique.

Seddon’s book is well worth a read, not just on appraisals, but on many other current management beliefs such as leadership, CRM, Six Sigma… Unfortuntely it’s printed on ordinary paper and doesn’t smell half as nice as the glossy booklet produced by the day job.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 at 6:47 pm and is filed under The day job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.