Most people look forward to performance reviews about as much as they look forward to a root canal.
As leaders/managers that should make all our alarms go off.
There are so many things wrong with how traditional performance reviews get done that it's difficult to know where to start, but let me drop one idea in the bucket. We'll revisit this subject many times I expect.
Here's the key question: Each employee engages in many transactions daily with other employees. What percentage of those transactions are between the employee and his/her boss?
A relatively small percentage. In many cases, less than 10%.
This should raise the obvious next question: If the boss has among the fewest interactions with the employee, why is the boss doing the performance review? He/she probably knows less about the employee's performance than almost anyone in the company.
This may appear to be an overstatement, but if we look at the the internal relationships in the company as internal customers and vendors, then it becomes apparent that while the boss is certainly a customer of the employee, he/she is only one of many customers the employee serves. This raises a third obvious question: since the quality disciplines tell us that customers get to define quality, why are the internal customers not conducting the employee's performance review?
For more thoughts on this subject, you'll find some interesting articles on one of my websites, www.fiveminutemba.com.
