Cumulative conversations

One of the problems in most organizations is that performance appraisals are thought of as this horrible thing that happens once a year. They're 60 minutes, or 90 minutes. It's agony. You go in as an employee, and you don't know what's going to happen. As a manager, you've spent two hours the night before trying to think about things to say. You've filled out the form. There hasn't been any interaction. And largely, the activity is being done to drive the pay process, not as part of the ongoing development and thought about a person's value in the organization.

In fact, the performance appraisal should simply be the culmination, the documentation, and the final conversation in a yearlong set of what don't have to be big conversations, but small conversations about how somebody's doing, and how they can improve their performance, strengthen their performance, get better at things, and develop themselves, so that the conversation at the end of the year — whenever the end of that year is — is simply, "Lets remind ourselves of all the things we talked about this year." No surprises.

I'm also not a fan, I have to say, of the manager going out to the employee and saying, "Do your own performance appraisal. Give it to me, and then I'll edit it." I think that is a manager not stepping up to their responsibility. It ought to be a joint process. It ought to be two people talking to each other over the course of the year. And you can say, "I'm a manager. I'm busy. I don't have time. I have 15 employees, or 20 employees. I don't have time to sit down with them all for an hour a month."

It doesn't have to be an hour a month. It could be 10-minute conversations that are targeted and purposeful. They can be things as simple as, "You did a great job on Project X. I particularly liked the way that you handled the vendors on this project." It can be something as simple as, "You know that presentation would have been even more effective if you used fewer slides. Next time, I'd be happy to go over your slides with you, if that would be useful."

Those are performance coaching conversations. And as long as they get documented someplace, that's what makes up the substance of the performance appraisal. And it makes it very easy to then think about development for the coming year, and the way in which that performance appraisal is going to play out and be of use to people, rather than painful.

Targeted, purposeful mini-conversations often build to the best reviews.