A Time for Reappraisal

Naked Leader Week – 350 – Monday 15 March 2010

Time to Read – Three Minutes

A Time for Reappraisal

Impact on your company – Massive

What happened to old fashioned appraisals, where you could air your views about your challenges and problems, ask for training, and talk about how you’d like to progress and receive honest feedback about your performance?

All of this with a manager who, besides wanting you to do the job well, wanted you to be more fulfilled, attain the skills you need and coach you to achieve your desired career progression?

Useful, motivational meetings that are now sadly all too rare.

These days it’s all performance related, target monitoring stuff designed to mark a person in such a way that they expect to get neither a good pay rise nor a lot of training.

Those with the gift of the gab wiggle their way out of missed targets while those who take responsibility take it on the chin even when the target was always impossible, relied on five other people to do their bit and were completely overloaded with their everyday responsibilities to tackle it anyway.

As for relating it to pay – while inevitably you can’t have a bad appraisal and expect the top pay rise to come your way, the two have become far too closely linked, at the cost of real personal development.

If the purpose is to get the best out of your people then I don’t believe this is going in the right direction to achieve it.

In reality wouldn’t you want people who are all so highly skilled and productive they deserve a decent pay rise, because of their direct impact on your bottom line?

Suggestion – split the two – have an annual pay review with clear open criteria and honest marking and be honest about the money available, and have separate personal development reviews.

Also, you need professional ladders as well as management careers so that specialists and experts can be rewarded.

Overall, we need to go back to catching people doing things right rather than this witch-hunt designed solely to justify certain pay rises.

Maybe that’s why everyone is having coaches now – to fulfil the role of the old-fashioned manager who was responsible for your development – the advantage of a coach or mentor is they are most certainly divorced from your pay decisions.

As with all things each company has methods that work and ones that don’t – be sure you know what outcomes you want and be honest with yourselves about whether your present review system will take you nearer to this or further away.

Action: Make sure you understand the purpose and outcomes required of your organisation’s reviews and be honest about your own performance without being the fall guy.

Thanks for reading – now, what are you going to do about it?

David

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