The Diary of a Reluctant Management Consultant

HR asked Steve to dispense with the gestures and use the prescribed form for performance appraisals instead...

Judging by how nice everyone in the office is being to everyone else, I can only assume that some sort of performance appraisal process must be taking place (I know what you’re thinking; yes, another one!). As a result, there has been much debate in meetings, in pause areas and on the golf course as to which people fit into which performance categories. Several organisations use the Topgrading system, separating employees into A grade staffers, forming the top 10%, the B graders making up a disproportionately large 70% and the losers… sorry, I mean, C grade workers who begrudgingly bring up the rear. There is much gnashing of teeth as managers struggle to put their subordinates into one of these categories. I’m just disappointed that there isn’t a category D… But as a service to managers struggling with this problem, here are some characteristics of high, average and poor performers that might just help you make up your mind.

Leadership

A Player – His leadership skills are often compared to Nelson Mandela, Sir Winston Churchill and the Dalai Lama

B Player – His leadership skills are often compared to Morgan Freeman, Joseph Stalin and Lorenzo Lamas

C Player – His leadership skills are often compared to Winnie Mandela, Sir Mix-a-lot and a llama

Team work

A Player – She works well with others, listening, sharing and bringing out the best in all the team members

B Player – She works with others, listening to her iPod, sharing her lunch and bringing out the average in all the team members

C Player – She works others into headlocks, listening their screams, sharing her views on waterboarding and bringing out the most fear in all the team members

Motivation

A Player – Is so motivated he’s willing to walk on hot coals

B Player – Is often motivated to use hot coals to barbecue things

C Player – Once picked up a hot coal to see if it was hot

Values

A Player – Mother Teresa would be proud

B Player – Mother-in-law would be proud

C Player – Madonna would be proud

Supervision

A Player – Requires very little, if any, supervision at all; can be confidently left alone to get the job done

B Player – Requires some supervision and a little hand-holding; can be confidently left alone to get the job done slowly, with far too many questions and plenty of mistakes, making you wonder why you didn’t do it all yourself in the first place…

C Player – Requires very little supervision as long as ‘very little’ is less than twenty hours per week; can be confidently left alone to cock things up

Customer Service

A Player – Lives the company motto, “The customer is King”

B Player – Has altered the company motto to “The customer is a Queen”

C Player – Received a written warning for repeatedly saying “The customer is a drag queen”

Pro-active

A Player – Tackles tasks before you even think of them

B Player – Tackles tasks when you remind him

C Player – Should have that “Casual Day 2003” poster complete any day now…

Quality Output

A Player – Produces one defect per thousand

B Player – Produces one defect per hundred

C Player – Is a defect

No, really, just stop

It has come to my attention that this month is interim performance appraisal month. I became aware of it when I received an invitation to my interim performance appraisal meeting. We all know your rating was already decided weeks ago, after you finished some random task or said something irrelevant in a meeting that either made your boss think you’re the company champion or the fifth floor’s village idiot.

But of course, just deciding on an employee’s rating would be terribly unfair. More efficient and perhaps more honest, but supposedly very unfair. So it’s important to gather subjective, immaterial and uncorrelated supporting evidence in order to justify the manager’s off-the-cuff evaluation of your performance. And this week I came across a rather novel way of doing that. It’s rather obviously called “Stop, Start and Continue”

Now, “Stop, Start and Continue” could easily be mistaken for the name of Alfa Romeo’s Motorplan (it runs for the first 10,000km or three months, whichever comes first or unless the gearbox falls off, in which case the motorplan is invalidated – hey, it’s your fault for buying an Alfa), but it also happens to be a very quick and easy way of evaluating employee performance. Why send out links to expensive performance management web sites, complicated Excel spreadsheets for capturing 360 degree feedback or asking people to complete a self-evaluation (an entertaining way to see just how deluded some colleagues can be)? All you need to do is send out a brief e-mail to superiors, peers and minions of the person being evaluated and ask them to list what the person should stop doing, start doing and continue doing, all for the purpose of learning, growth and weeding out the idiots.

To save you some time and attention, I’ve listed a few choice selections of what to answer if you’re lucky enough to be asked to participate in a friendly game of “Stop, Start and Continue”.

Stop

• Asking what Jack Welch would do.
• Pressing ‘Alt’ and ‘Tab’ every time someone passes your desk; we know you’re surfing the net and the fake budget spreadsheet from 2007 isn’t fooling anyone.
• Please.

Start

• Practicing higher standards of personal hygiene; there’s a reason why no one’s inviting you meetings and it’s not because “we’ve run out of chairs again”.
• Subscribing to those online recruitment web sites… I’m not saying anything but they might come in handy after we replace you with a macro in Excel.
• Working – a novel way to earn a salary and perhaps even a bonus as opposed to whining every year that you’re underpaid and the only bonus you got was an accidental extra helping of bolognaise at the canteen!

Continue

• Coming to work earlier and earlier and leaving later and later till you eventually leave before you arrive. We will interpret this as commitment, but will mark you down for having poor work/life balance
• Falling asleep at your desk. We all have a good laugh when you deny it, even though we can see the impression your keyboard has made on your cheeks. Also, it’s a mousepad, not a droolpad.
• Bringing donuts to Monday’s weekly progress meeting in a vain attempt to curry favour, when we all know you haven’t done anything since last week’s progress meeting you work-shy lazy bastard

The end of August means Spring is just around the corner but it also means doing two of my most soul-destroying activities, completing my tax return and renewing my car license. It’s like wanting to relax by doing something mindless, but then finding out that the only person on the radio is Alex Jay, that VH1 is having a Celine Dion weekend and the only book available to read is David Beckham’s autobiography. But this time of year is also the season for another soul-destroying activity, completing performance appraisals.

In some ways performance appraisal season is quite fun because everyone’s really, really nice to one another. These two weeks are what John Lennon wished for, peace, love and harmony. Managers that were arguing over what font to use in sales presentations, now happily agree that Ariel is the way to go. The action item list from last week’s meeting is conveniently forgotten by all. People are even talking to the actuaries. It is of course a very temporary state of affairs, a little bit of corporate détente, before Middle East-like tensions resume.

At first, you’re quite keen to get your ten page appraisal form, eager for revenge against all that have ignored you, disagreed with you or even just jumped the queue in the canteen. But then you’re reminded of the Cold War and the concept of deterrence. You can’t attack your corporate enemies with a bad rating because they have the power to do the same to you! Foiled again! This can mean only one thing, giving everyone good ratings so that the performance appraisal karma will come back to you and then resorting to more childish ways to get back at your annoying colleagues, such as parking in their parking bays, every evening reducing the height setting of their office chairs and leaving the jobs supplement open on their desks for all to see…

If you’re uncomfortable with giving everyone a good rating and a bad rating would invite en equally awful rating for you, then your only other option is to go with central tendency: choose the middle option, average. And then choose it regularly. It’s also faster that way. If the form is in Excel, you can just copy down. Now some HR people are astute enough to spot this and return the form with a rude e-mail asking you to fill out the form properly, but on most occasions, you can get away with it. And don’t feel bad with dishing out average ratings. Average isn’t bad. Look it’s not great either, it’s just so-so. Just remember that by definition, half the world’s population is below average and they seem to be managing just fine.

If I give my local tax office a three-smiley-face rating, do you think they’ll go easy on my tax return? Didn’t think so…