Refining Performance Evaluation Skills Putting Skills to Work
Refining Performance Evaluation Skills
"Sophia" had been a successful business owner for over 17 years. Things were going well, but she
wanted things to go better. Sophia hired me to help her take her leadership to the next level.
Over the course of our work together, we focused on many professional development areas, but one
in particular stood out: Sophia wanted to refine her employee performance evaluation process and
skills. We talked about the common methods of top-down management, where evaluations for both
parties were traditionally either confrontational or judgmental in nature. This is what she had
done for years, but now Sophia wanted better for her employees and herself. She wanted performance
evaluations for her organization to be "win-win" for both parties, as well as productive to the organization.
Sophia had strong skills in her ability to plan, implement, and manage traditional performance
evaluations, but despite these obvious strengths, she dreaded the process. She said she had personality
traits that were impeding her work. Specifically, she self-identified that she "wanted to be liked" and
she did not like to "ruffle feathers." She said these characteristics were impeding her work in the area
of implementing effective performance evaluations because it hurt and scared her to confront her employees.
She shared with me about her tendency to avoid some problems, even to sweep small issues under the rug
despite knowing these small issues inevitably would come back to haunt her as bigger problems. She believed
her employees wanted to grow and she wanted to help them. Her business, her
leadership skills, and her employees were ready to be pushed to the next level. So, we established objectives,
decided on realistic measures for success, agreed on timelines, and got to work on her two goals:
- create performance evaluations that were more specific and less anxiety provoking for her employees and herself, and
- directly connect her performance evaluations to her organizational goals
Looking carefully at her process, Sophia and I dissected it with the intent to keep the good and discard
the unproductive. She wanted to keep much of the planning, but needed to add to her questioning techniques.
She and I created new procedures, including a future training wherein she and I would teach her employees
how to do self-reflection prior to, during, and after meetings, evaluations, project work, etc. We looked
carefully at how decisions were made in her business. The need for attention to detail (specificity) and
keeping on track (relevance to the vision) continued to come up. Sophia wanted to make the evaluation process
specific to the individual, but relevant to the organizational goals. She and I saw how it was necessary to
create road maps in the form of performance standards and then give those to employees prior to an evaluation.
She created clear, measurable performance standards and procedural guidelines for all staff.
These documents would be the frameworks for employees and management to know how to start, what to do, and where to go.
Next, she and I generated possible questions that she would use to prompt herself during her preparation phases
of the evaluation process. We also generated questions and guiding prompts to ask the employees to facilitate
their thoughtful responses before, during, and after their evaluations. We practiced and debriefed on her
observation and listening skills. She discovered how she was predominately asking only "yes" and "no" questions,
so we developed open ended questions and added those to her repertoire. She quickly realized that if she framed
questions with a presumed positive, and allowed the employee time to answer, most of the hard work would be
done for her, and the employee him or herself would reveal areas of strength and areas for growth.
Sample conversations between Sophia and a subordinate might have looked like this:
Sophia asks: "I am impressed with how you've clearly
identified your project timelines, Betty. Which methods
did you choose for communicating these timelines to
your staff?"
Betty responds: "Thank you. We do make sure we stay on top of our timelines. Most of my department staff members check their
emails daily, so I usually start by emailing new project schedules, procedures, etc. This way I allow my staff to read and
digest this information prior to coming together as a group. This becomes like their 'homework.' Then, at our weekly staff
meetings, we are ready to revisit upcoming deadlines, new project information and other information, as needed. This has been
pretty effective. There was that one time, though, when the computer systems were down, and "I-T" couldn't get them back
up for days. We realized how important it was for us to also have the back-up piece in place. We needed to update our
department calendar in the work room weekly or more often, as needed. We were really glad we had our deadlines on that
centrally-located calendar. Having that back-up of the big calendar available when "I-T" and our computers went down
really helped. Now, we also keep the hard copies of all timelines and procedures in our project binders, just in case
something happens and we can't access the electronic
versions again."
By using open ended questions, Sophia was able to gain information and insight while still listening and maintaining
a friendly, positive, even conversational tone. Open-ended questions ensured more employee engagement and naturally allowed
employees to recognize areas of strength and potential need.
Through these steps, Sophia and I discovered that for her, a conversational style was the most effective. Further
developing her communication skills to include reading and mirroring body language helped her to establish
an atmosphere of trust and safety. These were key to introducing difficult subjects in a comfortable way.
Sophia discovered that if she set up a safe environment for the employee, then the employee would often
self-identify areas of need and essentially do much or all of the 'heavy lifting.'
Putting Skills to Work
When it was time to implement these new and improved procedures, Sophia was ready.
I agreed to sit in with Sophia on multiple evaluations in real time. My task was
to facilitate in the moment. This guided practice proved to be very helpful for
Sophia for many reasons, not the least of which was in our debriefs after the evaluations.
For her first evaluation, she chose to focus on one employee whose evaluation previously would have
been a real challenge, one who would have previously provoked a great deal of anxiety in Sophia. I
reminded Sophia to trust the process, that if she started out correctly and made the employee
comfortable and asked the right questions, the employee would naturally bring up the difficult
topics without Sophia even having to suggest them.
Her planning and trust paid off. The employee talked more freely and in the process self-identified
multiple areas for self-improvement, including the three Sophia had also identified. Because the
difficult topics had been brought up by the employee (rather than by Sophia), the employee was not
defensive. She actually asked Sophia for assistance with them. Together, Sophia and the employee
prioritized areas of growth, agreed on specific measures for success, created steps for improvement,
and established acceptable timelines, all as part of the conversation-style process. After the
evaluation, Sophia asked the employee for feedback in their debrief of this new employee performance
evaluation procedure. The employee reported (and these are direct quotes):
"This was the best performance evaluation I have ever experienced."
"I felt empowered."
After the first successful evaluation, Sophia couldn't believe how positive and rewarding the experience
had been. She was amazed at how "the employee did all the hard work." She even commented that, "I was
nervous coming into this meeting, but this has been the best employee evaluation I have ever experienced."
On Sophia's side of the evaluation process, she realized establishing trust and using different
questioning techniques encouraged the employee to bring up his/her possible areas of need and
performance improvement. This approach facilitated a conversation or dialogue between the employee
and Sophia. Sophia even observed that the employee suggested areas of growth and need that she hadn't
considered. Guiding the employee to self-identify areas of need allowed the employee more buy-in.
These features alleviated Sophia's fears of "ruffling feathers" and lessened the
chance that she would revert to her bad habit of sweeping small issues under the rug. Instead,
Sophia's input was invited. She could still be "nice" while helping the employee to remediate and grow.
The traditional method of a boss telling the employee what must be improved often elicited feelings of fear,
defensiveness, or denial. This method was replaced with a conversational
approach, which left both the employee and the supervisor more at ease. This conversational approach, rather then the more traditional
superior/subordinate or parent/child confrontational style, established a deeper level of trust and
reduced the level of anxiety for both Sophia and the employee.
This performance evaluation process became one of professional development and partnering rather
than confrontation between adversaries. It was conducive to open ended conversations that continued
inside and outside of Sophia's office. It allowed both Sophia and her employees to be open to create
solutions, rather than be limited to HR forms, structures and legalese. Sophia had created for her
business "win-win" performance evaluations. Her employees were energized and clearer than ever before
on their goals. We had met our measures for success, within our time lines and were ready to move on
to the next tasks at hand.
