The Man Who Cured the Performance Review

A Practical and Engaging Guide to Perfecting the Art of Performance Conversation

Graham Winter

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780730377993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Is there any other business process that consumes as much time and as many resources, damages as many relationships, generates as much ridicule and delivers as little value as the performance review?

Following the takeover of one of the world's most-loved franchises, employees are buckling under bureaucratic performance reviews instigated by an overzealous new owner. Morale is at rock bottom, trust between employees and managers has all but evaporated and staff are leaving. Two members of the team set out to find a cure for the ills of the performance review, eventually discovering a universal solution that is stunning in its simplicity and a breakthrough in its effectiveness.

In The Man Who Cured the Performance Review, Graham Winter weaves an engaging story that presents a framework to replace the bureaucracy of the performance review with simple tools and practices for fostering real performance conversations.

This book will inspire and guide you and your colleagues to:

• eliminate the fear of feedback
• create powerful two-way performance conversations
• simplify the alignment of business goals to individual behaviour.

The Man Who Cured the Performance Review is a must-read for any manager, team leader or employee who wants to perfect the art of real conversations that will see them perform at their highest level.

part I: the review

chapter 1: hr harry and the perfect performance review

Harry Robinson took over as Chief of Human Resources for Santa Enterprises at the time of the merger. Known to everyone (apart from himself) as HR Harry and reporting to the General Manager, Corporate Services, Harry was nearing the end of a thirty-year-plus career that began in Personnel and ended in Human Resources. He preferred Personnel and believed in running a tight ship. Harry liked to be well organised, expected his staff to be the same, always wore a tie (even on weekends) and prided himself on having the sharpest set of HR processes in the industry.

Like many of his colleagues at XFS head office, Harry firmly believed that one of the secrets to a well-functioning organisation was a thorough, meticulously managed and strictly applied performance review. When all he found at Santa Enterprises was what he described as ‘an apology for a performance review’ Harry dedicated every waking moment to his vision of creating the perfect performance review.

Shortly after the acquisition Harry had assembled a group of managers and team leaders for a two-day training workshop that would showcase his new performance review system and train these people to bring his vision to life.

‘The performance review is a critical part of the whole performance cycle’, explained Harry to a curious audience. ‘The review will enable us to objectively evaluate the per-formance of all employees and then allocate pay rises in line with our budget.’

A sceptical manager from Sweets Division raised her hand. ‘How can it be objective?’ she asked.

Harry replied with an almost direct quote from the performance review manual: ‘You will be using a well-researched checklist of behaviours and applying that stan-dardised checklist to every employee. This rating and ranking of employees on well-defined scales gives us a complete set of metrics.’

Harry was full of jargon and pride; his colleagues thought he was full of something else.

‘Rating and ranking? What’s that?’ queried a team leader from Warehousing who had been with Santa Enterprises for twenty years and had no idea what Harry was on about.

‘Firstly, you will be rating your staff member’, Harry replied, with extra emphasis on the word ‘rating’. ‘That rating will be from one — unacceptable — to five — outstanding.’

The manager nodded vaguely. He’d never seen a walking, talking procedures manual before.

‘After completing ratings on all personnel you will enter these into the PMIRS, and then rank your employees so that management can identify the top and bottom ten per cent of performers.’

‘What’s PMIRS?’, enquired someone.

HR Harry stood and felt tall. He knew his system was bulletproof.

‘PMIRS is our Performance Management Information Recording System.’ Someone scoffed loudly but Harry ploughed ahead resolutely. ‘This state-of-the-art system not only provides all the forms and data analysis that you need, but will also speed up the review process by generating perfect phrases to describe staff when you fill in the PRFs.

‘Oh, sorry, I should explain’, he smiled smugly. ‘PRFs are the performance review forms that you will download when needed.’

Georgie, Senior Team Leader in Wrapping, had heard enough. ‘One of our suppliers has a system like that’, she announced.

‘And have they seen the benefits?’ enquired HR Harry rather too optimistically.

Georgie giggled. ‘Well, they reckon that everyone ends up with a “three” no matter what they do.’

‘Why?’ asked HR Harry more cautiously.

‘It’s like this’, explained Georgie, enjoying being the centre of attention. ‘Apparently no-one ever gives a “one” because you have to go through the pain of counselling someone, you can only give a “two” if the employee is new in the job, a “four” means the person is exceptional so you really shouldn’t give many of those away or it blows the budget, and no-one has ever been given a “five”. So they say it’s completely useless!’

The whole room erupted in laughter.

Harry was exasperated but even more certain that these insolent managers and team leaders needed the discipline of the performance review to pull them into line.

‘That sounds like a very badly managed system’, he replied before yet another team leader jumped into the conversation.

‘I’ve got a great team,’ she said, ‘so why do I have to rank some of them as poor performers?’

‘Do we have an unlimited budget?’ asked Harry.

There was a pause then a tentative reply: ‘I guess not’.

‘You guess not?’ snarled Harry. ‘Then how do you pro-pose to allocate salary increases without an objective system to separate one person from another?’

The team leader wasn’t ready to give up yet. ‘I don’t know’, she replied sincerely, ‘but giving people unfair per-formance evaluations will just wreck team spirit’.

There were nods and murmurs of support across the packed room.

Harry was losing patience, but ever the bureaucrat he sensed the need to reassure his audience.

‘I have had many years’ experience in the army’, he began to audible groans, ‘where there are some of the greatest examples of teamwork because of the discipline of rating and ranking of performance’.

Managers muttered loudly among themselves and more hands went up to ask questions.

‘Enough’, announced Harry. ‘This company has been without the discipline of an effective performance review system for too long. There is substandard performance from many employees, and we owe it to our high-performing staff to provide them with feedback and reward.’

‘No-one would disagree with that, but why does it have to be so complicated?’ asked another voice from the back.

‘It’s not complicated, it’s thorough’, insisted Harry. ‘And it will give you more authority to deal with employees.’

‘Sounds good to me’, announced Ted, Manager of Sleigh Maintenance and a recent draftee from another XFS business. ‘I say we just get on with it.’

A few others nodded in unenthusiastic agreement, which gave Harry his lead to flick the first page of instruc-tions for the PMIRS onto the projection screen.

As they read the first paragraph, the folk of Santa Enter-prises wondered what had happened to the happy, friendly culture that Santa had created when he was the boss.

Xmas Franchise Systems

Santa Enterprises PMIRS Manual

In December all Santa Enterprises employees will be reviewed by their direct superior using the electronic PMIRS to provide the data needed for rating and ranking performance, establishing salary levels, apportioning bonuses and defining development activities. This objective electronic system will eliminate the bias of managers and employees and provide the information required by management to plan and execute the human resource strategy.

Harry J Robinson

Chief of Human Resources

seven reasons the performance review is ill

My American friend was a good storyteller and already had me jumping to the overhead locker in the plane to grab pen and paper to jot down some of the ills of the performance review that sounded so familiar.

Are any of these a feature of your organisation? (Use the questionnaire that follows to assess the health of the performance review in your business.)

• Bureaucracy gone mad. HR Harry is an extreme case, but so often management loses sight of the reason a review of performance can be valuable, and instead creates a complicated and unnecessarily time-consuming system. As a general guide, the more rules, the worse the system and consequently the greater the ridicule from the people who are supposed to use it.

• Feedback that is too late. Any manager who is relying on a six-monthly or an annual performance review to provide feedback and manage performance issues is setting themselves up to fail.

• The platform doesn’t fit the business. The performance review platform will not be effective if it doesn’t suit the business — in this case, the computer-based system. For example, one of my clients runs a trucking business and has an almost totally paper-based performance review system, which suits the hands-on, practical style of staff and the way the business operates. Another client, a high-technology manufacturer, has a system that is mostly online, and it works for this client because the staff are comfortable online and have ready access to a computer.

• One person’s ‘two’ is another person’s ‘four’. It’s hard enough to get people to rate anything consistently on a one-to-five scale, but without clear definitions for each rating, and some common sense about using all the rating numbers, the end result becomes a farce.

• Ranking is for tennis players. When Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, advocated the value in ranking people’s performance and targeting the bottom ten per cent almost everyone rushed to copy this little gem. While no-one will question the need to improve poor performance, public ranking of people often damages the teamwork between managers and their direct reports.

• HR owns the review. While HR continues to be seen as owner and guardian of the performance review it is likely to stay ill. Ownership of the performance planning and review system should be put in the hands of the people who will most benefit. HR should then partner with them to make it work.

• Unrealistic expectations of the review. The performance review seems to suffer from schizophrenia. Some people expect it to deliver wonders, while others expect it to deliver nothing. We need to be realistic about what we want from the performance review before it can be cured.

Are there even more things not well with the review?

chapter 2: more ridicule than review

It was a ritual established long before Ralph Hampton Jr and his financiers decided that they could own Christ-mas. Every morning at 7.30 a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• part I: the review
• part II: find the cause, find the cure
• part III: the prescription
• part IV: the cure