Its Appraisal Time - Part 2

Its the appraisal season again at all companies which follow the business year as April to March cycle. In this article, I talk about a framework which can help the managers do a fair appraisal. This is based on a one and half decade of experience in handling teams - large and small. The framework is simple and flexible, thus keeping individual management style intact.

As I sat writing this article, I remembered that I started my LinkedIn article journey many years back and my first article was on same topic. ( https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/its-appraisal-time-aditya-singh/ ). Hence, I chose to name this as Part 2.

Over the years, across the companies - I have seen three kind of managers. One who take the appraisal process as an un-ncessary task given by HR, second who try to do the appraisal diligently but are not equipped sufficiently to overcome biases of recency, similar to me, central tendency, lineancy etc and third, who don't just understand the importance of a good appraisal discussion as a feedback process which is meant for a team member to understand their performance against the expectations.

Based on my experience and readings, I have prepared and refined and honed this framework what I call as HRT Framework. I believe that the framework can help all three kind of managers, in their own ways.

5 Parameters of the Framework (How to Rate your Team member) - Attitude, Approach, Effort, Results and Learnings.

• Attitude - Businesses are dynamic and the situations which can come can't always be predicted. Often, during the year, there are several difficult moments in business. Its in these moments, the attitude of the person comes to the fore - whether the person panics, or handle things calmly; whether the person passes the buck or takes charge; whether the person take things negatively or positively. As the famous quote goes, your attitude is what people will remember you for.

Let's imagine a town planner department where a team member's (let's call him Joy) responsibility is to ensure timely watering of the plants on the road medians, so that the road medians have a nice green patch. With a positive attitude, Joy can look at the end goal of how his work is contributing towards making his city look beautiful and roads looking greener. A negative attitude can make Joy look at the same as a mundane task of watering.

• Approach - This is about the approach taken by the individual towards their work. This involves evaluating aspects like - whether the approach is comprehensive and well researched, does it take stakeholders and scenario planning etc. into considerations. Does the approach focus on efficiency or effectiveness, does it focus on right way or results at any cost etc.

• Effort - This is the elephant in the room. Really ! In most appraisals, the appraisee keep talking about the efforts and managers mostly look for results. And then the disagreements start. To balance it all, 'efforts' should have a weightage - how much, however that depends on a lot of factors like context / organization culture / organization growth phase etc.

"Hope, is wishing for a thing to come true. Faith is believing it will come true. Work is making it come true. - Dr. Norman V Peale

• Result - Finally, in any organization to grow and achieve its targets - its planned results have to be achieved.

Coming back to the story of Joy. When he was put on the job, his first approach was to hire a water tanker and services of a driver. He himself used to go around in the tanker to ensure water was being given to the entire stretch. While he put in a lot of hard work, he observed a) That a lot of water was getting wasted with piped supply from a tanker; b)Many plants were dying / got missing / got damaged, despite regularly being given water and c) He was fast exhausting the allocated budget. He realised his mistakes, while talking to a senior in the department. Then, he approached the local horticulture institute and did two things - One, understood the plants planted on the median and their water requirements - so that there is no under watering or over watering, he set up the drip irrigation system along the entire stretch and started applying plant protective net around the delicate plants - these he got made with school students, while talking to them about importance of maintaining our city clean.

• Learnings - Final element of our framework is learnings. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone get some successes. What's important is learning from those successes as well as failures and being agile to introduce corrections in approach basis that. As our Joy did !

A quick summary:

Attitude - Approach - Efforts - Results - Learnings.

That's the simple framework - I have used this model over the years and find that its beauty is its simplicity yet comprehensiveness. The same model can be used at overall level for a person or at each individual KRA level as well. The same model can be used at a team level as well, for giving feedback in cross functional work perspective.

So, while doing the appraisals this year - try and find your own balance on the above five areas and then use that yardstick for everyone on the team. Follow the framework that your organization recommends, but to make sure to do an unbiased assessment, do try and practice the HRT parameters. I wish and hope it helps you - both as a manager as well as an appraisee themselves.

Happy Appraisals !