Quit Trying to Fix Performance Management

We have such a love/hate relationship with performance management. What's more, our love and hate are directly correlated with how the results impact us. Either we get evaluated and rewarded in accordance with how we think we should or it is an unfair, unjust, broken process that must be fixed. But how can we fix something that has such a direct and interlocking tie to personal association?

Personal Association - Judging the credibility or viability of something or someone based on how it or they affect us personally.

To complicate matters even more, the high personal association rests in the employees being evaluated and the evaluators themselves. This is true no matter how objective we try and make the process or the systems they run on. Take, for instance, performance objectives. These are supposed to be short descriptions of 'What' we expect employees to accomplish. If written well, they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. But who writes them? Who approves them? Who determines whether the tasks are achievable or what equates to a fair measurement? On other side, there is the 'How' in the form of performance elements or competencies. They come complete with standards to help employees and evaluators understand and distinguish different levels of performance. Still, how someone views specific competencies (communication, critical thinking, etc.) and performance levels will override any written standard. These challenges are proven time and time again as board members struggle to normalize ratings or deal with raters and reviewers who are labeled Santa Claus or the Grinch depending on their rating history. Meanwhile, employees are almost always certain that their ratings are a poor reflection of their actual performance and impact. Who's right?

Organizations go through performance management program tweaks and resets every couple of years. Such things are necessary as people continue to scrutinize, litigate, and game a system that has human hands and minds at its epicenter. What's more, the biggest performance management complaints remain the same regardless of the frequency of changes.

1. Poor Feedback - "I received a Successful instead of an Excellent or Outstanding and no one told me exactly why. What's more, they didn't tell me how I could have received a higher score. The feedback process is complete bullsh*t!"
2. I Don't Trust the Review Boards - "We get rated by managers who actually know our work but the board just sends the ratings back or makes their own decisions about how we should be compensated."
3. My Reviewer Has No Idea What I Actually Do - "Ms. Michaels has talked to me maybe twice this year and she couldn't describe my position with any degree of specificity. Yet she's my reviewer for some reason."
4. We're Evaluated Against the Wrong Things - "We should be rated and rewarded for the depth we bring to the missing" versus "we should value breadth of knowledge and experience".

There is one commonality between these recurring complaints and it's a doozy. None of them have anything to do with the actual program. They are tied to the people who operate on both sides of it. To wit:

1. Programs don't give feedback, people do. Programs don't determine the quality or accuracy of the feedback given or whether the feedback is acceptable. People do.
2. Programs don't extend or remove trust. People do.
3. Programs aren't responsible for understanding employee roles and contributions. People are.
4. Programs don't determine what standards people will be rated against. People do.

I get it, you're the choir and as such you fully realize that we can work on policy and procedure changes, spend money on newer systems, and hire consultants to help determine the most impactful competencies. None of it will resolve the human issues at the core of performance management.

Let's acknowledge:

• Some leaders don't know how to give feedback.
• Some managers disguised as leaders are not interested in giving feedback.
• Some employees who get specific and credible feedback will still take it personal and rail against the program.
• Some board members are dishonest and lack integrity.
• Some employees won't trust board members unless and until the board certified results positively impact them.

Am I wrong? How is it possible that any program can incur the same complaints year-after-year, even as its most specific and acute details change? Because...gasp, managing performance will be subjective as long as people have a role on either side of the management. Some will read this and say, "yep, we need to take humans out of the process". Nope. Doing so would only lead to complaints that sound like:

"No! My rater knows my performance. Just remove the reviewer and the board."

"What? Entrust my evaluation and the bonuses to a computer who can't understand or distinguish different levels of performance or impacts?"

"I get it. Take humans out of it so that the feedback process can be even less specific and engaging that it already is. Not!"

In other words, we complain about the human part until we're approached with removing the human part. Here's the thing and there's really no way around it.

• If we are going to align performance to pay, promotions, and employment then we must have means to evaluate it.
• If we are going to evaluate it, humans must be involved. After all, performance management goes way beyond the number of products expected and the number of products delivered.
• As long as humans are involved, performance management will have elements of subjectivity.
• If humans were replaced by algorithms, it would still be subjective because 'how' people execute their roles and the quality and impact of their deliverables are subjective.

Performance management challenges come down to the same root issues that nearly every culture challenge is tied to: High Personal Association, Valuing Mission Over Leadership, High Negative Messaging, and Institutional Distrust.

Institutional Distrust: Exhibiting distrust towards an entire institution or institutions of people (‘the workforce’, ‘the leadership’).

BOTTOM LINE: As long as institutional distrust exists, anything (training, brown bags, performance management results, etc.) that comes from that specific institution will be seen through a lens of skepticism and thus buy-in will prove elusive.

Low Systems Thinking: Complaining about a system without understanding how it operates, what its interdependencies are, etc. 

BOTTOM LINE: As long as people do not fully understand the performance management system, they will be forever misinformed.

Valuing Mission Over Leadership: Focusing a majority of time and energy on the direct execution of the mission instead of more human centered aspects of personal development and care.

BOTTOM LINE: As long as people (leaders and employees) are focused more on the mission than the people who execute it, performance management efforts will be placed in the ‘nice to have’ bin and treated accordingly. 

High Personal Association: Attributing the credibility of something based on how it affects your personally.

BOTTOM LINE: As long as people have high personal association, they will only see performance management as successful when it is benefitting them in ways that they believe are beneficial.

Performance management is an emotional topic and all of the root issues are culture related. Culture is, by definition, collective regard and social norms. How the collective regards it will determine their social norms, to include how they talk about it and react to it. This relates to the negative culture cycle wherein a couple of people having angst about it and sharing that angst with others can lead to rumor, gossip, storytelling and misinformation until it ultimately becomes a complacency problem. This explains how a new program or system can be persona non grata within two weeks of its release. People have already created and stirred a narrative.

All to say, there are no policy, process, structure, or technology changes that can be levied that will fix how people feel about performance management if they have high institutional distrust and high personal association. This will be further compounded if their leadership (or peers) value mission over leadership. Why? Because eventually, the workplace complacency will be met on equal footing with the leadership’s perception that performance management is a distraction, at least when compared to the mission. At the end of the day, both side will have minimal engagement. This brings us to the fourth root issue, low systems thinking. After all, why would I care to know more about a system that I don’t trust (workforce) or don’t value (leadership)? Hence, low training numbers, low percentage of mid-points completed, etc.

Invest in more performance management improvements at your own risk. Just don't assume that change will occur unless and until a culture shift has occurred too.