Why You Shouldn’t Evaluate Others
Everyone who has ever managed a larger organization can probably understand the desire to simplify things as much as possible to keep their sanity. This need for simplicity then easily morphs into conformity and fights against individuality. The organization stops treating each individual for what they are, individuals, and looks at the employees as interchangeable pieces in the staffing puzzle.
The whole talent development system and career advancement criteria are then designed to help make everyone as similar as possible. And here comes the performance management system and evaluations.
As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall write in Nine Lies About Work, one of the biggest lies in the corporate world is the idea that people can reliably rate other people. The goal settings, performance reviews, competency models, and feedback are based on this idea. And it is faulty.
“Human beings are incapable of rating other human beings accurately and consistently.”
As Buckingham and Goodall point out, several decades of their research, as well as numerous papers written on the topic of our ability to rate others, leads to an inescapable conclusion. In the real world, outside of academic papers, human beings are incapable of rating other human beings with accuracy and consistency.
You can’t evaluate others
People use specific rating patterns regardless of who they are rating. Your rating about other people says more about you than about them. Your unique idiosyncrasies have a more significant impact on how you rate others than their actual behavior, skills, and traits.
Human resources professionals are usually aware that the rating by one person can be skewed. That is why you go for 360-degree feedback and try to gather rating information from managers, subordinates, and peers. The more data you can get, the better. You get all this data, average them out, and have a correct rating. Right?
Unfortunately, no. This sort of crowd wisdom works only when the crowd is well-informed. The problem is that no one truly knows you. You have a bunch of people who have no clue who you are trying to rate you. The average of nonsensical data is still nonsensical.
“More feedback from more people won’t make the data better. It can make them worse as the one or two people who know you will be overshadowed by the majority who have no clue.”
The idea behind getting more data and averaging them out to get the real deal would only work in situations where that data is random. But rating by other people is not random. It includes systemic errors. More feedback from more people won’t make the data better. It can make them worse as the one or two people who know you will be overshadowed by the majority who have no clue.
Someone may even know you but not the domain they are rating you on. Let’s say you ask a colleague from the finance department to assess your accounting skills as part of a performance review. They don’t know you that well but will give it a shot. Based on your statements and questions you were asking in the past, they rate your accounting skills as 4 out of 10. Then you go and ask four of your friends from the engineering department whom you often interact with when they need help with reimbursement of their work-related bills. These four believe that since your job is an accountant and you can usually help them, you are probably 9 out of 10. If you average it out, you are 8. But are you? What value does this number have? And how come that one person gives you four and another nine? If these data truly described you, then they would be the same from everyone. Since they are different from different people, it means that they don’t describe you, but they describe something about them.
360-degree feedback works… sometimes
360-degree feedback is most often used for developmental purposes. Since different raters will see various aspects of your performance, they can provide you with feedback that your direct manager may not be able to do. This feedback will differ from each other, and that is the whole point. If all the raters in 360-degree feedback gave you the same message, there would be no point in doing it in the first place. So, if you want to get some ideas on how different people see you, go for 360. However, it is essential to understand the limitations that make it somewhat useful for developmental purposes but tricky for performance management.
Researchers Brian Hoffman, Charles E. Lance, and Bethany Bynum from the University of Georgia, and William A. Gentry from the Center for Creative Leadership suggest that the impact of rater source (peer, boss, subordinate) is roughly three times larger than the impact of performance dimension when it comes to variance in the feedback. Furthermore, the worst culprit in differences in the rating is the idiosyncratic rater effect when we unconsciously project our personality into the ratings of other people.
“When presenting the results of 360-degree feedback, you need to split them by source.”
This means that when presenting the results of 360-degree feedback to the person who is receiving it, it is important to split the results by source. The rater source effect can be then interpreted as coming from differences in the rater’s opportunity to observe ratee behavior, a different understanding of the desired performance, and having different interaction goals.
The idiosyncratic rater effect plays a role, so aggregating data even by source (peer, boss, subordinates) is still problematic. It can result in a loss of valuable information. Practically speaking, though, having lots of divergent opinions coming from the team is cumbersome and may not lead to a clear path to improvement.
Does it mean feedback is useless?
This being said, feedback is important. The right type of feedback. Harsh and critical feedback doesn’t really lead to learning opportunities unless it is given with respect and visible care. Otherwise, it just triggers defensiveness. Positive feedback is not a meaningless gesture, but it is encouraging and important for learning.
How does the inability to reliably rate others fit in? We may not be good at assessing others, but it doesn’t make it useless. I may not be totally objective when giving you my feedback, but it would still tell you my subjective view of you. And that is valuable too. If you receive feedback from others saying you are a bad driver, they may be all wrong, but it still makes you think about why they would believe that. Maybe it is not the actual driving but the way you talk about it. Any feedback always tells you something. Especially in leadership. Knowing how others feel about your actions is useful, even if it is subjective.
“Feel free to use feedback in any form, not to evaluate people but to help them grow.”
Research indicates that it is unrealistic to expect large improvements from everyone once they receive feedback. The most improvement happens when the feedback you are getting indicates that change is necessary, the recipients request the feedback and want to know how they are doing, understand and agree with the feedback, and believe that they can and will change if they act on the feedback so they take action. So yes, feel free to use feedback in any form, not to evaluate people but to help them grow.
There is one thing you can rate reliably
So what can you do if you can’t reliably rate other people? Because of all your biases, you can’t even reliably rate yourself. But you can reliably rate your own experience. You can tell whether you like something or not. You can tell how something made you feel. You can do this reliably. But only you can do it. No one else can do it for you and tell you how your experience was.
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“You can’t reliably rate other people, but you can reliably rate your own experience.”
If I ask you to rate my leadership skills like strategic focus, drive, developing others, managing performance, political skills, and other leadership competencies, you can’t reliably do it. If I ask you whether you will follow me or not, you can immediately answer yes or no. This then clearly represents whether you see me as a leader or not.
The same goes the other way around. Let’s imagine I’m your manager. If I give you feedback on your potential to become a manager, it doesn’t tell you much, as I’m not able to rate you well. No one is. I can give you some feedback on what you should improve. I will try to mold you into my version of the ideal manager. I may even come up with some specific goals and actions for you to take. Other things might be on my agenda, like not having enough budget, not feeling we need a new manager, or having plans for someone else already. Ultimately, you will hear just a managerial mumble-jumble. It is unreliable and, for you personally, rather useless. I may tell you that you are almost there. But if I tell you that I won’t promote you today, you know that it is a hundred percent reliable. That is how I feel right now. I don’t see into your head to accurately assess your abilities, but I see into mine. I don’t believe you can have that promotion yet.
Managing performance
Similarly, when talking about performance, each of us has our own definition of what good performance looks like. If you ask me to rate your performance, you won’t get reliable data back. However, if you ask me whether I go to you if I have a task that requires excellence and top performance, I can say yes or no. I can reliably say whether I trust you to get that work done. I’m not judging you. I’m judging my perception of you. I’m not saying whether you are good or bad. I’m just saying what my perception of you is. Another person may have a different perception.
This is why even some widely used systems like the nine-box grid don’t work. The nine-box grid is a talent development and management tool where you rate a person’s potential (high, medium, low) on one axis and their performance (outstanding, effective, under) on the other axis. A person’s potential is essentially a projection of their performance in the future. Take out your crystal ball. The system is here to simplify the manager’s life and create a bit of order in the corporate chaos. But since no one can reliably rate other people’s performance and definitely not their potential, the data coming to the tool are nonsensical. So the output is nonsensical too.
What can you do instead?
If none of the widely used management tools work, what can you do if you are asked to manage other people and measure their performance? The only way forward is to stop asking whether the person possesses a certain quality, and start asking what our reaction to that person would look like if they indeed possessed that quality.
Instead of asking, “Is this person writing good articles?” Or, “What is the quality of the articles written by this person?” You ask yourself, “Would I go to this person if I needed an article written?”
“In management, reliable subjectivity is better than unreliable objectivity.”
You may object that this approach would be highly subjective. And you are correct. It would be subjective. However, it would also be reliable. As opposed to the seemingly objective but wildly unreliable data you get from most performance management tools.
It may not give you a complete picture of the person, but it gives you enough to work with. When it comes to management and leadership, reliable subjectivity is the king.
What is your take on managing performance? Do you believe the current systems work and are fair to individual people? Or do you believe they are in place to simplify management in big companies at the expense of individual employees?
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Originally posted on my blog about management, leadership, communication, coaching, introversion, software development, and career The Geeky Leader or follow me on Facebook and Twitter: @GeekyLeader