Aubrey Daniels is a clinical psychologist who has spent more than thirty years dedicated to helping people and organizations apply the scientifically proven laws of human behavior to improving workplace performance. I first heard
There were several key takeaways for me that day, but the one that had the biggest impact on me was his idea that annual performance appraisals are not only a big waste of time, but actually damaging to performance. This statement was both shocking and liberating to me. My background and experience up until then had been with very traditional, medium to large size companies, where I had been tasked with both giving and receiving many, many performance reviews over the years. We were always trying to improve the process, use a new form, make it easier and find a way to get them all done by a certain time. No matter what new flavor of performance review we tried, we still always dreaded them. We dreaded giving them and receiving them.
I think the one statement Daniels made that I remember most was that “the most recent trend is to take this universally despised, ineffective, time-wasting practice we dread doing once a year, and force everyone to do it quarterly.” OMG, that was exactly what we were talking about doing! We were stuck in the old paradigm of trying to fix a system that wasn’t just broken, but was fundamentally contrary to what we wanted to accomplish.
Daniels’ book OOPS! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money finally set me free. He does a great job of outlining what we’re doing wrong, why it’s wrong, why we keep doing it anyway, and what we should do instead. In addition to Performance Appraisals, which is #3 out of the 13, he also points out the flaws of other popular ideas like Employee of the Month programs, Employee Rankings, Rewarding Things a Dead Man Can Do, and Overvaluing Smart Talented People. Fascinating stuff.
Here’s an outline of what he teaches us about Performance Appraisals.
Daniels points out five reasons why companies say they continue with their traditional performance appraisal process: Employee Development, Motivation, Promotion, Pay, and Legal Termination. Legal termination is my favorite – we’re so sure we’ve hired poorly that we want to build a case that will hold up in court when we fire them and they sue us (see point 2 above – and spend your energy hiring A Players and taking good care of them rather than building systems to support your sloppy hiring and poor management.) Daniels does a good job pointing out how performance appraisals fail to accomplish any of these five.
But honestly, I think the biggest reason companies continue with this old-school way of thinking is simply because it’s just what has always been done and they don’t know what the alternative is. In fact, I’ve seen very successful, growing, companies talk about this as a benchmark for proving they are becoming a mature, professionally run company. What a shame… they’re going to throw away the naturally developed, positive, culture-building ways that probably already exist to adopt this negative legacy process, just because it’s what they think successful companies should do.
If what you are trying to accomplish is an environment where every employee does their best work every day, then you need a method for letting people know how they’re doing…. every day. Daniels surmises that “if all employees did outstanding work every day there would be no need for an appraisal system. Therefore, organizations need the knowledge, systems, and management practices to create such an organization, because it is possible.”
I believe there are three key components needed to make this work:
It really is okay to walk away from this outdated management practice if you understand what you need to accomplish and create an environment where people can be accountable and successful. It still requires a lot of work, but you’ll be spending your time, energy and resources on very productive and positive forms of reinforcement instead of wasting them on this negative and unproductive legacy.