Nightmare on corporate street.

This guy gets a parrot but it’s got a bad attitude and foul vocabulary. He tries everything to change the bird’s attitude and clean up its talk but nothing works. Finally, in a moment of desperation, he puts the parrot in the freezer. For a few moments he hears the bird squawking, kicking and screaming and then, suddenly, all is quiet. He opens the freezer door. The parrot steps out and says, “I’m sorry that I offended you with my language and actions. I ask for your forgiveness. The guy’s astounded at the bird’s change in attitude and was about to ask what changed him when the parrot continued, “By the way, may I ask – what did the chicken do?”

I hate performance appraisals. I hated undertaking appraisals on my staff and I hated being appraised as well. It is one of the most challenging aspects of management as it requires a fair amount of wisdom, fortitude and a steely resolve to stand by your rating despite the remorseful or downright resentful eyes of your subordinates sitting before you. The organization trains you on the technical part of undertaking a performance appraisal, but no one ever tells you what to do when your staff member completely disagrees with your views, stands up on the table and starts screaming bloody murder. Nor do they tell you what to do when your employee dissolves into a disgusting mess of snot and tears in front of you. One CEO told me the other day that as far as he is concerned he manages by this mantra: “In God we trust, everything else is data.” How true this is, especially when it comes to assessing how our staff perform.

As a matter of course, it is much easier to appraise staff who have quantifiable, measurable targets. Produce X number of widgets every month, open Y number of accounts every week, book Z number of transactions every day. All those are easy to measure as the data is easily available. The harder task is to appraise staff who do not have easily determined quantifiable targets. And most staff fall into this category as they are in the support functions such as customer service, operations, risk management, finance, security. A lot of support functions focus largely on quality of service to the customer through error free expeditious processing and keeping control of the business. The same applies to organizations in the not for profit sector that are more service delivery driven than sales driven. How does one measure what one’s staff does knowing full well that what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done?

Well, only you as a manager have the answer as your staff have key outputs in their job descriptions – assuming you have given all your staff their job descriptions. Those key outputs have to be translated into key performance indicators (KPI’s) that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely- better known as SMART objectives. This is not rocket science. You cannot give an internal auditor, for example, a customer satisfaction rating of high as a KPI. If the internal auditor is doing her job well, the internal customers will more likely than not want to throttle the very life out of the auditor on any given day for raising red flags in the operations rather than give her favorable ratings. That speaks to relevance. The relevant KPI for the internal auditor therefore would be number of audits undertaken, number of findings resolved and number of process improvements that have resulted from the audit process.

As a manager, you have to prepare well before going into the performance appraisal. You should review the performance contracts well in advance and compare the KPIs to the actual performance you have observed. If the performance has statistical data required then you should have a reliable internal resource produce the management information (MI) data on a monthly basis for monitoring and tracking. The same data, which should be regularly shared with the staff in the team, will then form the basis of the performance appraisal. It means no surprises come the day of the appraisal as the information is not only being regularly tracked and monitored but it is also publicly available and not the secret weapon you unleash from under your shirt. If you stick to the script – which is that the numbers never lie- there really should be no drama. That drama would already have been unleashed on the MI resource’s desk each month when she published the data. [MI resources, by the way, are required to have a very thick rhino skin to go about their business safely]

As for you, the one being appraised, read your performance contract at the beginning of every year and not two days before your scheduled performance appraisal. Undertake an honest self-appraisal, putting your comments against every KPI and try – for the love of God and country, try- to be objective about what you have achieved. Then go to your appraisal meeting with your document in hand and be prepared to have the fight for your life. You see, the numbers never lie and your boss will have the numbers with him. The real numbers and not the massaged version on your self-appraisal where booking a transaction without getting the payment from a client counts. No, actually, it does not. Don’t look like a weakling and for crying out loud don’t weep if the outcome is not what you expected. It’s never that serious. Your appraisal is really a good time for you to determine if you are doing your job wrong, if you hate your job and if you hate your boss. If the answer to all those three is yes, then move on to something else. If you don’t, your boss will put you someplace cold, isolated and where only chicken carcasses survive. You choose.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka