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Back-ground
The sign of bad performance management is when at the time of performance appraisal feedback session, an employee and manager have different views about an employee's performance.
The key reason for this is lack of sharing feedback on ongoing basis. The root-cause of this lack of sharing is because both the manager and the employee are uneasy in the feedback sharing situation. Therefore they keep on postponing the situation to the end of the year till it is enforced upon them by the organizational processes.
TIP
The year end performance appraisal feedback session should be an occasion to consolidate the feedbacks shared through-put the year. This should ideally result in both manager and the employee almost in synch on the employee's performance.
The idea behind 'through the year' feedback is that it should be online and closer to the point of action or observation. You may follow the rule ' the maximum shelf-life of an online feedback is 48 hours from the point of action'. Secondly both negative and positive feedback needs to be given with equal sense of intensity and sincerity.
One does not need to give feedback on every observation, till you become a feedback machine. Secondly, one does not need to match each negative feedback with a positive one. The idea is to give feedback on either when there is a sufficiently over or under-achievement on a task or a project OR when you see a trend. For example, I will not give a negative feedback on the first observation of my employee not being able to manage a conflict. I will observe, and if I see few more incidents like that, I will give my feedback.
One other point you may consider is to qualify your feedback. The feedback should not be black and white, as nothing else in the life is. If the feedback is on 'quality of project deliverable was inadequate', one needs to define on what was inadequate and what was adequate. One way to do this qualification is to provide a score. For example you can say ' I will rate your deliverables in the project as 6 out of 10. Now I will share with you why do you get 6 points and why do you fall short by 4 points’.
Giving feedback close to the observation is especially critical, when you are giving feedback on the leadership competencies. While an employee more or less knows on where he stands on the goals, it’s the quality of his leadership, where a manager and an employee can have different perceptions. Therefore, the feedback on leadership will need to be more in-depth and fairly close to the observation point. As the time passes, an employee and manager loose memory of what was said, what was observed and what was felt...
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