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Appraisal Time: a Polemic

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


Appraisals are one of the least enjoyed aspects of organisational life: few people enjoy conducting them and still fewer like attending them. Often they are done badly and many times this is largely due to a poor internal process, supported by weak (or absent) training and confounded by other pressing business priorities.

So an important part of career development, skills acquisition, organisational growth and good governance, gets squeezed into 25 minutes of of a rushed conversation, ticking of boxes and a superficial assessment followed by formulaic goal setting, stipulating weak goals.

Sound familiar?

I have only one message for this module:

‘Performance Appraisal is Important’

So give it the preparation and the time it deserves, do it well – by asking good questions, and listening hard. Whether your internal process is good, bad or absent, make it your priority to sit down with your team members at least quarterly and discuss openly:

  • what they have done
  • how each of you assesses their performance
  • what you each want from the next period and for the next one to three years
  • what goals will help them achieve these
  • what their realistic and stretch prospects are

It is not neuroscience, rocket science nor even high school chemistry. Doing a good appraisal requires only two things:

  1. That you care
  2. That you deploy a dose of common sense

Polemic Over: Onto Process

Your organisation will have its own specific process. Frank Scott-Lennon gives us a good generic one in the Appraisals Pocketbook.

Appraisal Process

Revision

We have already covered the tools you need, earlier in the Pocket Correspondence course, so work your way back through…

 

Further Reading

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