I keep hearing that the Club for Growth is on Converse Chellis’ case for some raises given without performance reviews. I have no idea whether there is a problem there or not (I had trouble finding any elaboration, although I guess it’s out there somewhere).
But I do know this: In my experience (close to 30 years in management), performance reviews are THE biggest waste of time in corporate America. I have wasted YEARS of my life — late nights at the office because of the impossibility of getting this pointless crapola done during the regular working day because there’s actual WORK to do — filling out those blasted things, which sometimes go on for 10 pages or more, with essay question after essay question.
It made for a particularly vicious form of madness when I was a supervising editor in a newsroom and didn’t have a private office. Whenever you saw the metro editor or government editor or photo editor or whichever editor trying to hide in a dark corner of the newsroom at an odd hour, hunkered over a computer muttering, looking like he’d bite the head off anyone who bothered him, he was probably doing performance reviews.
Basically, I always sort of figured that if the employee didn’t know what I thought of the job he or she was doing, then somebody wasn’t paying attention, and probably would ignore the eval as well — because I’ve never been shy about telling people on the spot what I think about what they’re doing.
It particularly became absurd when I headed the editorial department, full of very senior people who usually worked out the kinks in their job performance years earlier, else they wouldn’t have gotten there. Sure, we all have flaws, but at that point in your career they’re pretty permanent, more in the nature of fundamental elements of one’s character. So you end up saying the same things year after year — he’s great at this, she’s not so great at that — and it looks like either you’re a lazy manager (failing to come up with fresh observations), or the employee is obstinately refusing to improve. When the truth of the matter is, the reason you’ve been employing the person all these years is that his or her good qualities far outweigh the bad.
I lessened the pain of doing the blasted things by inventing my own evaluation system, which I got away with in my last few years at the paper. Short and to the point: I’d list three strengths (no more than a line or two on each), three weaknesses, three accomplishments since the last review, and three goals for the coming year. And I’d have the employee do the same, and then we’d sit down and compare them, and come up with a synthesis for the official report. This didn’t take so long, but I still hated it.
Evaluations became even more onerous in recent years when, more often than not, there was no raise attached to them. At least it gave me an incentive to get them done at some point because I knew I was holding up the subject’s raise. With no raise attached, my only motivation was to end the nagging from HR. And I can take a LOT of nagging.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I was thrilled to read a review this morning (in the Club for Growth’s favorite newspaper, ironically enough) of a book entitled “GET RID OF THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW!” An excerpt:
This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities… How could something so obviously destructive, so universally despised, continue to plague our workplaces?
Amen to that. I don’t know anything about the authors, Samuel A. Culbert and Lawrence Rout, but as far as I’m concerned they are geniuses. Someone needs to give them a good review, and a nice raise…