Did you ever know a manager who waited until performance evaluation time to “sock it to” an employee? This is a pretty horrible tactic for a number of reasons – most obviously becuase the employee isn’t given the chance to adjust his or her behavior and then essentially punished for not doing so. It’s bad for the employee becuase they get broadsided and bad for the company becuase it has lost the opportunity to fix things along the way (if there was indeed anything to fix in the first place).

This topic is being discussed in depth over at Workforce Management’s online discussion boards. There are a number of resources mentioned – a very “rich” thread. Worth checking out.

A quote from MilesSW:

If you have a puppy who piddles in the corner, do you wait eight months for its performance appraisal to whack it with a newspaper? Well, you never whack it with a newspaper, but you most certainly don’t wait eight months. To modify human behavior, there needs to be immediate positive consequence for positive behavior and immediate negative consequence for negative behavior.

It’s people like this who give management a bad name. Keep the employee, dump the “manager”.