Don Blohowiak at BNET is talking about the shortcomings of performance reviews. In his mind, looking backwards to critique performance is a fundamentally foolish idea. From the post:
In the face of feedback, most people become defensive not receptive. The mental energy goes to self-protection not learning for improvement.
Since you can’t change the past, don’t spend a lot of time recounting it. Instead, focus on the future, which you can influence.
The thing is that the basic idea of performance reviews is to improve future results. As George Santayana said, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” It’s as true for the history of any one person as it is for the history of the world. Just moving on doesn’t cut it. A structured, focused look at past performance can lead to actionable changes for the future – and to performance gains for both the employee and the company.
October 5th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Hi Max
Just found your blog. Good stuff!
I recently wrote a piece about performance reviews at my blog:
http://learningvoyager.blogspot.com/2005/09/sock-it-to-me-as-corporate-year-begins.html
As an OD Guy, I try to look at performance reviews from a systems standpoint where I ask, “How will this process support what we are trying to accomplish as an organization?”
In my experience, all too often performance review collapses into a massive year-end exercise…
- of spreadsheets
- of meetings
- of forms
- of uncomfortable interactions
…that leaves the participants stressed, then relieved when it ends.
Terry