Page 150 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

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Supportive Feedback

low performance evaluation and wake-up call. Not only would it
be unfair to punish Tom because he had a lousy supervisor, but I
could guarantee that after reading the review Tom would become
so upset that he would disengage and most likely start looking
for work elsewhere. In light of our conversation, I asked Andrew to
reconsider his evaluation. Begrudgingly, he raised a few of the low-
est scores.
When we reconvened the following week, Tom sat quietly
reading his review. When he finished, he looked up at Andrew and
said, “I cannot believe that in the five years that I have worked for
you that you did not respect me enough to tell me that I wasn’t
meeting your expectations.” Tom was hurt and angry, and he
had a right to be. He told Andrew that he didn’t see much point
in working for someone whom he had obviously been failing for
such a long time. It took a pay raise and six months to get Tom
back in the game. If you respect your employees, you will give
them regular feedback; you won’t leave them assuming or guess-
ing how they are doing. As you look at your team roster, do you
have players who haven’t received the kind of supportive feedback
they need from you to continue improving? Begin a dialogue
today, and don’t wait for a performance review.

The Dreaded Performance Review
Most organizations would be well advised to throw out and dis-
continue their performance review forms and processes. The
fact that supervisors and employees uniformly hate the perfor-
mance review process should tell us that something isn’t work-
ing right. The pain associated with the review process comes
from supervisors not having provided employees with ongoing