We need to change the way we manage people, the way we assess their performance, and the way we evaluate our leaders.

Every organization claims that its people are its most important resource. And yet, when I ask people how they like the way their performance is evaluated and how they like the way the review system is run, everybody laughs. No one has anything good to say about the appraisal system.

This strikes me as strange since there is nothing more vital than making sure that the performance of people is well managed and evaluated. Managing performance requires planning, coaching, and evaluating. In planning, you set goals, objectives, standards, expectations, and direction. Day-to-day coaching involves helping people win by accomplishing their goals. Evaluation involves assessing people’s performance over time.

There are two problems with the way most people’s performance is managed. First, people rarely get feedback on results—they never know how well they are doing unless they make a mistake. They are managed by sea gulls who fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on them and then fly out. There is no day-to-day feedback. Second, a performance review system exists, but nobody knows how to do it so that everybody gets rated high. I was just at a large telecommunications company, and the president told me that he found that 80 percent of the employees were rated as "excellent performers" and, yet, the organization wasn’t accomplishing its goals. In this case, the evaluation system obviously had nothing to do with the established goals, because if 80 percent of the people were performing well, the goals of the organization would have been met.

What often happens is that top management decides that the evaluation system is "too soft" and seeks to make it harder on people. A forced distribution is announced where managers can only rate a certain percentage of their people high or low, and the rest have to be in the middle. This "normal distribution" mentality is a popular way to sort people.

I have two concerns with the normal distribution mentality. The first problem is that most organizations do not hire losers. You don’t hear them saying, "We lost a few of our best losers last year. We’d better hire some more." Organizations either hire winners—people who have proven track records—or potential winners—people who they think can be trained to be good performers. By admitting this bias in hiring people, managers are clearly skewing the curve to the right, that is, they have an inherent bias for having good performers. They are not hiring a normal distribution of the population; therefore, they should not treat the work force as if there were a normal distribution curve.

My second concern is that when people are getting rated high and goals aren’t being accomplished, the problem is not the performance evaluation system. Rather, the problem really lies in performance planning and day-to-day coaching. The problem with most organizations is that in the planning stages, individual goals do not have much to do with the organizational goals. So often, people are asked to evaluate their employees on such things as "willingness to take responsibility" and "initiative"—all kinds of things that nobody knows the meaning of. When you’re asked to evaluate employees on things that neither you or your employees understand, their energy shifts to politically supporting the hierarchy and making sure they have a good relationship with their boss.

In performance planning, goal setting has to be consistent with the key goals that the organization needs to accomplish to survive and move forward. Once goals are clear, managers become cheerleaders, supporters, encouragers and guides for their people, helping their performance move in the direction of the goals. When it comes to goal achievement, managers are just as much responsible for their people’s performance as their people are!

If you want to improve employees’ self-esteem and goal accomplishment, performance planning and day-to-day coaching need to be the major focus. Performance evaluation should only be a review of things that you’ve been discussing with your people all along. Any new information shared with the employee at performance evaluation time is inappropriate. It is only a review.

Our work with Situational Leadership suggests that "there is no one best leadership style." It all depends on the development level of the follower on each of his or her particular tasks. A leader and follower must jointly establish goals and objectives and, then, determine for each of those goals and objectives what kind of supervision the boss needs to provide, what kind of help is needed and how the manager is going to provide that assistance.

We call this Partnering for Performance. That’s what’s needed. The whole process of managers running around as judges, critics, and evaluators should be forgotten. The emphasis should be on performance planning and coaching, so that when employee evaluations are conducted and 80 percent of the people get rated excellent, the organization is moving forward full tilt.

The Importance of Being a Manager
At the end of a recent session with some managers, I was reminded once again of the importance of being an effective manager. I told the group that there is no role as important.

Years ago my wife, Margie, wrote a book entitled Working Well with Mark Tager. She asked managers all over the country, "Can a bad boss make you sick?" What do you think the response was? Universally, everyone said "yes." Then they started mentioning ulcers, migraine headaches, sleepless nights, even heart attacks and cancer.

Clearly, a bad boss can make an employee’s life miserable. I’ll talk to a person one moment and they are thrilled with their job. Then, three months later, I find them down in the dumps. And in 99 out of 100 cases, the reason employees feel demoralized and no longer like their jobs is because they have a new boss who jerks them around, doesn’t appreciate them, doesn’t involve them in decision making and generally erodes their self-esteem.

I always emphasize that managing is a "people" job—one you do with people, not to them. Managers today have to be partners with their people. When we talk about partnering for performance, we say that managers and their people work together as teams. None of us is smarter than all of us!

One of the reasons why people were bad bosses in the past is because they spent all of their time thinking their job was to judge, evaluate, and criticize people. Today, once goals are set, a manager’s job is to get out of the way and help employees from the sidelines by getting resources and giving advice, but mainly in supporting and encouraging them. Managers should work for their people and do everything they can to help their people win. Judging and controlling are out!

We are all put here to help others. There is no nobler profession than a manager. What a wonderful ministry. Here you have an opportunity to help others be as good as they possibly can—on a daily basis!

I ask people all the time, "Given the fact that you spend 8 to 12 hours at work, would you rather be magnificent or ordinary?" Everybody votes for magnificent. I don’t think anybody heads off to work and says, "I think I’ll see how badly I can do today." People want to be wonderful. It’s the job of the manager to ring out that magnificence in people and create the environment where they feel safe, supported, and ready to do the best job possible in accomplishing key goals.

This responsibility is a sacred trust that should not be violated. The potential to guide others to their fullest potential is an honor, and one that should not be taken lightly. As managers, we hold the lives of others in our hands. Those hands need to be gentle, caring, and always supportive.

Are We Too Hard on Our Leaders?
At a recent conference, I had dinner with the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. In chatting with Dr. Mohamad, I discovered he had recently met President Clinton. I asked him what he thought of our president. He said, "I like him a lot better than former President Bush. He doesn’t know anything about the Far East, but at least he’s open to learning."

Then Dr. Mohamad made an interesting observation about the way we treat leaders in America. He said that it is very hard for the United States to get an outstanding leader because of the close scrutiny by the press. What Americans need to do is evaluate their leaders based upon their performance and behavior in office.

I think competent people shy away from leadership positions in this country for two reasons. They don’t want to put themselves or their families through the extensive public scrutiny, and they abhor the instant celebrity status we bestow upon character allegations against our leaders.

I’ll never forget Norman Vincent Peale saying to me one time, "If I were the Lord, I would be laughing because I gave everybody everything it takes to make their lives work. But then I threw in one final twist—free will. I gave them the capacity to make mistakes and goof up their lives."

Given the fact that we all have free will, how many of us can say that there is not something in our past that we would like to replay? We probably can’t even remember some of the things. Yet if we got into office, somebody would be ready to make a name or some money by reminding everyone about the foolish acts and decisions we made in our past. To me, if a leader has never made some mistakes or done anything stupid in his or her life, he or she probably hasn’t been trying to do much of anything.

I am writing a book right now with Don Shula, coach of the Miami Dolphins. Shula feels strongly that leaders today need to have strong convictions, or as he terms it, to be conviction-driven. Too many leaders today don’t seem to stand for anything and when they do stand, often it’s not very firmly.

Shula knows you can’t coach without convictions, and that you must be able to implement those convictions. He would rather have players with character—people he can count on—than superstars who want to be pampered.

While we ought to scrutinize and observe the performance of our leaders, we need to stop attacking their character flaws. I also feel our leaders need to have—and consistently hold to—their convictions. They have to set some ground rules in terms of what they are and are not willing to take.

Unless we and our leaders do something about the way they are treated, I think we will guarantee ourselves future mediocrity in our key leadership roles.
 

Ken Blanchard, contributing editor to Executive Excellence and coauthor of the One Minute Manager series, is chairman of Blanchard Training & Development, in Escondido, California, (800) 728-9730.