Insights on Excellence | "Insights on Excellence" Archive

Why not try performance management instead of a performance appraisal?

by Stephen Hawley Martin
for Virginia Business
June 22, 2006

Do you dread doing performance appraisals? If you do, you aren't alone. Most managers dread doing them because they don't have good data sources from which to draw information. Most employees go into an appraisal with the assumption that if they have heard nothing, they must be doing okay although many experience anxiety before a performance appraisal because they really don't know what the appraisal is going to reflect.

The truth is, performance appraisals as stand-alone events don't work.

What does work, however, is performance management.

A performance appraisal is a formal annual or semi-annual event in which the manager sits down with the employee and discusses past performance, with an eye to the future. Performance management, on the other hand, is an ongoing process to manage performance. The manager maintains documentation and keeps up a dialogue with the employee in a continuous effort to change work behaviors and outputs. The performance-management process involves rewarding and acknowledging good performance, identifying and rectifying deficient performance and applying consequences to unchanged behavior and performance.

Performance appraisals are often components of a performance management system, becoming a summary of continuous performance feedback.

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Stephen Hawley Martin is a former principal of The Martin Agency in Richmond and the author of more than half a dozen books including his newest, Lean Enterprise Leader: How to Get Things Done Without Doing It All Yourself. He is editor and publisher of The Oaklea Press, a book publishing business dedicated primarily to helping business executives increase productivity.