Episode 5 – The Annual Appraisal is Lost
In this podcast, we discuss a simple technique to make the annual appraisal useful at work. One of the mainstays of business has always been the annual appraisal.
Since time and memorial business people have struggled to use them as an effective tool for business. There is a better way.
Read the Annual Appraisal Podcast Transcript:
"Annual appraisals just don't work the way you're doing them. My name is Darren Smith and you're at the home of Sticky Learning, MBM, trainers to the UK grocery industry."
The Traditional Annual Appraisal
"I worked in the corporate world for many years, commuting to London, working for one of the top four UK supermarkets. It was time for the annual appraisal, and what happened at this time where people were taken into rooms in pairs. The line manager took the report in for these long going meetings around the annual appraisal and the documentation was huge."
Has it Changed?
"That's probably no different to what you're doing today. You're either a report or a line manager knowing that the dreaded annual appraisal adds very little, yet they've done year in year out at most companies."
"So let's call him Richard. We'll change the names to protect the guilty. I go into a room with Richard, my line manager at the time. I'm a cheese buyer. We sit down and we begin. The first few minutes of this is an annual appraisal. We're here for maybe an hour, an hour and a half. We're going to talk about your performance."
Don't Start With Feedback
"Now what we should have done at that point is taken the objectives that I'd been set and run through those. But Richard started with feedback. What he then did was pull out a book. Now, I'd seen this book over the last 12 months. But, I didn't really know what it was apart from he'd written some things in it. I thought it was what some time managers call a daybook, where you just sort of jot down meetings and notes and so on."
Annual appraisal: Effective business tool
127 Things I Did Wrong
"Well, this book, he opened it, I think he was on about page 12 or so. He opened it on page 12 and my name was at the top. What he'd done and been doing over the last 12 months as he had captured 127 things that I'd done wrong. 127 things that he hadn't told me until my annual appraisal that these are the things you could do better or you'd done wrong were his words."
"I was shocked. Now, in my early twenties, I didn't know that this wasn't the right way to do appraisals. I had no idea. And what happened over the next, I think it was an hour, hour and a half, he went through each of the 127 items and asked me why I'd done it wrong."
Give Feedback Regularly
"Now that's an extreme example, and you're probably thinking, yeah, that would never happen to me or I'd never do that, and you're right, it probably won't or you won't do it to another individual, to one of your reports. The point is still the same. You should not wait 12 months to give feedback."
"Lord Mark Price, who used to be the managing director for Waitrose for many, many years before he became deputy chairman for the John Lewis Partnership, says that on average people get feedback once every four months. Now I think that's really better than where it was back then in the early nineties, but it's still not good enough."
What the Objective of an Annual Appraisal Should Be
"The objective of an annual appraisal should be a summary of the feedback over the last 12 months to support the individual to find the themes of things that are good and could be better in order to improve that individual's performance."
"So I was sitting there. Richard opposite me, and we're running through 59, 60, 61 of these things that I'd done wrong, and some biggish and some small. And what did I take away from that? Well, I took away that this was the way to do it, but actually, as I learned over time, I realized you can learn as much from a bad boss as a good boss."
