Performance Evaluations – Start Grow Manage

It can be a pain in the neck, but the performance evaluation process is critical to clear communication and enhancing the team’s performance.

Through the performance evaluation, you identify employees’ strengths and weaknesses. This allows you to build on their strengths, address weaknesses, and help them improve their work performance through feedback. Employee evaluations also serve as a basis for decisions about promotions, salary increases, or terminations.

In this course, we will discuss the different ways to evaluate employee performance and some valuable tools that can help you with the process.

Abdication and the perils of skipping performance evaluation

In the E-myth, Michael Gerber talks about the abdication error. MSP owners tend to hire somebody, give them vague instructions about what to do, and expect that person to fill in all the gaps.

Instead of managing them, we abdicate: throwing work their way that we don’t want to do.

Abdication makes nobody happy.

At first, it feels great: you hand off all the work you don’t want and your new hire, eager to please, does it all with aplomb.

Then it starts to fall apart: they can’t do everything you want. You spend way too much time deciding and delegating with not nearly enough time doing. (Read more about your 4D mix here).

You end up micromanaging. Your employee becomes unhappy because they are overworked and feel like they can’t do anything right. You end up in Gotcha Management.

You end up unhappy because you’re back to doing all the work you thought you were delegating in the first place.

There are two things you need to do to avoid abdication

First, define the roles in your organization.

We call this a hat chart because people can wear many hats, and each hat is a role.

It is okay to hire someone and have them wear multiple hats. What you can’t do is create a job that is a jumble of everything you don’t want to do, call that a job, and then micromanage them to death.

Second, conduct performance evaluations.

In the performance evaluation, you set expectations for what you want them to do and how you want them to do it.

Then, after a defined period, you give feedback on their progress. The review should include evaluating how well the employee has done their work and an assessment of strengths, weaknesses, and development areas.

We use two tools to evaluate performance.

At its core, we think that performance evaluation entails defining objectives and then measuring people against those objectives. The objectives come from the hats chart and your business plan, which are your expectations of the role. Performance is, well, performance.

We’ve also found that there is a more conversational aspect to performance evaluation, an overview of what is working and what isn’t.

Finally, there should be some formality to the process. Writing down your observations, objectives, and goals brings clarity and gives everyone something to work from.

So we have two tools we use for performance evaluation: the Performance Review Sheet and the Three Sheets Exercise.