This fascinating case study in the Guardian recently reminded me how difficult and knotty performance and feedback can be in real life.
Can I honestly appraise the husband of the MD?
There’s clearly a lot of politics going on here. The writer of the letter supervises the MD’s husband, who appears to be performing his job very poorly.
Now the writer has to do his performance appraisal. To add to the writer’s woes, his/her appraiser is – you guessed it – the MD.
Although the writer does seem to have turned to HR for help, it isn’t clear what effect this has had, if any.
My advice to the writer would be to get evidence and feedback from other people on this guy’s performance, keeping it factual and unemotional: what goals he had, what he achieved, and what he didn’t achieve. In a situation like this, it’s handy to have a 360 degree feedback process in place that can pinpoint behavioural issues, as well as task and goal achievements.
Providing this level of data would help the writer to get through the appraisal process and hopefully get the message across to the MD’s husband about his performance.
Invariably when things are going well and people are performing at their best, a clearly laid out feedback and performance review system can been seen as a bit superflous.
It’s when things are not going so well that organisations need a robust and consistent way of measuring and
managing performance!
If you’ve got any more ideas, please do share them on this forum.
Jo
