The Leadership Star

APPENDIX AA BALANCED APPROACH TO PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

The performance management process — and conducting performance reviews in particular — is often a source of frustration for leaders.

Theoretically, a good performance assessment process allows the leader to:

• measure an employee's performance against the goals they set
• provide feedback on what they're doing well and where they need to improve
• determine rewards — bonuses, salary increases, promotions, and so on.
• communicate rewards in a way that the employee will accept as fair.

In practice, both leaders and employees often find these processes hugely time‐consuming, overly bureaucratic, and unsatisfying in the way they support development conversations and link performance and reward.

What follows is an approach I developed through trial and error over the years that works well in addressing these concerns. The output is a one‐page, two‐sided document that covers both target achievement and behaviour, and supports a content‐rich development discussion between the employee and their leader.

The keys to this approach are to:

1. Set a small number of objective and subjective goals.
2. Have the employee conduct their own initial self‐assessment.
3. Separate the rating and remuneration discussions.

1. Set a small number of objective and subjective goals

In a typical balanced scorecard approach to performance management, the leader sets out a number of different targets, each of which is assigned a weighting, that collectively ...