Response to yesterday’s Moral Dilemma has convinced me of one thing. The readers of this blog are incredibly smart. The New Guy needed more than advice, he needed support to do what he knows is right. Your immediate feedback was insightful. He is most appreciative. I will let you know tomorrow who gets the book.
New subject: A while back, we spent some time with Shannon who described a 360 degree performance system. We got this question related our web based tool.
Question: I am intrigued by your 360 Tool as a different way of handling performance appraisals. I am a little vague on how the interview goes between the manager and the team member?
Shannon’s Response: “The purpose of any performance appraisal system is to provide constructive feedback for improvement. That’s it. That leads to two questions:
- What is the feedback?
- Based on the feedback, how can we improve performance?
The 360 Tool provides the feedback, but the critical piece is still the conversation between the Manager and the Team Member. The conversation is centered around the two questions.
“What is the Feedback? I usually give a copy of the 360 Tool Report to the Team Member about 15-20 minutes prior to the conversation. Together we review each question, looking for patterns of responses. If one person says the Team Member is a jerk, perhaps it is just an isolated remark. If two people say the Team Member is a jerk, then we have something to talk about. If three people say the Team Member is a jerk, then perhaps we have a deep rooted area that will require significant focus. So, the first part of the conversation is to identify patterns in the responses.”
Tomorrow, we will continue with the second question, “How can we improve performance?” -TF