Setting and Resetting Expectations
November 25, 2008 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under Business
Recently I had a big disagreement with one of my associates about their self-evaluation. He listed himself as all “exceeds expectations” (the highest rating) and I felt he was at “meets expectations” (the middle rating).
Because he has reported to me for the past 5 years, we only need to meet once a month to talk about his performance. A typical conversation goes something like this: “Phil, it was just another day/week/month/year.” To me, that means he met expectations, because if he’d exceeded my expectations, every time we met would have another example of how he had exceed expectations. Additionally, the performance review he submitted had no examples of how he’d exceeded expectations, just high ratings.
I was very concerned about the disconnect, so I reached out to him with 3 possible reasons as a cause for the disconnect:
- You think I have really low expectations for you. If this is true, I apologize. This means I’ve done a very poor job of telling you what my expectations are of you. I expect you will be fantastic in every interaction with your customers and with your teammates.
- You don’t know what it means to exceed expectations. To me, exceeding expectations means you have numerous examples of “WOW!” customer service, amazing solutions to difficult problems, or you’ve gone far above and beyond what we talked about at last year’s performance and you did things far better or faster than I expected you to.
- You’re holding back all the ways you’ve exceeded expectations this year, and you’re dropping them in my lap now at review time.
When I was straight with him, he took the opportunity to re-evaluate himself and ranked himself as meeting expectations.
The lesson is quite simple: Be honest with your team, communicate often, and don’t be afraid to ask for clarification of your team. Sometimes they don’t know what they think you know.
Does your team know what you expect from them on a daily basis?
Do they know what it takes to get your highest rating, or why they might be rated as needing improvement?
If not, it is your responsibility as a manager to clarify this for them, and then reinforce it all year long. Don’t be like me and wait until the end of the year. Have an expectation setting meeting early in the year, and talk about performance all year long.
Great advice Phil and very timely. I recently went through a bit of the same with a team member and had the exact same conversation, it does help. I think there could be more than meets the eye here though.
However, I believe in this case the ratings were in direct relation to salary review so were skewed from what they might have put at a different time of year. This is something I think a lot of people believe. I’m always amazed that people find it hard to believe that a manager can actually think about a whole year in review, not just the last few weeks before a review.
I allege that the method of your evaluations is pure bullshit to begin with. It boils down to this:
Your subordinate thinks they did a great job. Then you only give them a mediocre rating (based on this absurd expectations game). They ask why, since they feel they did an outstanding job. And this is where you answer (with a straight face, I presume) “Yeah, being amazing is just what I expect of you, which makes you really mediocre, since you’re only performing ‘as expected’. Get it? Hehe, gotcha!”
Seriously, you need to work on your evaluation criteria. Otherwise this is just another Dilbert cartoon. Stop this pretentious “expectations” madness and stick to evaluating the actual performace, the hard facts.
Managing should be about making people achieve great things for the company. However, the expectations-based evaluation process substitutes objective measurements of their actual performance with the subjective perception of the manager. It’s a deeply flawed process, it’s unfair to the employee and bad for the company. And nice for the manager’s ego, but that doesn’t really count, does it?
Mike – thanks for the feedback. I agree that when you put the review in terms of salary, folks will naturally skew up because they believe if they rate higher, they will get paid more. Meeting my, and their customer’s, expectations is only part of the puzzle.
Udo – either you’ve never visited Slacker Manager before (because you think I revel in making people feel badly), or you’re a snarky commenter. Either way, I appreciate you challenging my thinking about performance reviews and why I do what I do.
I will respond to you fully in a future post, for now, let me say this: This is not the only method of rating my associates. This is for core competencies and company values. This is the subjective part of the review. This is the part where I take all the client feedback, all the emails I’ve sent the associate, and everything else, and weigh that against where I expect you will be (and what we have discussed all year as part of the one-on-one process).
More to come…Please stay tuned!
Phil,
Being a little more realistic than Udo, who was both a little harsh but yet had some good points – my problem is the separation of what the employee thinks is “exceeding expectations” and what we as Managers feel are “meeting expectations”. I’ve seen enough reviews where employees give themselves a “5″ on a 1-5 scale and you wouldn’t give them higher than a “3″.
Now is it your fault as a Manager because you did not communicate the expectations clearly enough, or is it a problem with the employee who, without direct and consistent feedback, had the attitude that they should be recognized as a King or Queen.
Maybe a ranking of where they stand in relation to all the employees in your firm would give them a more realistic visual (sort of like the BCS standings). If they saw themself ranked 24th out of 50 employees, then maybe they would do away with the feeling that they deserve all 5’s on their evaluation.
I think the question is really “whose expectations.” The answer, IMNSHO, is the JOB’s expectations, not your and not the employees. Each job should be defined in terms of what is expected. If YOU then expect the person to do an amazing job, far above the JOB’s expectations, and the person does so, then they HAVE exceeded expectations.
And you have done a good job as manager to find and encourage the person.
Unfortunately, one of the problems with these “meeting” or “exceeding” expectations often is that the HR department or upper management doesn’t want *any* employee to get a “5″ because that would imply that (a) the employee is the cream of the crop, needing no improvement, or (b) the employee is deserving of the largest possible merit increase, which the company doesn’t want to pay out. Hence, I know several managers who have said they *never* put down “exceeds expectations” for the overall review, because it causes problems with the employee’s *future* expectations. Plus, how do you rate someone a 5 this year and then give them a 3 next year, without making it seem like a complete slap in the face? I agree that these types of evaluations are often not objective enough, and even more often are a problem with a manager having a totally different set of “expectations” than the employee has, and/or not effectively communicating expectations all year long.