Upper management through its human resource professionals places a great deal of emphasis on performance appraisals. Those appraisals involve both individual and group appraisals. That emphasis usually originates with the CEO. But HR professionals tend to emphasize qualities that may not necessarily meet your requirements. You may hear suggestions that you can't rate a person below some level. Rating a person above his or her performance level in order to motivate only creates future problems. You may also hear that your best performers are too aggressive. Obviously aggressiveness that destroys team cooperation must in some way be checked but in twenty-first-century America we could probably use a little more of what I refer to as polite and respectful aggressiveness.

You may be counseled to treat everyone equally but keep in mind that we attribute uniqueness to all people and that uniqueness must be accommodated. You may be criticized for setting your performance targets too high. You may control the work of one individual more closely than another. You may allow more freedom to those who can manage it. The point is that you make these decisions. You set performance standards. You decide when aggressiveness becomes counterproductive. You integrate the uniqueness of your people into a competent working group.

Performance reviews present a major stumbling block to organizational development. Managers dread them except when the review is positive. Employees find some shortcomings whether the review is positive or negative. The format changes every three or four years, the process becomes more complex, it requires more time, and then all those records go into the organization's archives only to be released when some legal issue becomes apparent. The results of all those good intentions are difficult to quantify during the following year's evaluation. Evaluating performance is absolutely essential but requires information that generally lacks the specifics related to actual accomplishments.

Evaluating performance need not be an unpleasant task. In my first year of employment after receiving a university degree I asked my manager whether there was a formal appraisal system in the company. His reply was that I "should keep in mind that every time we meet you're being appraised." We did have a formal performance review and it began by my manager opening a folder with many slips of paper, plus a summary of those slips of paper, and a one-page written report on my performance. While the evaluation was very positive, I was struck by the amount of information he had about my year's performance. That was my first formal evaluation and I have followed that procedure throughout my many years in management.

Unfortunately, most managers often do not have sufficient documented information to make an intelligent assessment of an employee's performance. The annual or semiannual employee appraisal may be an anachronism in today's economy. Can you as a manager wait six months to provide feedback on an employee's performance? As my first manager noted, keep in mind that every time we meet you're being appraised, and provide the feedback now. Also place a note in the file. Disagreements usually arise because of a lack of documentation.

Performance evaluation begins long before the day scheduled for the evaluation. It begins the day after the last evaluation. It begins with establishing some short- and long-term objectives depending on the organization's workload. Management by objectives (MBO) receives a great deal of bad press, but how can you expect people to meet performance requirements without setting goals and objectives? MBO worked until it became a tool of the human resource department that transformed it into a time-consuming paper mill; instead of focusing on performance it focused on filling out forms.

Practical application of MBO has nothing to do with the HR department. MBO is an agreement between the employee and his or her manager. It is a statement of agreed-upon expectations. We don't need a formal contract to describe the employee's expectations. The critical issue that is too often lost is that you as the manager are part of the objective. Yes, you are part of the objective. You cannot be in absentia and then criticize the employee for nonperformance. You have close contact with your employees, so you shouldn't wait until the date of delivery to know whether the work effort will meet the requirements.

Evaluating the performance of the group includes evaluating individual performance. The performance of each group member might meet expectations but that does not guarantee meeting the organization's expectations. The group could also meet expectations while some members of the group may not have met their expectations. Each department has a particular mission to fulfill. Measuring the performance against that mission becomes somewhat problematic. It's not possible to just add up all the individual levels of accomplishments and attribute them to the group.

We know that less than ten percent of projects meet their specifications, are completed on time, and meet the original cost estimates. At the same time the majority of employees have been evaluated as either meeting or exceeding requirements. There is clearly a disconnect here. There are many reasons for not meeting these three requirements, and the majority stem from not diligently doing what I've referred to as the up-front work: developing and reaching agreement on a comprehensive and understandable work statement; assigning people with the right mix of skills and competencies; developing the work plan; engaging in the follow-up of the work plan; and monitoring the execution of the many details. These are all straightforward management activities that on the surface are very simple and mundane activities but are seldom given due attention. As a manager you need to work with your employees and other managers to develop the yardstick by which performance will be measured.