Competency Based Performance Reviews

My good friend, Robin Kessler, has just completed her third book, Competency-based Performance Reviews: How to Perform Employee Evaluations the Fortune 500 Way.  It completes the cycle of writing your resume (Competency-Based Resumes: How To Bring Your Resume To The Top Of The Pile ) and getting the interview (Competency-Based Interviews: Master the Tough New Interview Style And Give Them the Answers That Will Win You the Job).  As you can tell from the similarity in titles they all have the common theme of knowing how to express your competencies to succeed in each phase.

Performance review are not very popular with anyone, neither the managers who give them nor the employees who receive them.  There are even some suggestions that we abandon the process as it exists today such as:

• Please throw out your performance review system by Kent Blumberg
• The Alternative to Performance Reviews  by Terence Seamon
• Performance reviews are a big fat waste of time by Alexander Kjerulf
• Performance Evaluations: Do They Do More Harm Than Good? by Bob Sutton

I suspect this is because they are rarely done well.  Fortunately Kessler's book can help in this area.  She lays out the process as most companies do it and shows through numerous example how to prepare for the review and how to do one properly.  A major theme is "Don't attack the person, attack the problem".  She shows how properly structuring competency reviews can do this.

This book can be especially helpful for both managers giving review and possibly even more useful for those receiving them.  This is because when companies role out competency based review programs managers are given some training on how to do them.  Just how effective the training is, is another question however.  Even is the manager's training is lacking it is usually better than what employees get which is often none at all.

Rather than relying on your manager to document your competencies and properly evaluate them you may want to prepare your own competency based evaluation.  Kessler does an excellent job of how to do this and lays out the STAR process for documenting your competencies

• Situation / Task - a brief summary of the problem or situation
• Action - what you did to solve the problem or resolve the situation
• Results - what were the results from your actions

The STAR concept should be familiar as it is also an important part of the resume' writing and interviewing process.  Most people seem to do well describing the situation/task and what they did about but falter when it comes to giving the results.  This is unfortunate as it often turns out to be the most important part.

As uncomfortable as the performance review process may be it can be made better, take a read on Kessler's book and improve the reviews you give and receive.

How do you feel about the performance review process?  What work well?  What works poorly?

Update November, 2010 - Robin Kessler has started her own blog.  Her blog’s main purpose is to help people be more successful with competency-based organizations and even  in some workplaces that haven’t officially identified their competencies yet.  If you want do learn more about competencies check out Robin's blog: 

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Another Day In Paradise?
• Critical Skills and Competencies for IT employees
• CIO Competencies
• Or the posts in the "Organizational Development" category

Comments

[Terrence Seamon]

Nice entry, Mike, on a favorite topic of mine. Thanks for mentioning my entry. And I appreciate the links to the others.

I am not familiar with Robin Kessler's competency based material so I'll need to check it out.

My take on performance reviews is simply to ask, Does the process make us stronger as an organization? Does it enhance employee engagement? Does it help us to deliver a better product or service to our customers?

If it isn't adding value to the business, scrap it.

Terry

[Mike]

Terry,

Thanks for the comments. I think you've gone right to the heart of the matter - does the review add value or not. If the do continue on, if the don't scrap it or change it.

Mike