[Ailist] RE: Appreciative Valuations of Staff

[Jerry Garfield]

Hi Chris,

Lots of good thoughts and observations. Here are comments that address your
desire to be genuine with a "problem child." You wrote:

So here's the rub ... this approach breaks down for us when we really do
have 
> a "problem child" in the ranks. Legally, we are, of course, required to
> document when we have to formally put someone on notice that things aren't
> going well. Flipping an appreciative review into a disciplinary discussion
> makes the entire process seem disingenuous. Some of our leaders try to soften
> this by sugar coating any negative observations, which does not give the team
> member a clear message.

I would reframe this as "what's real." Rather than flip an appreciative
inquiry, I go more deeply into appreciation of both sides: the employee and
the organization. I identify ways the employee is contributing and ways s/he
is not. I create a plan for improvement, with goals and timeline to support
strengths and ability to contribute. I also note ways the organization has
and must benefit from this person's contributions. If performance continues
to lag, I speak with the employee about a poor "goodness of fit" between the
organization's needs and the employee's contributions. This takes
fault-finding off of the agenda and looks squarely at what an employee can
realistically do and not do, and what the organization needs. With the
employee and support of HR, I talk about alternatives: movement to another
department in the company; movement out of the company. I work with the
employee so that s/he sees what is best for the company and best for
her/him. We build bridges to the next step in that person's career -- again,
that might mean out of the company or transfer to another department.

In this whole process, I want to stay in dialogue with the employee to
balance the emotionality with real assessments of performance
strengths/accomplishments and performance weaknesses/disappointments.

In many years of practice, I find that we all must appreciate BOTH‹what's
working well and what's not working well. Then the process is real, genuine,
and treats employees and the organization with respect.

Jerry Garfield, Consultant & Executive Coach
Leadership & Organization Behavior

Adding value to valuable organizations!

747 Balra Drive
El Cerrito, CA 94530-3302
Phone/fax: 510.525.2976



On 4/29/08 6:06 PM, "Chris Willis" <cfwillis1 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
>> Not to muddy the waters, but I wonder if another layer of this>
>> valuation/evaluation process should take into account who the person > is
>> that> is being valued/evaluated combined with the purpose/intention of the >
>> action.
> Jumping into the middle of this conversation with a few personal observations
> ... As leader of a small (22 person) consultancy, as I started learning more
> about AI over this past year, I have begun to implement various appreciative
> approaches within our company. My greatest hope, besides overall process
> improvement and injecting a boost of joy in our work in a stressful business
> climate, is to build a more positive culture internally that will transfer
> into the work we do for our clients. We're in process of completing a full AI
> process in exploring ways we can improve our end-to-end project development
> methodology. At the same time, I have introduced appreciative questioning into
> our quarterly team reviews.
>  
> To summarize, we ask team members to come to a review prepared to tell us
> about what they have contributed in the past quarter that they are most proud
> of, what helped them acheive that success, how they have grown, what they
> think they could do to contribute more, and what can we do as a company to
> support them. Someone talked about having "conversations" rather than evals,
> and I guess we've always done that, but now we've formalized the questions
> we're asking around an appreciative questioning approach.
>  
> Many of our people actually ask to be reviewed, and they always have. They
> seem eager to know how they are doing and learn ways they can continue to
> improve and contribute. Of course, some of this is financially motivated, with
> hopes that the review will lead to a pay increase (although salaries are
> pretty much frozen at present, but we do hand out our quarterly bonus checks
> at that time.) 
>  
> What's working? Well, we've had some incredibily eye-opening reminders by our
> folks of what they are doing RIGHT. Come review time, it's tempting to go
> through a list of names to determine who needs a tune-up, and it can be really
> easy to brand someone based on the last project they've worked on -- or,
> worse, the last screw-up they were involved in. It's actually been empowering
> for our leadership team to hear our team's stories and share in their wins.
> And they've been fairly perceptive, overall, in identifying the places they
> need to work on moving forward.
>  
> So here's the rub ... this approach breaks down for us wnen we really do have
> a "problem child" in the ranks. Legally, we are, of course, required to
> document when we have to formally put someone on notice that things aren't
> going well. Flipping an appreciative review into a disciplinary discussion
> makes the entire process seem disingenuous. Some of our leaders try to soften
> this by sugar coating any negative observations, which does not give the team
> member a clear message.


>  
> I guess I'm glad our team is still small enough that we can approach reviews
> this way, and, overall, it appears to be working quite well. I would hate to
> try and implement a more form-driven rating out of fear of covering our ... um
> ... assets! ~ Chris Willis Where there's a Willis, there's a way!
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