3 Problematic Performance Appraisal Situations and What to Do About Them

Ensuring fair performance appraisals when it’s hard to do so

Holding performance reviews with your team is an essential part of being a leader. You have to set SMART goals for your team, and at the end of the year, you have to rate your team on their goals.

I’ve already written about how to prepare for performance reviews, conduct evidence-based reviews, and what to do when your team’s goals and weightings change.

In this article, I’m covering what you do in three other problematic performance review situations:

• Conducting a performance appraisal for someone who has reported to you for six months of the year and another line manager for six months.
• Joining an organization and having to conduct end-of-year performance appraisals for your new team.
• A team member who is rating themselves at the highest rating for each goal.

I’ve managed many performance review processes over decades as a Learning & Development professional, and there are solutions for all these situations.

Here is what to do:

Situation One — Conducting a performance appraisal for someone who has reported to you for six months of the year and another line manager for six months

This situation comes up often. It’s appraisal time, and you’ve got to do your team’s reviews, but some of your team haven’t been with you for the whole year.

In this scenario, let’s say your team member has worked for you for six months and another line manager for six months.

The same process works for whatever proportion of the year your team member has been with you, but we’ll go with six and six for this example.

To ensure your team member gets credit for their tasks for the whole year, you’ll need to liaise with their previous line manager.

Then make sure the weightings for your team member’s time with you and their time with their previous manager are equal (remember this is for the six-month and six-month example).

If you are working on a percentages-based weighting system:

Previous line manager:

Goal one: 10%

Goal two: 5%

Goal three: 35%

New line manager (you):

Goal one: 20%

Goal two: 20%

Goal three: 10%

So you can see that if your team member spent 50% of the year with you, the weightings for their goals add up to 50% of the weightings.

If your team member spent nine months with you, their weighting would add up to 75%.

If you are working on a number-based rating system (1–5):

Again, liaise with the former line manager but split up the weightings so they add up to the same amount.

Previous line manager:

Goal one weighting: 4

Goal two weighting: 3

Goal three weighting: 2

Total weighting is nine

New line manager (aka you):

Goal one weighting: 5

Goal two weighting: 3

Goal three weighting: 1

Total weighting is 9

Yes, this can be a bit clunky, and you need to apply common sense, but showing your new team member that they are getting credit for all of their work is important.

And remember, you are trying to conduct the performance appraisal as fairly as possible. But it might not be perfect.

As the new line manager, you may have to enter the information on the performance review system and do some of the grunt work. But hopefully, that will be a cut-and-paste job.

If your team member’s old line manager is no longer with the organization, use the same method in Situation Two below.

Situation Two — Joining an organization and having to conduct end-of-year performance appraisals for your new team

In this scenario, let’s assume the team member’s old line manager has left the organization. Otherwise, follow the process in Situation One above and get the information from the old line manager.

This is where evidence-based reviews come into play, and you become a detective for a while.

Firstly, check out what goals your team were set at the beginning of the year

You can discover this by:

• Checking out the performance review system and the department’s hard and soft files
• Asking your new boss, your new team, whoever runs the appraisal review process, and the IT person who runs the online system (if you’ve got one)

Next, verify if the goals still stand or have changed

Once you’ve clarified your team’s original goals, check whether any goals were added, deleted, or amended.

If goal weightings need to be changed, you can learn how to do this here.

You’ll have to spend time with your team verifying how their original goals stand at review time, but it’s worth doing.

Finally, collect evidence that the team has completed their goals

Next, you’ll need to collect all the evidence that your team has completed their goals. You can learn where to look here.

Similarly, to Situation One, this can be a bit messy, especially if the prior manager didn’t hold one-to-ones or keep good records.

But taking the time to make your team’s final reviews as fair as possible will go a long way to building trust with your team.

Three — How to deal with a team member who always gives themself the highest rating

Ratings are always a source of discussion at review time, with some people under-rating themselves and others adamantly giving themselves the highest rating for every goal.

Ratings are usually from 1–5, with one being either high or low.

Let’s assume the ratings are as follows:

1: Did not meet expectations

2: Met some but not all expectations

3: Fully met all expectations

4: Exceeded expectations

5: Significantly exceeded expectations

I’ve worked at organizations where a three rating means you did a good job and organizations where everyone always got ratings of four and five despite the wording about significantly exceeding expectations.

In many organizations, team members get to allocate themselves a rating for each goal.

Yes, the manager’s rating goes on the final review, but having everyone self-rate is usually a good idea because it means you understand how your team member thinks they are doing.

What if team members always give themselves the highest rating for every goal?

If one of your team members insists on giving themselves the highest score for every goal, it can be problematic.

You can head this off by talking to your team about the ratings at the beginning of the review process. The earlier, the better.

Explain that a three rating means people have met expectations in the job. Give examples of work that would get a rating of three, four, or five.

Tell your team about the calibration process if you have one. Calibration is where the senior team gets together and ensures that all line managers rate their teams fairly and similarly according to the rating system.

If this doesn’t work and you still have that one person who gives themselves a five for everything, ask them to send you details in writing specifying what they did that was over and above each goal.

Ask your team member to consider each of their goals and explain:

• What a three rating would look like?
• What have they done that exceeded expectations, and in what way?
• What have they done that significantly exceeded expectations, and in what way?

An in-depth discussion about what three, four, and five ratings look like will bring your team members around.

Explain that it’s unlikely that anyone will achieve a five for every goal and that you need your team to rate themselves realistically to be on par with other teams.

If not, you still have the final say about the ratings to ensure your team member is in line with the rest of your team.

I’m not suggesting that your team should never receive high ratings, just that it is unlikely that anyone will receive the highest rating for every goal.

Summary

Performance review time is stressful for everyone. Doing a good job with team reviews takes up a lot of time on top of your day-to-day work.

Add in the team watching your every move with a beady eye to ensure you are being fair, and it can be incredibly stressful for line managers.

Plan ahead, be objective, and do your best to deliver fair reviews, and you will get through the process in one piece.

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