Posts Tagged ‘appraisal’
When appraisals demotivate
At a recent reception I was talking to a junior solicitor. She had worked for the same law firm for nearly three years but, despite the recession, was planning to leave.
When I asked her why she said that she had had enough promises to last a lifetime none of which had materialised.
It turns out that when she first arrived at the firm she was asked to work on a project which involved a lot of telephone work. She didn’t feel especially confident on the telephone so had asked for some telephone skills training.
Giving feedback
Recently I was talking to a group of managers who expressed difficulty with giving feedback. The crux of good feedback, of course, is not to be judgmental and to ask questions so that the other person reveals the problem and the potential solutions. In other words you lead through questions rather than statements.
There are numerous questions you could ask, but here are just a few to consider:
• The coaching approach – “What did you learn by doing it that way?”
• The inquiring approach – “Why did you do it that way?”
• The exploring approach – “Can you tell me what brought you to come to this conclusion?”
• The challenging approach – “Are there any other ways you could do this?”
• The tying down approach – “Give me some examples of what you mean?”
• The summary approach – “Can we agree that . . .?”
A few years ago, I had a very talented graphic designer within my team. Part of her work was to take commissions from other department within the building. That was fine; except that I noticed that many of the secretaries were sitting in her office and chatting for quite long periods of time.
Clearly this was disruptive to her work and to me it looked as though she was encouraging the time wasters.
Since she was coming up to her appraisal I decided to broach this issue with her. It would have been easy for me to be judgemental and to tell her that it had to stop. Instead I asked her if she was enjoying the variety of work that was coming in from other departments and then talked about the type of work coming in.
It was at this point that she announced that she was enjoying the work but was frustrated that people would linger in her office. Immediately I was able to explore solutions with her through the questioning approach discussed above and we found a workable solution to the problem.