The once or twice a year performance review is a staple of many companies both large and small. Usually, it is handled poorly or avoided completely. Even those managers who are strong advocates of appraisals often are poor in execution. Sometimes it is treated as a tick the box exercise with little value to the employee. Then the review is filed away and not look at again until it is time for the next appraisal.

Why should this be? Because many organizations have forgotten why performance appraisals were introduced in the first place. The laudable original intent was to help employees get better, to grow to their potential. Unfortunately, reviews became linked to pay and bonuses and thus became a high stakes game.

Telling people where they are going wrong is not the same are helping them to improve. In fact, the complete opposite. Employees given poor reviews disengage and often deny the problem.

Positive appraisals don’t help fix weaknesses that may be getting in the way of your employee achieving their best.

So if feedback isn’t helping, what does? The authors recommend a four step strategy. Shift from critic to ally No one wants to talk to a critic, but everyone want to talk with an ally Display caring, confidence and commitment towards them This allows them to drop shame and defensiveness – opens them up to hearing how to become better Empathize, if they are struggling show you understand how difficult it is for them Express confidence, show that you know they can handle the challenge Ask their permission to help. Identify the future they want to create. One that is bigger than their problem Allow them to describe the outcome they are hoping for Find a positive clear objective Discover a hidden opportunity What might the outcome facilitate? The ability to learn a new leadership skill? The potential to fix an underlying problem Create a level 10 plan Develop a plan of action which measured on a scale of 1-10 is 10. That is the employee is confident that the plan can be executed It’s not critical that the plan succeeds, just the employee follows through, assesses the results and moves forward.

Feedback well delivered can be a way that people can see their weaknesses and identify opportunities for growth. But only when it is part of a true culture of employee development.

This approach was highly successful at a large investment bank. Their unwanted attrition rate dropped to 3% and the performance review completion rate went from 50% to 95%

But maybe you should kill off performance appraisals totally, many big corporations already have. Why? What are they using instead? It is well known that both managers and staff hate performance appraisals. They can be difficult conversations – the type that most people either avoid or handle badly. Forced ranking and management interference can lead to unfair rankings It is almost impossible to avoid bias. The halo effect surrounding folks identified as top performers. Reducing a person’s performance to a number on a scale from 1 to 5 is dehumanizing. Taking a year to tell an employee that he/she is not performing is too long. It’s expensive and does not add much value. One Deloitte manager estimated the review process to 1.8 million hours across the company.

Given that is still a need to identify top and poor performers how can this be done without a formal appraisal process? Let’s start with rewarding top performers. Managers know who their best people are without an annual performance appraisal. They have no difficulty allocating merit based pay using qualitive data rather than quantitative data.