Development recommendations in employee performance evaluations

A personal development plan is at the core of high impact employee performance evaluations

The personal development plan is a 15 minute meeting on employee performance evaluations that you’re going to have within a week of the third meeting.

In that meeting, they’re going to bring in the one side, one piece of paper, they’re going to take the areas of improvement, they’re going to turn them in to goals, they’re going to take the development recommendations, they’re going to go look at that course you suggested, maybe find another.

They’re going to look at the 20lbs planner you suggest they get, come back and say maybe they want a palm pilot. Okay, they’re going to change a little bit but as long as you don’t change it substantively and as long as it makes sense and the timeframe is reasonable, okay, what you’re going to do is sign off on it and in the, you know, agreed that this is something that you want them to work on.

You don’t have to sign off just because they typed it up nice, okay. But it’s something that you want to look at and say, you know, “Good, okay this is the plan for your development.”

By the way, they’ve got a list of things they got to do to do a good job for your company, okay. But this is the list of things they’re doing to develop themselves for their job now and later.

Integrate business goals with employee performance evaluations
So the plans here to integrate improvement efforts, their current assignment, mentoring they take all that stuff, come back and say here it is, you review with them, you sign off and ultimately, that’s it.

Now, I love this quote. I had a boss once; he says “People grow more from what they learn in job assignments than from fancy training courses. Sending people to classes is an overrated development tool”. Got that, buy that, I think that’s totally accurate.

So don’t think of everything as I got to turn somebody to another class, you’re going to blow your budget and people will not want to do this forever. You’ve got to be able to afford it.

So let’s – moving on. Step four says, “Okay, we’ve created the development plan. Once a quarter, we’re going to look at it and I’d like you to own the process, you’re going to run the meeting, I’m going to look at it, and I’m going to ask you questions. Combine employee performance evaluations with the business goals review if you do that every quarter. If you need to make mid course corrections, then change what you’re doing there for the year and that’s fine, okay.

But you want to follow-up through on employee performance evaluations and that’s simply taking that form and scribbling on it so that what you’re doing here is essentially saying, “Okay, that is – you’re doing that. That’s great.” And the fact that we’re following up will quadruple your results.

Edited remarks from the Rapid Learning Institute webinar “No More Performance Reviews! – A Revolutionary Approach to Performance Feedback” by Gary Markle