How Mentoring Pays Off
Managers shouldn't shirk this important responsibility.

H. James Harrington
jharrington@qualitydigest.com

Last month, as the first part of an ongoing examination of the performance appraisal process, I discussed how to prepare an employee performance plan. Once this is done, the mentoring part of the process can begin.

Ideally, mentoring is the most beneficial aspect of the total performance appraisal process. It's when the manager provides constructive advice and encouragement to the employee, such as pointing out positive accomplishments as well as activities that were completed inadequately. However, mentoring doesn't mean that the manager keeps the employee from making errors; we all learn more from our errors than we do from our successes. The challenge facing every manager is knowing how closely to monitor employees--enough to keep them from making serious errors while giving them enough latitude to learn from their less-critical mistakes.

Mentoring is usually the most difficult part of the performance appraisal process, and most managers fail to meet this obligation. The difficulty stems from the following perceptions:

Most managers want to be liked and not considered overly critical.

Employees tend to over-analyze compliments.

When done correctly, mentoring takes a lot of time.

Employees often belittle managers when they say good things about them.

Often a manager isn't technically capable of mentoring a particular person.

When employees make mistakes in the presence of other people, managers feel they shouldn't comment at that time. However, when they do get a chance to speak to the employees privately, it's usually too late for the advice to be effective.

A manager can indeed come up with many excuses why he or she can't do a good job at mentoring, but that's just what they are--excuses. These must be addressed and overcome if he or she wants to be a meets-requirements performer.

Once every three months, the manager and employee should sit down in a quiet, confidential area and review the employee's progress against the quarterly and yearly plans. Both people should spend some time preparing for the quarterly review by filling out a simple performance evaluation form listing task titles, a rating of how well each task was performed, the employee's major accomplishments since the last review and his or her goals for the coming three months.

The performance review meeting should focus on tasks the employee rated higher than the manager did. The objective is for the manager and the employee to agree on each of the ratings. If they can't agree on an item, they should jointly establish a more detailed performance plan for it that will be used during the next three months to provide data for resolving the differences of opinion. If the employee's rating is lower than the manager's, the latter's prevails. As soon as the manager and the employee have agreed on the individual task ratings and the overall rating for the previous three months, they should then agree on a performance plan to cover the next three months.

Because the quarterly reviews are informal, no official report is sent to personnel. However, the reviews form the basis for the formal yearly review, which is simply the average of the quarterly ratings.

It's very important for the manager to coordinate his or her quarterly review with upper management to ensure there's agreement with respect to the manager's rating. Nothing is more detrimental to the appraisal process than to have the manager and the employee agree on a quarterly rating and then learn the employee was rated higher than he or she is performing, based upon someone-up-there's uninformed judgment.

One of the biggest problems with performance evaluation is a manager's dishonesty to employees by rating them higher than they were actually performing. It's an easy way out of an uncomfortable situation, but it's unfair to the company and employees for three reasons:

The employee is misled and not provided with the information that he or she needs to improve.

The company is misled because the employee really isn't doing the job as well as the manager indicates but is getting paid for a higher performance.

It's unfair to other employees who are performing their jobs better and receiving similar ratings.

Salaries should be directly related to employees' job levels and also to how well they perform their responsibilities. All job assignments can be performed at different levels of effectiveness, productivity and quality, so it's only logical that each job should have a salary range associated with it. The employee who puts out large quantities of work at high-quality levels should be paid more than the employee who just meets standards and frequently makes errors. The yearly performance evaluation provides an ideal way to relate employees' salaries to their performances. And one of the very best ways to reinforce desired behaviors is through a merit pay system.

About the author

H. James Harrington recently retired from his position as COO of an Internet-software development company. He has more than 45 years of experience as a quality professional and is the author of 20 books. Visit his Web site at www.hjharrington.com. Letters to the editor regarding this column can be sent to letters@qualitydigest.com.