Self Assessment Concerns

Working with Il Duce was, if not exactly interesting, let's say educational, or at the very least eye-opening. Or rather, irritating. Here's just one example:

Every January we go through an employee appraisal process. We (the managers) have to write lengthy reviews of each employee and give them numeric scores to go with it. But before we do, the employees have a chance to write their own reviews of themselves. This is optional and is stated so in the instructions we get from HR every year. I give each employee about a month to write their own comments before they have to send them to me so I can write mine. I tell them that their comments are appreciated but not necessary. They can sway me slightly but only if they are well-written, properly thought-out, and persuasive. However, I've spent the whole year working with this team, and I don't need them to tell me what they've done well and what they haven't.

So, the first year working for Il Duce, January of 2006, I did the same as I've always done. And for my own review, I wrote comments on the few subjects I felt I wanted to highlight, same as I'd done for years, but left the others blank. It came out to about 3 paragraphs.

Il Duce sent my review back to me, demanding more. He said I'd not written enough, that my sparse comments only showed upper management that I was apathetic about my job.

I explained that this is how we'd done things for years, that HR themselves said these were optional comments, and that I'd never written anything lengthy before. Furthermore, I explained, I didn't require them of my team and I'd already gotten their ("sparse") comments from them and was done, myself, with writing my own reviews (which are typically quite verbose, since as you can see I'm not one to shy away from an open forum). On top of that, I argued that upper management should look at the reviews that we write (as managers), that the only people the employee's comments are meant for are their direct manager.

What he took from that discussion was that the apathy that I was showing myself was something that I encouraged in my entire staff; therefore I was failing them as a manager.

The end result was that I got a below-average rating on my annual review, the first in 8 years at the company. He wrote at length about how I failed my team during the review process. How I let them look bad to upper management. How I put a bad face on the group by not understanding how things really worked.

When I got my below-average rating, I asked him if there was anything else I'd done all year long to warrant this. There wasn't. I asked him if all of the good work I'd done the whole year was negated by this one difference of opinion. Yes, he said. This one thing was significant enough to impact my entire rating.

Needless to say, on subsequent appraisals, I insisted that my staff write their own self assessments (at least something in every category, I required of them now) and I myself wrote volumes. The last self-assessment I wrote for Il Duce was 9 single-spaced pages, about 5000 words. By his own admittance, he didn't even read it.