Manager’s Review vs. Self-Review – Where’s the Disconnect?

— by taylor (4 min read)

We’ve all dealt with employees who believe their employee performance is well above the level of performance as represented by the performance review that we completed for them. Their self-review comes in with extremely high ratings and glowing comments about their performance. Ours shows ratings well below theirs and our comments are less than glowing.

How can there be such a disconnect? Let me count the ways:

The Manager

  • The manager subscribes to the notion that no employee should be given high ratings because they need something to strive for or the infamous “no employee is truly outstanding on a consistent basis”.
  • The manager doesn’t have a good handle on the employee’s work and level of performance and hasn’t been diligent about journaling (documenting) performance “events” during the review period
  • The manager is a victim of “central tendency bias” whereby they are hesitant to select ratings on either end of the rating scale.
  • The manager, for whatever reason, doesn’t like the employee and lacks the maturity and professionalism to rate the employee based on work behavior and performance.
  • The manager hurriedly completed his employee reviews and didn’t put enough thought into any of the employees’ reviews.
  • The manager is measuring performance against poorly constructed goals and expectations for the employee.
  • The manager has a great handle on the employee’s performance and work behavior, has done an excellent job of documenting performance “events” during the review period, is very objective and thorough and carefully thought through the review and rated the employee according to sound logic and reasoning .

The Employee

  • The employee is a narcissistic egomaniac.
  • The employee is completely out of touch with reality.
  • The employee has a bad attitude and is out to make some sort of odd point.
  • The employee lacks a sense of self-awareness.
  • The employee has an entitlement mentality.
  • The employee is measuring his/her performance against goals and expectations that differ from those used by the manager.
  • The employee is making mental comparisons to co-workers who are known underperformers.
  • The employee knows his/her performance falls below the ratings placed on the self-review, but he/she is hoping to place seeds of doubt in the manager’s mind thinking it could sway a change in the manager’s ratings.
  • The employee is truly performing at levels well above those perceived by the manager and is, for the most part, accurately reflecting his/her performance.

Okay, so this probably isn’t a complete list for either the manager or the employee, but you get the point. In a perfect world, the manager and the employee are very objective, very professional and have a great handle on the actual performance of the employee leading to a lot of agreement on the performance review for the employee. But we all know this isn’t a perfect world.

The good news is that most employees and most managers try to be as objective and honest as possible when doing reviews. It isn’t all that common that a wide gap exists between the two. But it does happen.

To minimize the impact of a disparity of any significance between the self-review and the manager’s review, it is important that the manager do, at a minimum, these five things:

Document all positive and negative performance events hat are of any significance for each employee over each review period. Discipline yourself to take time to make performance journal entries as the event of significance occur. This documentation will prove invaluable in preparing the review and in supporting your ratings.

When goals and expectations are being established, meet with the employee and make certain you are both on the same page in terms of what each really means. The employee should have a crystal clear understanding of what is expected of them over the upcoming review period or longer.

Carefully complete the performance review and be able to substantiate ratings with sound and logical comments.

Forget as best you can any unfair biases you might have about the employee. Rate them based on their work behavior/performance for each competency and not on things that are irrelevant to the review itself.

Based on the review as it was prepared, anticipate questions or arguments the employee might raise during the review session and be ready to respond logically and rationally to those questions.

Obviously performance reviews are a valuable component in measuring and elevating performance in any organization. Make sure you’ve done your homework so that on those rare occasions when there is a wide gulf between your ratings and the employee’s ratings you can skillfully present a strong case to support.