In my career, I have seen many management styles for providing assessments. Most have miss wide of the mark. I believe that this is one of the most important things a manager can do because it focuses on replicating the positive aspects of the team and addressing any under-performance.  Most of the performance assessments I have received in my career were based on a manger’s gut feel as opposed to hard data. My managers felt employee assessments a task to be avoided or at best rushed through with as little work or thought as possible. The people I manage, as well as the company, I work for deserve better.

As a manager of program managers, the problem of assessment becomes much more difficult. Program Managers manage a cross functional programs and initiatives. The program’s success or failure may have little to do with how good or poor the program manager is. I have seen programs go a smooth as silk with poor program management and some programs crash and burn with the best program managers.

The following approach I have developed and implemented with my teams. I have found very effective and efficient.

The approach is broken down into seven parts:

1. Resume updating
2. Motivation and Aspiration
3. Replacement job description.
4. Creation of an interview question list
5. Peer Review  
6. Presenting Feedback
7. Mapping career paths for the employee

Resume Updating

I know, I know. Why am I asking my employees to update their resume? I am setting them up for their next career outside of the company. Am I encouraging them to leave and seek employment elsewhere?

After being a manager for the last two decades, my style breeds loyalty to me. I have people tell me that they want to follow me from job to job. They want to work for me. Some employees I have had decades ago still call me up seeking advice, asking for mentoring or just call to say hi? Why? Because they know that I am a manager for life, I am always happy to make time to support them in their careers. I have given them excellent references. I have their back and I know they have mine.

Why the resume update? It’s simple. Most people update their resume when they find themselves victim of a downsizing or they actively want to find employment elsewhere. I have worked with people who have gone a decade or so without updating their resume. I request all my employees take time every 12 months or so to update their resumes with the latest experience.

This step has two advantages to the manager:

1. Loyalty to the employee: In mandating that the employee updates their resume, you are telling them that if an unexpected downturn in the economy does occur, they will be four to six weeks ahead of everyone else. They have an updated resume and can start looking for new opportunities right away.

• Insight into the Employee’s Previous Experience: Few managers know the history of their employees. What makes up the foundation of their skill set? What have they done in the past? How do I know the capabilities of a team member if I do not know their history? With the resume, I can refer to it when I need to assign work or have someone manage a critical hot issue.

Motivation and Aspiration

This portion of the assessment is broken down into three subsections:

1. What motivates the employee?
2. 3-5-year event horizon
3. What do you look for in a company?

What motivates the employee?

This activity by far is the hardest portion of the entire 360 assessment. Why? Because you need to get to what really motivates the employee as opposed to what the employee  thinks the manager wants to hear.

We have all been in interviews where the interviewer asks, “What motivates you?”

The “right answer” to this question is:

“Interesting work which challenges me to perform to my fullest potential”

“Working with a highly energized team”

“High pressure environments to deliver solutions to the market ahead of the competition”

Exactly, 100% bullshit. You know it. The interviewer knows it. You know it. But that is what the expected response is.

That is why I will spend 4 – 6 hours with the employee over the course of a few weeks to guide them to a real answer. It will require employee self-reflection, which no one will take the time to do unless they are paying an expensive career consultant.

It is extremely important that the employee is honest with you and more importantly with themselves.

For example: I often joke that for the right amount of compensation, I will sit in a meat locker in my underwear in the dark and count motes of dust by touch. Yes, compensation is high on my list of motivations.

I have unfortunately not been 100% successful in this assessment. I have had employees in my past tell me that they are motivated by this or that. As their manager I work hard to deliver on what they have told me motivates them only to find out that this was untrue (in the exit interview).

The format I ask them to fill out is as follows:

What motivates the employee: (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL)

I tell them that they can list up to six things that motive them and tag them with a tee-shirt size. However, they only get one tee-shirt of each size per motivation so you can only have one XXL.  As the manager, you need to be 100% supportive of this effort. You need to ask questions. You need to be skeptical. This is a partnership between manger and employee.

 3-5-year event horizon

The next section is where does the employee want to be in 3 – 5 years. Do they want to go into management? Are they looking to be an individual contributor? What are their dream jobs and aspirations both inside the group and outside of the group?

For example, I had an employee say they were interested in exploring business development opportunities. Even though this is outside of my group’s scope, I will work with the leader of that organization to find opportunities that my employee can contribute on and make time in their schedule to explore this opportunity. Even if they decide in the future to change organizations, the company will be better off for it.

The employee may want to hone skills, learn new skills, explore new things, etc. Knowing these wants and desires and acting upon them will breed employee loyalty. Since the number one reason people leave companies is because of their manger, you will know that if an employee decides to leave the company it will not be because of you.

What do you look for in a company?

What are employees looking for in a company? Have you ever thought what you are looking for? Probably not. This is important so that you can build a group and help influence your company to be a place people love to work for? At a marco level, it is much better at determining what is important to people and what the company can do to address this importance that say a survey.

For example, here are a few of mine:

1. I want to work for a company that is pursuing fresh technology.
2. I want to work at a company that is succeeding and will continue to succeed.
3. I want to be recognized and am in the INNER CIRCLE, not just called upon when needed.
4.  I want to be given autonomy without the company losing visibility of me and my work.
5. Leaders create a collaborative, equitable and flat org structure where the level of politics doesn’t create gridlock.

For each of these criteria, I ask two additional questions.

Where applicable, how is the COMPANY and YOUR BOSS delivering on these items.

This will give you and the company insight on how the employee is perceiving the current work environment.

 Replacement Job Description

The establishment of the job description is an important component to this evaluation process. The goal of this phase is to get a consensus from the team or even individual.

The scenario I establish is that the employee or team wins a large sum of money from the lottery and have decided to retire to Hawaii. Not wanting to leave their manager in a lurch, they help formulate the job description for their replacement. We are looking for the ideal candidate. In brainstorming sessions, the employees developed the skills of what the ideal program manager candidate should have. All program managers are asked to provide input and as the manager you may have to prompt a few of the non- “type A” s for a response. The result of this phase should be a document which describes this fictitious individual’s talents, skills and drive. This document will be reviewed in a staff meeting for approval of the team. Once approved, this document must be sent out to the entire team. Now all your individuals will know what they are being measured against.

Here is an example of one I did a few years ago;

Responsibilities:

• New Product Introduction Program Manager (80%)
  • Leverage LCM process while managing & driving NPI program by effectively coordinate across organizational lines program related activities and milestone deliverables. 
  • Uses knowledge, creativity, and company practices and priorities to obtain solutions to complex problems.
  • Maintain overarching program schedule that consolidate individual project track plans, reflect cross-track dependencies, and eliminate redundancies among the tracks.
  •  Manage program risks and drive issue resolution as it relates to meeting the overall schedule and quality commitments.
  • Coordinate activities and communication among functional teams.  This includes weekly core team meetings and reviews as required to support the program.
  • Track program progress and provide communications at all levels.
  • Manage various corporate decision point meetings associated with an assigned segment.
  • Knowledge of Agile (Scrum) development Process
  • Looking for leadership, not facilitation.
• Life Cycle Model Process Initiatives (20%)
  • Proven ability to drive initiatives associated with the Corporate Life Cycle Model.
    • Identifying Gaps in the LCM process
    • Ability to provide leadership for initiatives that are undertaken
    • Ability to educate impacted personnel on new process.
    • Ability to track and monitor initiative to determine if solution is addressing the original problem.

Interpersonal skills:

• Solid leadership skills
  • Ability to establish trust and confidence of cross-functional core team.
    • Ability to lead the team of subordinates, work with peer managers, and work with executives all at the same time and all equally.
  • Provide vision and guidance: Ability to distinguish critical from non-critical issues and set teams focus and priorities accordingly.
  • Quickly recognizes challenges facing the team and works toward resolving and achieving results in spite of those challenges.
  • Ability to break down issues to key fundamentals and drive team toward corrective action plan.
  • Ability to inspire team to act on behalf of the program instead of personal interests.
    • Bring out the best in everyone on the team.
  • Ability to establish productive relationships with each member of the team with an understanding of each individual’s motivations and priorities that factor into the decision process.
  • Ability to drive a positive outlook in the face of adversity and does not back down from a challenge.
  • Ability to organize cross-functional activities into a complete program plan of record, recognizing interdependencies, and establishing framework for the team to build out the plan and mentoring the execution of that plan.
  • Ability to influence subordinates’ peers and executives to the best possible outcome by building solid relationships.
    • Ability to manage up, down and sideways
• Excellent verbal and communications skills
  • Ability to communicate in a concise and deliberate fashion.
  • Recognizes the audience of the communication and organizes and factors in appropriate content accordingly.
    • Being that communication goes down, up or sideways.
  • Ability to recognize sensitive or confidential information and shares information appropriately.
  • Experience in presenting to large groups and executives. Displays knowledge and confidence in presentation content.
  • Facilitating communication in meeting and offline.
• Character and Integrity
  • Defines and communicates actions and follows through to meet commitments.
    • “Say what they do and do what they say”
  • Provides open and honest assessments with company and organizational success rather than personal success as the basis.
  • Ability to manage through “politics” to achieve the desire result.
  • Serves as a resource to other team members, helping to achieve broader organizational success.
  • Providing Vision and Guidance
    • Mentoring Team members for success

Education and Experience

• B.S. College graduate (Degree in Networking Engineering or Industrial (Process) Engineering a plus).  This is considered a mid-Level program management role. 
• Candidate must have 5-10 years direct program management experience
• Knowledge of Life Cycle Management (Waterfall and SCRUM) , Project Management, and Program Management
• Qualified candidate must have solid skills using MS applications (Excel, Word, Project, PowerPoint, Visio, etc) and knowledge of SharePoint application
• Excellent communications skills are required (verbal/phone & written/email/web).
• Candidate must have an ability to participate in multiple cross-functional projects concurrently in a rapidly changing environment, within established time lines and have a demonstrated ability to learn and embrace new and changing technologies.

Additional Skills

• Understands basic revenue models a plus (ie: P&L)
• Technical background or awareness of networking.  Ability to interact technically with cross functional program team.  Knowledge of network design, topologies, basic architectures, and L2/L3 protocols.
• Ability to coordinate with local and offsite team members.

Ability to build consensus and keep team aware of impending deliverables.

This process should be repeated every few years as the roles and responsibilities of the program managers can change as time progresses making the ideal candidate not as ideal. Additionally, if you team has several roles you can do as many of these as is deemed necessary down to individual job descriptions.

Creation of an Interview Question List

The next step in this process is to create a series of questions which measure how a program manager performs. What questions would an interviewer be asking for the replacement candidate.

I broke the evaluation up into several sub-sections around:

       Leadership

       Problem Solving

       Administration

       Interpersonal Relationships

      Personal qualities

Each question is scaled from 1 – 5 with 1 being the program manager is a novice in this skill and 5 being that the program manager is master at this skill. Each subsection has four – five questions each.

The ideal candidate would achieve a perfect 5 on all the questions. In addition to the ranking portion, I add in a first page a subjective section. The document asks to name three areas where the program manager excels, three areas of improvement and would you work with this person again?  

Again, the questions are reviewed with the team. The team needs to agree that the questions are relevant, and that the ideal employee would get all 5s on each question. As with the ideal candidate document, this questioner will be approved in staff and distributed out to the team. The team members now know how they will be assessed.

The evaluation should be updated every time if ideal candidate changes.

Peer Review

When it comes time for review, I ask my employee to give me the names of ten individuals whom they have been working extremely closely with for the period since the last review. Out of these ten people, I will choose six to eight individuals and set up an in-person meeting with them for 15 – 20 minutes. I have found that face to face meetings are required to make the data you are collecting valid. Be sure to include the ideal program manager candidate but not the evaluation test.

In this meeting, you will meet with the co-worker and assure them that the data you are collecting will be anonymous. You will mark their sheet with numbers not names. You will need to explain the purpose of the interview and what you are looking for. You should bring the ideal program manager candidate document for them to review in the interview.

People in general do not want to be overly harsh. You as the interviewer, must provide guidance as these questions are being asked.  This is the reason I do these in person if possible. I stress at the onset that just because you give someone a 2 does not mean you should feel obligated to give them a 5 on the next question. You need to make the interviewer feel comfortable and that their honest feedback is necessary and beneficial for the company and the individual being reviewed. These interviews should not take more than 15 minutes. If an individual gives your employee less that a three, you should request a little more justification, perhaps a sentence or two on why that is the case. Some interviewees may decline to respond to all questions. If they have not experienced the program manager in a certain situation (presenting to executive staff for example) they cannot legitimately rank them.

You also need to be aware that you may need to discount some of the data. I have thrown out outlier data that is both overly nice (the individual mostly all 5’s) and overly critical (the individual got mostly 1s). You must also assess feedback based on what you know of the programs.

I did an assessment for a program manager I knew was very good and had just completed a difficult program. The program had many nasty surprises including an ASIC bugs and a non-related board defect found late in external beta. All previous interviews had highlighted these program challenges. During one interview, the respondent kept telling me that it was difficult to give feedback because the program had gone so smoothly. While I completed the interview, I immediately discarded the data as suspect.  

I also ask the employee to do a self-evaluation and as the manger I also do the evaluation

After the interviews are completed, I sit down and consolidate the results. I create an excel spreadsheet which lists the questions and the aggregated responses. I give an overall assessment for each question and an aggregated overall assessment.

The comments for each question should be aggregated if possible and language changed for anonymity.

Likewise, the subjective section should be consolidating from the three things that the program manager does well and the three things that the program manager needs improvement. Similar comments can be grouped together with a count.

In this example, five people expressed that the program manager is a great organizer while four people felt that the program manager needed to hold the team more accountable on deadlines. Sometimes that Areas of Improvements and the Areas of Excellence may be at odds depending on the interviewee’s point of view.

Presenting the Feedback

Once all the data is collected, it is time to have the one-on-one with the employee. This conversation should be honest. Present the positive and negative aspects of the engagement. Even if the employee disagrees with the feedback (my experience is that this happens very infrequently), your response should be that this is how you are being perceived by the people whom you work for. Even when I must provide negative feedback, I have found the employees more accepting because this is based on hard data that they can see as opposed to manager opinion.

This meeting should reinforce the positive aspects of the employee. For the areas of concern, you should work with the individual to set up a concrete plan for improvement with measurable goals prior to the next assessment.

One employee’s area of improvement was his presentation skills. The comments were “He is like a deer in the headlights up there” and “He is always having his hands in his pockets while presenting.” When this data was presented as part of the assessment the employee and we agreed to act upon it. The employee was enrolled in a presentation class and encouraged to join the corporate Toastmaster’s organization.

At the next assessment, the feedback marked a notable improvement in his presentation skills. The employee expressed a sense of self accomplishment in achieving this goal.

Another use for this data is team trends which may be an indication of not an individual area of improvement but an area of improvement for the group or organization. After completing an assessment of about half of my group, one area of improvement was noted across every program manager.

I took this feedback and investigated the processes by which this deliverable was being managed. In this case, the feedback identified a weak area in our NPI process. I marked this area for improvement and assigned it to one of my employees to address it. After it was completed, it marked a definite improvement in the overall quality of that specific deliverable.

Some individuals have certain best individual practices of performing their job. When these are identified, I ask these individuals to redefine our processes to replicate their success across the group.

In the future, you can collect the data over multiple years and show the employee how they are trending in their peer perception.

Mapping career paths for the employee

Finally, as a manger you are at the end. Congratulations!!! You now have the data to act upon with your employee.

Let’s review what we have:

1. Resume: The foundation of my employee’s capabilities
2. Motivation and Aspiration: What the employee is motivated by?  
3. Replacement job description: What is the agreed upon employee’s job?
4. Interview question list: How will the employee be assessed in their job performance. 
5. Peer Review Feedback: How is the employee performing in their job as viewed by their peers?  

That is a lot of data. Now let’s use it.

The next conversation with the employee should center around what concrete steps can we take together to take that employee to the next level.

If the employee is looking for a promotion, what does the company expect for someone at the next level and what can we do to hone the employee such that if the opportunity becomes available, the employee will already be the best candidate for the job. If it is a promotion, you have hard data on why the promotion is justified as opposed to one of many opinions.

You can create opportunities for the employee to get higher exposure among the E-Team. You can train the employee on communication skills, presentation skills, or whatever aligns with the employee’s goals and peer feedback.

You should come up with an employee improvement plan and execute on that plan.

Closing

Is it a lot of work? YES.

Is it more work that you are doing now? YES.

However, the benefits will be employee retention, employee skill building, trust between you and your employees, and a much happier workplace for everyone.

To be honest, you need to be this involved with your employees or step aside and allow a more qualified manager to take your place for the good of the company and its employees.

Remember, not everyone is cut out to manage people.