CPE Week: Linda Delaney on Performance Appraisals

My name is Linda F. Delaney and I serve as a program evaluator for my own company, LFD Consulting, LLC, in Cordova, Tennessee.  In addition to independent consulting, I am currently employed as the Learning Coordinator for the City of Memphis Academy of Learning and Development.   In this role, one of my primary concerns is fostering empowerment evaluation techniques among managers and supervisors in the area of performance appraisals.

Below are some FREE tools that I have found useful in fostering participation, collaboration, and empowerment with those responsible for conducting performance reviews.

Hot tip- Align SMARTER goals, objectives, and activities with the mission: State your mission and then develop SMARTER (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound, Evaluate, Record) goals and objectives.  They will help you to make better decisions and know when you are off course.  See A Brief Guide to SMART Goal Setting. After setting SMART goals, evaluate to see if you have achieved them and record your progress.

Hot tip- Take stock:  Log events as they occur (as close to “right now” as possible) whether they are positive or negative occurrences.  Logs can define a pattern of success. In addition, event logs provide historical information that can help you track your activity and determine the root of a problem in its early stages.  In essence, event logs allow you to take stock of where a program or person has been, where things are now, and to provide “intelligence” that helps us plan events for the future that smartly align with the mission.

Hot tip- Plan for the future: A primary objective of performance appraisals is skill development.  After taking stock to see where one stands in goal achievement, project managers can make plans for training (and other avenues for progress).  Excel has free project management and planning tools.  You can customize the program for your own use.

I look forward to your thoughts and learning more about your experiences concerning performance appraisals and empowerment evaluation.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Collaborative, Participatory & Empowerment Evaluation (CPE) Week with our colleagues in the CPE AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our CPE members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting CPE resources. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice.