Guidelines for Conducting the Performance Interview
- Listen!
- The effectiveness of your interview increases with your understanding of the employee. If you talk when he/she wants to talk, you may miss some of your best opportunities to learn what you need to know. But just letting him/her talk is not enough. How you hear his/her words and how you respond to them will determine, in part at least, what he/she will say in the course of the interview – and how he/she regards the experience. There are at least two basic approaches:
Passive Listening: Encouraging the employee to speak freely can produce good results. However, this kind of listening requires considerable self-discipline and risks the loss of opportunity to capitalize on problems brought up and feelings expressed. Ordinarily, it is useful only to a point.
- Active Listening: Using skillful and tactful questions or comments; the active listener can focus attention on key matters. Do not rebut the arguments and contentions of the employee even though his/her position might easily be crushed. Instead, seek to develop better insight and understanding on the part of the employee.
- If the employee has appraised himself/herself more favorably than you appraise him/her, invite him/her to tell you his/her reasons.
- Then, if you still disagree, restate his/her self-appraisal. Be sure you understand it. Let him/her know that you want to consider his/her judgment and that you think his/her feelings are important even if you must disagree. Review and state the points on which you do agree. Then discuss your differences.
- Try not to be unduly influenced by things that may affect your feelings but do not otherwise affect the employee’s value to the Synod.
- Remember that you are trying to help each employee to develop himself/herself, so that he/she can give the Synod the best he/she has to offer. This will require setting aside your purely personal preference and confining attention to matters of importance.
- In evaluating an employee’s successes (or failures), maintain an appropriate perspective.
Keep in mind the relationship between what is achieved and what is undertaken. Consider mitigating circumstances.
- Never discuss another employee’s performance.
- Unfavorable comparisons cannot be kept confidential. They always leak.
- Do not discuss salary or promotion during the performance review.
Such discussion is apt to be interpreted by the employee as a commitment. Instead, focus on helping him/her improve his/her competence in his/her present job. Emphasize this aspect of growth and with it the satisfaction to be derived from achievement in current assignments. - 7. Do not try to do too much.
Unless you are unusually skillful, some achievements in performance reviews are apt to be beyond you.
You cannot make an unfavorable review a happy experience.
You cannot make a suspicious employee trustful.
You cannot make a belligerent employee cooperative.
You cannot make a defensive employee self-critical.
8. Remember that it’s more important to develop strength than to correct weakness
