As an individual who recently revamped a performance management system from the old subjective system (everyone gets the same 80 items, rank on a scale of 1 to 5) to one driven by cascading goals driving individual objectives across the organization, I've had a lot of time to ponder things in the performance management space.  One thing I have ran into is the value of allowing employees to evaluate themselves as part of the process (Self-Evaluations!!)....

Now, I don't want go all Dennis Miller and get off on a rant here, but the prospect of self-evaluations is more riddled with holes than the final season of the Sopranos.

Here's why I don't like Self Evaluations:

1.  There is always a gap between real and perceived performance, and the gap is always largest with your lowest performing employees.  Poor performers lack the skills to perform - which are the same skills required to evaluate their performance. They don’t understand that they don’t understand, and so believe their abilities compare positively to their peers.  The Success Factors Blog plots this out with research to back it up... See the chart below from their site as well....

2.  Self Assessments set up managers who struggle with performance management to fail unnecessarily.  Your inexperienced managers already have a hard time with conflict, so you take your garden variety self-assessment (the one that allows the employees to have the first crack before receiving the feedback of the manager) and automatically your manager is boxed in a deep corner of conflict.  What is he/she to do?  Go after the perceived gaps and really drive home their point of view with multiple specifics?  Or just give in, offer up a few comments, give the employee 75% of what they wanted, and live to fight another day?  Better to allow the manager to drive the process with their thoughts before the employee has a chance to frame the conversation.  Self-Assessment afterwords, OK - Self Assessment before, not so good...

3.  Self Assessments are often crutches for managers with poor writing skills.  I literally had a manager just offer up the objective-based system to an employee, then turn it in as his own work.  I called the employee (happens to be a manager of people working for a Director) and said, "You wrote your own review didn't you?"  To which the employee responded "I did the self assessment part and I think ____ took most of my recommendations.  If you look at the last sentence of each section where the grammar changes (she meant where the grammar became very poor), you'll be able to see his comments".  Nice... what more can I say?

4.  Most employees confuse behavior and performance that "meets" expectations as "exceeding" expectations.  Called all your customers?  Got all the transactions that are a part of your job complete?  Darn, that is just plain "Exceeds"...(I'm Joking).  Most employees have the opinion that if they knock out the major components of their job, they are exceeding.  That's incorrect - the progressive view of performance management suggests that employees need to innovate and add value in other ways to truly "Exceed"  Want to know what happens with weak managers when a "Meets" employee turns in a self-evaluation that rates themselves as an "Exceeds"?   See #2 - they fold without the help of a competent partner on the Human Capital team...

Exceptions to my observations - if you use self assessments as part of a well tuned 360 degree feedback program, the self rating probably has the proper rating and is effectively counter-balanced by the non-manager feedback of others.  Of course, 360 degree feedback programs have their own set of issues, and I'll leave the pro/con breakdown of that for another day.

Bottom line - unless your org is a well-oiled performance management machine, leave the self assessment on the shelf.  Your managers won't overcome it...

Of course, like Dennis Miller, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.