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Assessment & Evaluation

Published February 2008

Alternatives to 360 Assessments: The Manager's Role

 

  Rick Tate & Julie White, Ph.D.

The challenge for businesses is clear: To get and maintain a competitive edge, organizations must not only attract customers, they must attract and engage the most talented employees. The quality of the relationship between managers and direct reports defines an employee's level of engagement, discretionary effort and loyalty to the company.

People do not leave organizations; they leave managers. The quality of manager-employee relationships depends on the quality of the management practices each manager uses. Talented employees will look for greener pastures when they have to endure deficient managers who:

• Poorly articulate job expectations.
• Employ vague, inadequate standards and
• measurements of performance.
• Utilize faulty, manipulative motivation techniques.
• Tolerate poor performance.
• Are ineffective communicators and are rigid in their coaching styles.

It is the manager alone who is the greatest catalyst for exceptional employee performance. The evidence can't be any clearer. A recent global workforce study of 90,000 employees in 19 countries conducted by global professional services firm Towers Perrin showed:

• Just 21 percent of the employees surveyed around the world are engaged in their work, meaning they're willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed.
• Some 38 percent of employees are partly to fully disengaged. The result: a gap between the discretionary effort companies need and people actually want to invest, and companies' effectiveness in channeling this effort to enhance performance.
• Firms with the highest percentage of engaged employees collectively increased operating income 19 percent and earnings per share 28 percent year to year.
• Those companies with the lowest percentage of engaged employees showed year-to-year declines of 33 percent in operating income and 11 percent in earnings per share.

Assessments: Who and What?

The critical influencer of whether employees are engaged is how individual managers and supervisors behave, and the impact of effective talent management practices is staggering.

Companies employ a wide variety of employee assessments to try to ensure managers will make an effort to attract good people, develop their strengths, and retain sustained, high levels of performance. Generic 360-degree assessments are often utilized as a tool to gauge a wide variety of characteristics in the workplace that hopefully correlate with talent managers' efforts to execute these tasks. But because of the wide range of information available, all too often managers are swamped with data and scores that:

• Are all but useless to them.
• Provide no identifiable leverage for improvement.
• Leave the manager on his or her own to figure out how to learn and adopt more effective practices.

Alternatively, talent managers may want to limit the surveying of management practices in favor of an assessment of each manager's direct employees for the following reasons: