There is a day in every organisation that employees fear more than retrenchment rumours. It is neither budget day nor the audit day. It is performance appraisal day.
If you have spent any time in a Zimbabwean organisation, public or private, you know the ritual well.
The invitation arrives in your calendar: “Performance Appraisal Discussion — 14:00, Boardroom”. Your stomach sinks. In that moment, you are not a professional. You are an accused person waiting to be sentenced.
There is a judge, and that is your line manager. There is a charge sheet, and that is the appraisal form. There is a witness stand, where you are asked to defend yourself for the last 12 months.
Finally, there is a sentence, which is a score, a percentage, and a category: Below Expectation, Meets Expectation, and if you are fortunate, Exceeds Expectation.
Psychologically, this ritual is associated with paying for one’s sins as one stands for judgment. No one, not even the chief executive officer, is comfortable on that seat. No one wants to stand in judgment.
Perhaps there is a research gap that fellow academics must take up with urgency. What is the prevalence of stress, anxiety and workplace depression that is directly attributable to performance appraisals?
We diligently measure employee engagement and we measure burnout, but we have not yet measured the stress that is induced by the very tool we claim drives performance.
If we did, we would discover that the appraisal season is a public health hazard.
For starters, the setting itself is a crime scene. The traditional appraisal is convened to inform you of all your sins, including the undocumented ones. Sins that were never coached in March suddenly become mortal sins in December.
Your manager states, “In April you missed a critical deadline”, a deadline that was never discussed in April. You sit there, defensive and shocked, assembling an alibi for work that was done six months ago. This is not management. This is prosecution.
The word itself, appraisal, is the least persuasive word on the scale of collaboration. The workplace, by definition, is a social enterprise for collaboration. We come together because no single individual can build a product, serve a client, or run a nation alone.
Why would the tool we use to improve collaboration be named after judgment.
The boardroom must, therefore, consider a fundamental shift, from performance appraisals to performance conversations, in the same spirit as the Works Council.
What boggles the mind more is the fundamental configuration of an appraisal. It demands that an individual account for work that was done by a team.
This is not an argument to shield individual accountability because accountability is non-negotiable in any organisation.
However, it takes eleven players to concede a goal. Focusing primarily on the goalkeeper is not accountability. It is scapegoating. It shields accountability on the part of the defenders, the midfielders, and the strikers.
Our performance systems have become sophisticated in committing this error.
Recently, Zimbabwe’s Mighty Warriors recently lost to the Malawi ladies, 7-0.
On face value, the goalkeeper and at most the defenders are appalling. The scoreline screams failure at the back. If this were a corporate appraisal, we would score the goalkeeper quite lowly.
But the truth is, we do not need an appraisal to improve the future performance of the team. We need a performance conversation.
A performance conversation would ask how we transitioned from midfield, whether our strikers retained possession, whether we had a pressing strategy, whether the bench read the game correctly and whether our fitness was adequate for high press.
It would not start with the statement, “You failed.” It would start with the question, “What happened to us, and what must we do differently as a team?”
That is the power of the word conversation. Conversation invites sanity, civility, co-creation, and recalibration. Appraisal invites fear, defensiveness, impression management, and memory hunting.
Performance conversations need to be anchored on principles of appreciative inquiry.
Even in a seven-nil defeat to Malawi, we did something right. It needs to be known, celebrated and sustained. What you appreciate, appreciates.
People repeat what you recognise. If you only spotlight failure, you get a workforce that is fluent in failure.
Over the years, the appraisal approach has become a sophisticated crime. We have perfected the forms and moderated the scores. It looks scientific and feels objective.
But underneath the sophistication, it is often a tool to justify a bonus, or to justify not paying one. We manipulate scores to fit the bonus budget. We inflate scores for favourites. We punish dissent with low scores. And then we print reports that state, “Performance Management completed one hundred percent”. Completed? Or complied?
We need the builder’s mindset, the farmer’s approach and the engineer’s perspective to human resources.
A builder does not appraise a foundation that is half-built. He levels it. A farmer does not appraise a wilting crop. He waters it, checks the soil, and changes the seed.
An engineer does not appraise a bridge that is vibrating. He models the load and redesigns the struts. Performance can be grown, designed, or modelled.
It cannot be judged into existence. Not through appraisals, but through performance conversations.
Let us, therefore, change the architecture. Let us move from an annual event to a continuous conversation. From judgment to joint sense-making. From individual blame to team reflection. From a form to a forum. From human resources presiding over it, to leaders owning it.
Replace your appraisal calendar with a conversation rhythm. Weekly check-ins that ask what we are winning.
Monthly co-creation sessions that ask what is blocking us. Quarterly recalibration that asks what we must learn, unlearn and relearn.
With immediate effect, the word appraisal is banned from management vocabulary. Call it a performance conversation, growth dialogue or even a co-creation huddle.
But do not call it an appraisal. Because no one ever grew because they were judged. People grow because they were seen, heard, stretched, and supported.
Do not say I did not warn you.
Dr Request Machimbira is the executive director of Proficiency Consulting Group and the International Wellness Institute. For feedback, email request @proficiencyinternational.com or phone +263772693404
