How Can Boss Tell If He/She Is Doing Well?

While critics seem to abound in this day and age, it’s tough for a boss to get an accurate evaluation of his or her job performance.

Q. My business has grown rapidly in the past 10 years and I’ve had to make the transition from entrepreneur to manager. Dealing with 30 employees is a different ballgame entirely. I’ve had no training for this. How can I tell if I’m doing it right?

A. Ask the most informed critics who have the most to gain or lose because of your performance … your employees.

Getting feedback from underlings is a delicate task, but it can be done in a way that benefits all parties. Since most followers will be reluctant to proffer criticism of the boss, it will take special effort to reverse the traditional top-down performance appraisal process so the “peons can pan the prince.”

Most often, programs facilitating such upward evaluation involve carefully structured questionnaires that are filled out, anonymously, by a manager’s subordinates. These rating forms commonly evaluate the boss with respect to communication skills and policies; the allocation of unit or individual workloads; coaching and counseling practices; performance review and compensation skills; methods for achieving commitment and desired contributions from each team member; adroitness in handling crises; and the ability to find and solicit the best that an employee has to offer.

Of course, there are scores of other criteria that you can apply in the formulation of a your “report card.”

Constructive “boss-bashing” is not an exact science that can only be plied by expert critics like your banker, spouse, or chief competitor. Employees can do a top-notch job, too, since they have a ringside seat at the spectacle of their boss in action.

They are in the best position to see - and criticize - their boss’s routine activities. Their unique perspective makes them experts when it comes to determining what is needed to motivate or move the “worker bees” in the organization. Their opportunity to participate in such an important process will also foster an atmosphere of openness that will encourage other forms of valuable employee expression.

Any thick-skinned manager should be able to compile a list of performance characteristics for consideration by his subordinates. A simple, homemade survey can be of immeasurable help in opening doors to communication, fostering an attitude of openness, and producing some worthwhile criticism for consideration by all involved.

Most opinion-gathering survey forms allow a rater to quantitatively grade selected performance criteria that are particularly relevant to the person and position being evaluated. To provide maximum benefit, a survey should also ascertain the relative degree of importance that the rater ascribes to each criteria against which the boss is being measured.

Here are a few rules you should follow in implementing such an evaluation:

Make sure that the employees being surveyed understand the purpose of the evaluation, the technique used and its implications. Show them how this exercise will benefit both them and their firm as well as their boss.

Keep the population of raters large enough to be meaningful but small enough to be manageable. Five or six raters constitutes the minimum survey population.

Guarantee anonymity and confidentiality. A third-party administrator or facilitator can be employed to give the respondents the assurance that the results of their efforts will be used only for the purposes declared. If the raters even suspect that retributive behavior could be the response to their efforts, their comments will be skewed to only favorable reactions and the entire undertaking will come to naught.

The evaluated boss must always provide some type of “after action” report once the exercise has been completed. The report can range from a simple, grateful acknowledgment, to a review of some of the findings with appropriate responses from the “ratee.”

Whatever tack is taken, it is important that something happens once the survey is completed. The evaluators deserve recognition for their efforts.

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