Among the thousand other things a leader in a family-owned business has to do is the dreaded employee evaluation. Managers know that it is a wise and good thing – for both the company and the employee – to get at least an annual performance evaluation. However, the typical evaluation meeting is tense for both parties and isn’t nearly as productive as both would like. Neither are they urgent; if an irate customer calls or there’s an emergency out in the field, the evaluation meeting is all too easy to easy to postpone – and postpone, and postpone again. We know we ought to do them, but because we dread them we find wiggle room in the hopes that, if we ignore them long enough, they’ll go away.
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A couple of years ago, one of our peer group members recommended the book Love Works by Joel Manby. Dutifully, I bought it, stuck it in the pile of other business books I had yet to read, and let it sit. Finally – and this is not a book review! There’s a specific and relevant point I want to make below – guilt caused me to pick it up and read it. The principle behind Love Works is that companies often think they have to sacrifice their values in order to hit their sales and profit goals. Manby makes the point that this is a “false choice.” If you don’t have a healthy bottom line, you cannot have a great company where people want to come to work to do the outstanding things that you mutually set out to do. When Manby says love plays a big role in the workplace, he’s talking about love as a verb, not as an emotion, and he goes on to spell out how to practically apply “agape love” in your family business.
One of the valuable tools he offers has to do with evaluations. He talked about an employee who produced superstar results but had a hard-driving personality and frequently rubbed others on the team the wrong way. He was torn between wanting to reward good bottom line results while needing to deliver a reprimand for poor people skills which weren’t in concert with the company’s core values. Here is the particularly effective process he laid out.
Pull out a sheet of paper and label three things: 1. Same as, 2. More of, and 3. Less of. Write down the things you appreciate about the employee in the first section. In the second write down things you’d like to see more of in terms of her performance and personal interactions, and in the third, write down things you’d like to see a little less of. It’s that simple.
Now, this is a two-way street: you’re going to give your family business employee a sheet labeled exactly the same way. She’s going to go through the same interaction with you so you can learn how she – and likely other people in your area of responsibility – need you to better support her. Manby says there are “people like _____ in every organization, and they need truthful, direct feedback and follow-up to help them refine their performance and attitude to become fantastic – not just good – leaders.”
Having an organization based on heartfelt core principles doesn’t mean that you don’t work diligently to make sales, achieve profits, and hold people accountable. Tony Robbins said that early in his career he thought he had to be intense, driven, and borderline fanatical in order to achieve his ambitious goals. Then, one day he wondered why this had to be true and resolved to be a happy achiever! Happy achievers tend to be the ones who run their companies based on their highest senses of self and values, and they find ways to hold people accountable and communicate on the subject of employee performance in a way that’s rewarding for both sides.