PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL & Unconscious Imprinting

Why So Much Fear of Performance Appraisals?

Over twenty-five years of corporate consulting,  I often helped people cope with the complex anxieties accompanying performance appraisals.  The sad fact is that most employees (both bosses and subordinates) approach these opportunities for feedback and growth with terrible feelings of trepidation.  Where does all this fear come from?  It comes from early unconscious imprinting.  (Imprintings & The Levels of the Unconscious)  

Think back - what was the first time in your life when your performance was appraised in writing and significant emotion was present?  That's right.  Report cards.

When I was a kid, report cards were more honest in that they gave two sets of grades – one for how well you performed, and one for how well the teacher liked you.  The first was generally expressed in the letters A-B-C-D-F, symbolizing maximum achievement to minimum or unsatisfactory achievement.  The second, variously called Effort, Citizenship and Deportment, was expressed in the numbers 1-2-3-4-5, symbolizing maximum effort to minimum or unsatisfactory effort.  

Since most of us spent our childhood and adolescence in school, that imprinting was not only done when we were very young but was repeated year after year after year.  And what is the perfect report card in that system?

A-1, of course!  Maximum Achievement with Maximum Effort!

But  when you step back for a moment and look again, A-1 is silly and stupid.  Why?  Because it leads us to believe that excellence equals maximum achievement with maximum effort.

How about A-5:  Maximum Achievement with Minimum Effort!

After we see it, A-5 is obviously a vast improvement over an A-1 belief system that drives us crazy by making us think we can never do enough.  But here's the Catch-22: while A-5 may make perfect sense rationally, imprinting causes us to behave irrationally, just as in the story of the black Labrador puppy and Aunt Elizabeth.  So what's going on with this A-1/A-5 stuff anyway?  The simple answer is its driving us nuts!  And the major way it does this is to teach us we can never do enough because no matter how high the achievement, we could always have put in more effort, couldn't we?

Understanding the Unconscious Isn’t Enough

I’ll use myself as an example.  I teach this stuff, right?  If anyone should be able to appreciate A-5 in another person, it ought to be me.  Let me tell you another story.  Cindi Crutchfield ran the business aspects of our small consulting company for many years because I was smart enough to know that if I ran it, we wouldn't have company for very long.  Somewhere around the sixth or seventh year we worked together, we were having a good deal of success, and this resulted in my spending much time on the road which got me pretty stressed and strung out.  (There's nothing like a little stress to help your imprinting show up!)  Well, during a stretch of about three weeks traveling, one day I called the office and Cindi wasn't there.  In my frustration and impatience, I left her this message on the answering machine:

"Where the hell are you?  I'm out here working my butt off, and you're not even in the office!"

When I got back into the office later that week, Cindi still wasn't there, but over her desk was a large sign:

 REMEMBER,

I AM AN

A-5

PERSON!

From that point on I had to look at that sign whenever she wasn't sitting at her desk...