Weather has been beautiful and I finally got out and played golf at the Nehoiden Golf Course a couple of times this week. Next week is an exciting week. One of our son is graduating after MBA and the commencement is on thursday, 24th May. Wellesley’s commencement is on Friday, May 25th. I have now been at Wellesley long enough that I know at least five of the graduating seniors. And I “know” a sixth one through twitter who thanked me for helping move forward the “lifetime” Wellesley email for the senior class. We had an exciting Drupal upgrade on thursday where our staff demonstrated how such a complex upgrade can be done without the site really going down. And then, we encountered some issues and going back to the previous version was also done very elegantly and quickly. Go team! Absolutely no comparison to the situation before!

It is also that time of the year when we all have to write performance reviews and attend to compensation recommendations. This is not an easy task for many!

Performance reviews are feedback mechanisms through which a supervisor informs a staff member how she/he is performing in the job. This has a parallel in the way faculty members evaluate their students or their peers when they review their scholarly works. This process is inherently subjective. Two faculty members teaching the same course do not necessarily teach them the same way nor do they evaluate the students based on exactly the same metrics. Similarly, managers in the same group may have different criteria for evaluation and the diversity of the jobs we all do adds yet another complicated dimension to all of this. HR provides a very practical guideline for evaluation, but let us face it, it is not formulaic. I try very hard to make these evaluations fair & consistent.

In a merged organization like ours, now you have staff doing very different types of work that have to be evaluated on comparable scales. It is like an interdisciplinary course on Logic which both philosophy majors and CS majors take, but the former end up submitting research papers for the final project which the CS majors all submit computer programs on related subjects. Of course these types of things happen all the time and everyone who is in the position to evaluate finds a way to level the playing field.

I am very fond of the methodology that I learned from John Meerts, who was my boss for a long time at Wesleyan. He required the reviews to always start with accomplishments and praise for good work, but it should also have areas of improvement (because no one is perfect)  in the upcoming year and a development plan that addressed the areas to improve as well as professional development. I have found that we are very good at talking about the accomplishments but are extremely reluctant to talk about areas to improve. Especially in cases where we have staff that have worked extremely hard and have excelled in their work. I think even in those cases, the improvement part can be written in a very realistic way through specific examples or observations.

I have read through all of the LTS performance reviews that have been submitted so far and I am so thrilled to see all that has been accomplished collectively. Though we have talked about all the major ones during the course of the year, there are many other significant accomplishments that have not risen to the surface that I got a chance to read about. Great stuff!

During this time, we also encounter the perennial question about goals for the upcoming year. What is a goal? We will review all the submitted goals and push back on those that do not qualify as a goal and explain why and how to choose a goal. Not an easy task indeed, but something we need to do. There seems to be still a lot of confusion about the methodology used for evaluating who “met expectation” and who “exceeded expectation”. We want to try to address this right up front for the coming year by providing some concrete examples of what it takes to exceed expectation. Another highly subjective area where we need to keep trying to provide guidance.

I have been consumed by this so much during the past week, it is time for me to move on! Looking forward to playing some golf this weekend and enjoy the outdoors. I will do my own self-assessment during these outings and my score will tell how well I performed!