If you are in a managerial position, then the largest chunk of your responsibility is both to enhance and evaluate the performance of your people, but evaluating people can be tricky, managers need to be aware of the following common mistakes and traps when evaluating employees performance.

 

Unbalance: The issue here in evaluating performance happens when the manager focuses on one area where an employee is doing exceptionally good and ignoring other weaknesses. For example a manager focusing on an employees great customer service skills and ignoring the employee's poor teamwork spirit and unprofessional conduct with colleagues which is negatively affecting the team spirit.

 

Short memory effect: This happens when two weeks before the performance evaluation a poor performing employee starts to perform perfectly a manager may forget about the months of poor performance and unmet objectives and goals and remember only the recent outstanding performance. 

 

Great  guy/girl: Many managers absolutely dread conducting performance evaluations because it forces them to acknowledge the failings of their employees and then talk to their employees about those failings. Most managers would much rather give their employees good news rather than bad, but sometimes bad news is all you’ve got. But every manager must be prepared to give both if employees are to improve in their jobs and become more effective.

 

Mirroring: This occurs when you fall into the trap of rating highly those employees who are most like you (same likes, dislikes, interests, hobbies, and so forth) and rating lowly those employees who are least like you. While the employees who are most like you will appreciate the favor, the employees you don’t favor won’t.

 

Putting them in boxes: Managers sometimes fall into the trap of stereotyping or preconceived notions of how their employees will react or believe . For example some managers will believe that women are better in serving customers so will naturally have the tendency to give female team members better ratings than male members in customer satisfaction.

 

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