360-degree performance feedback can be tricky

Dear Bob …

I am a senior staffer in a small IT division. I work in operations and network support, but I’ve been asked to provide input for the performance appraisal of a younger colleague in the application development area.

[ See also: “When assessing employees, measurement and personal acquaintance aren’t enough” | Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld’s Advice Line newsletter. ]

We are both generally considered pretty good at what we do. The problem is, this guy and I have butted heads on just about everything since day one, although we’ve managed to work together well enough to keep the doors open and the lights on for the past seven or eight years now. But our well-recognized antagonism would seem to render me unfit for this task, at least by my own standards of objectivity. I would like to do the right thing here, but it just looks like a minefield to me. How would you try make the best of all this?

– 360’d to Distraction

Dear Pythagoras …

Seems to me you have three alternatives. One is awful, the second acceptable, the third a big positive for you. They are:

Awful: You can use this opportunity to finally tell the company what you really think of your co-worker. He’s impossible to work with, a pain in the neck, bullheaded, and his mother dresses him funny.

It’s awful because the only attention anyone will pay to your comments will be to draw inferences about you, and none of them will be complimentary. You’ll look like a schmuck.

Acceptable: You can honestly inform whoever asked you to provide feedback that because the two of you just don’t get along very well and have so much negative history, you don’t think you’ll be able to be sufficiently objective to provide useful information. It’s acceptable because you’ll present yourself as self-aware enough to know your limitations. It’s only acceptable because you’ll be highlighting a limitation, not a strength.

Big positive: You start by acknowledging the poor quality of your interactions with your colleague and caution the reader to be alert to your biases. Then you provide as balanced and objective assessment as you can, describing more positives than opportunities for improvement — realistic and accurate positives, that is, with the opportunities for improvement stated tactfully and with restraint.

Which means that before you start to write, you’ll need to do some serious thinking regarding the reasons the two of you have butted heads in the past. My guess: Part of the reason is that he works in Applications and you work in Operations. That means the two of you are supposed to butt heads. Your job is to make sure everything runs tomorrow the same as it ran yesterday. His job is to make changes.

In any event, the reason this last alternative is the best for you is that it shows that you’re more than self-aware regarding your biases: You’re able to see beyond them to the world as it is.

I’m not a big fan of peer performance feedback. It’s great in theory, but in practice it generally ends up as a combination popularity contest and group backstabbing session. Since you’re stuck in the middle of it, though, do your best to make it work to your advantage.

– Bob