Honest Evaluations

It's no secret that the National Security Personnel System is far from universally popular. The consensus that the system is flawed is reflected in an appeal filed by the American Federation of Government Employees with the Supreme Court on Monday, Congress' efforts to prevent the Defense Department from suspending collective bargaining rights for its employees, and the comments section on GovernmentExecutive.com.

Regardless of your feelings about NSPS, my colleague Brittany Ballenstedt's January cover story on how the system is changing the way managers supervise their employees and what that means for performance ratings and pay is a must-read.

The opening section is particularly revealing.

"Performance reviews were of no value to the employee because they were done without any conscience," before NSPS, Pat Tamburrino, an assistant deputy chief in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, told Ballenstedt. "Managers didn't spend a lot of time setting objectives, and [employees] didn't get a lot of feedback from their bosses during the course of the year."

That's a pretty bald statement, and it summarizes both the danger of moving to pay for performance too quickly and the potential of NSPS. If employees aren't given honest evaluations of their performance, the management support they need to improve, and a sense that they're part of a system that wants and needs them to succeed, then paying them based on their performance will be as haphazard as … well, as tying everyone to a pay raise determined by Congress.

That portrait of a breakdown in the manager-employee relationship is one that's appeared in this column before. Back in October 2007, I wrote about the challenges that outside analysts saw in training NSPS managers how to evaluate their employees and give them motivating raises within the constraints of the federal budget. Jason Kovacs, a compensation expert with the nonprofit organization WorldatWork, said that he thought managers frequently didn't feel confident rating the people they supervised, and employees lost confidence in ratings systems as a result.

Ballenstedt's story goes further in explaining how managers are coping with those challenges. Some solutions are simple. Tamburrino said he is working to change expectations of how much time managers should spend working to improve each employee's performance in a given year, and how much time managers should spend on supervisory activities each day.

Other challenges are more psychological. Tamburrino told Ballenstedt that it's hard to strike a balance between helping employees write self-evaluations that will win them the recognition they deserve and helping them to evaluate their performance in the context of a given year and their fellow employees' performance so they can understand when they've gone above and beyond the norm.

Mary Lacey, Defense's program executive officer for NSPS, has shown a willingness to invest in training managers on basic communications and coaching skills, Ballenstedt writes. That investment may not yield an immediate payoff, but it's an important indication that Lacey and others are serious about helping managers do their jobs properly.

Lacey also has recognized that pay for performance or not, management isn't the logical career destination for all upwardly mobile employees. She's working to develop nonsupervisory tracks for senior employees, which will help guarantee that future managers will be the employees who are best-suited to overseeing the performance and development of their co-workers.

All these steps sound straightforward and logical on their own, but Ballenstedt's article illustrates how difficult it is to get them all right and working together, particularly when congressional budgeting and high-stakes fights over labor relations issues are thrown into the mix.