Evaluating Staff Performance

09/23/2005

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statute, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…To affect the quality of the day—that is the highest of arts.
Henry David Thoreau

One of our mentors, a person whose advice and support helped us through the early years of publishing Exchange, was Jim Levine. Before we met him, Jim had been a center director in Worcester, Massachusetts. He wrote a series of letters to his predecessor giving advice on being a director. In one of these letters he shared the following ideas on using evaluation to help staff prove their performance. Here are a few of these ideas:

• Staff must understand that the program is premised on the belief that not only children but also adults continue to grow; evaluation as a regular feature of the program is a tool for such growth.

• Everyone should understand that evaluation is a two-way process. The director must be open to criticism, for staff will only accept criticism if they see the director is doing so.

• Directness in criticism is a virtue. Everything else muddles issues. Our cliche -- simple and direct -- makes it sound as if directness is easy to come by. This is not so. It is often much easier to be vague and indirect, for fear of hurting feelings.

• Evaluation is often difficult because one's criticism can imply so much more than a judgment about the carrying out of specific job responsibilities. Few human relations jobs allow us to separate job tasks from personality: criticism often conveys -- or is received as -- judgment of personal worth. While you must evaluate in terms of specific job functions, your criticism will more likely be received constructively if you are able to communicate a desire to see beyond the job, to understand your staff members' skills or potential skills in other settings.

• The preconditions for constructive evaluation is trust. In the classroom we strive to communicate our support of the child as a growing person, even if we don't sanction all of the child's actions. Should the goals or standards we set for ourselves be any less than those we set for our children? Staff can only be evaluated constructively if they feel supported as individuals, as persons whose talents may or may not be appropriate for the child care center, and as persons who are being given the chance to test the talents peculiar to working in a child care center and not to their personhood.

The full text of the Levine’s Exchange article, “Letters to a Child Care Director: Insights on Being a Director,” is available on our web site.

For more information about Exchange's magazine, books, and other products pertaining to ECE, go to www.ccie.com.