Recently, I was having a conversation with a senior colleague about the challenges of performance appraisals and year end reviews, he asked me,
“Do you have subordinates reporting to you?”
“Yes.”
He said, “make sure you do istikharah prayer. We are making decisions that impacts people’s livelihood and rizq (provisions) here”
Wow. Oh man, I needed to hear that. So concise, yet such a profound and rare piece of advice!
Staff Performance Evaluation - to me, this is by far, the MOST difficult job of a manager.
🤔 How do you adequately give credit for a person’s efforts and contributions for an entire year?
🤔 How do you objectively evaluate that a person’s contribution is better than others, especially if they have different job scopes?
🤔 How do you be 100% objective, and completely put aside personal feelings, relationships, biases and preferences? Easier said than done!
🤔 How do you "fight" for your subordinates performance and hold the Fort, while others are picking your team apart and hunting for their flaws on why they are "unworthy"?
🤔 How do you muster the courage to convey tough constructive feedback, or that they failed to meet certain targets, without harming the relationship?
🤔 How do you you do “damage control” in the aftermath, as you confront the disgruntled voices of dissatisfied, frustrated staff who believe they deserve better?
From the Islamic perspective it is genuinely terrifying if we consider that if we don’t deal with this justice, we will be accountable of dzulm (oppression), and our decisions will come and haunt us on the day of judgment.
Furthermore, because it puts so much confidential responsibility on the leaders, evaluating performance often feels so isolating and lonely. It feels like a largely thankless job, especially when it gets such a bad rep from perceptions such as favoritism, leader incompetence or leadership failure to acknowledge contributions, or simply that “managers don’t bother reading your submissions, they already know what to rate you”. And, at the end of the day, no matter what you do, you will always end up with people being dissatisfied - perhaps even enraged - at your decisions.
It's one of the few work tasks that keep me awake at night, constantly questioning my own judgment, wondering if I did the right thing.
This, my fellow Muslim friends, is why we need to perform istikharah prayer to get the assurance of our decisions.
You don't have to go at it alone. Seek the counsel of Allah through istikharah.
Why DO we pray istikharah in the first place?
In life, we will make difficult decisions - some of which will have a huge impact to others. And this is certainly one of them. And so, we ask Allah for His blessings for the decisions we make, and seek His Wisdom, that if we do make mistakes along the way, to help us make the relevant course corrections.
People typically associate istikharah exclusively in marriage, but in we should do it for every major decision in life - and this was the practice of our righteous predecessors of the past. It was reported that Imam Al-Bukhari would pray istikharah every time he would write a hadith in his Sahih compilation (that’s over 2,000 hadith!)
On a personal level, performing istikharah prayer also helps us build our own self-confidence in our decisions. And self-confidence is SO important so that we don’t cave in under pressure or get paralysed by fear into being undecisive, or cower away into silence by avoiding difficult conversations, such as 1-on-1 feedback exchange, performance conversations, and conveying the results of their performance ratings.
Firstly, by performing istikharah, it clears up our conscience: by opening up to Allah and coming clean, we make it clear that we are striving towards performing this task with ikhlas (sincerity) and ihsan (excellence). That we are not doing this for personal glory, revenge or selfish fulfilment. We are simply doing our job as professionals, and as part of recognizing that our jobs are an aspect of our ibadah (worship), we recognize the importance and responsibility of this heavy burden.
Secondly, it gives a psychological reassurance of our decisions as we progress in executing them, especially if things do progress well. In this du’aa, we ask Allah that “if this decision is good for me for my life in this world and hereafter, then decree it for me, facilitate it for me and bless me in it” - and so when things do progress, it gives us comfort that we are receiving Blessings from the Almighty. And if it doesn’t turn out well or the way we intended? Perhaps it’s a sign to perform some course-correction to rectify something. And a means to improve and learn.
No decision will ever be perfect. You will make mistakes. And that’s okay. Fact of life: You will never be able to please everyone. Some people will be frustrated, angry, dissatisfied. Even if you do the best job with 100% justice, Some might even hate you forever.
And well, as frustrating as it is.. that’s life.
We just have to own up to our decisions, their consequences, maintain good professional conduct, and keep moving forward. All of these are simply the natural consequences of shouldering the heavy burden of managing people.
The key here is to come with a clean conscience, try your level best, without burning bridges of our personal & professional working relationships.
As always, never forget also to ask Allah to grant us the patience, steadfastness courage to confront these difficult tasks.
All the best to everyone, for your performance evaluations - especially to my fellow managers out there!
No comments:
Post a Comment