The exercise appeared in “Psychology Today” and is based on a test developed by a teacher to make sure students get better-directed feedback.

Imagine you are taking part in a clapping contest. (Bear with us on this.) Three judges are chosen to rate the quality of clapping on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being the very best score and 1 being the worst. You have one practice trial where you get feedback before you do it for real lat.

Scenario One: For your practice trial, you clap wildly – frantically and enthusiastically for the required 30 seconds. Then you stop. The judges confer. Judge 1 gives you a 3. Judge 2 gives you a 2. Judge 3 gives you a 3. You leave the room with 3 minutes to prepare for your performance.

Scenario Two: Same situation, but at the end the judges confer and critique your performance. “I don’t really like the fact that you started your applause at such a quick pace. There was no texture to your performance,” states the first judge. “And the beats were much too close together,” says the second. Judge 3 mutters,  “Too quiet. Much too quiet.” You earn two 3s and a 2. You leave the room to prepare.

Scenario Three: Same situation. But the judges confer and critique in a different way. “What I think really makes an excellent performance,” explains the first judge, “is a performance that builds. I like it to began slowly and then get louder and louder, almost like a crashing wave. What you did was great for the end part, but it would have much more impact if you created some contrast between the beginning and the end.” The second judge nods. “You can also increase the crescendo by starting with slower, quieter clapping, but then getting faster and louder towards the real triumphant ending. Your clapping at the end was quite good.” “You’re looking for a sharper sounds as well”, says the third judge. “You keep clapping with the middle of your hands, but you really want that sharp sound to give it some definition. I absolutely hate that hollow palm on palm sound.”  You earn two 3s and a 2 and go to prepare for your final performance.

Question: Which scenario should lead to a better final performance? Why?

In Scenario 1, you received feedback – your marks – but you have no idea what they’re based on. You know you need to change something. But what? They’ve given you no clue, so you’re equally likely to change for the worse as change for the better.

In Scenario 2, you’ve been told what not to do, but you don’t know what your goal is. So you can avoid the behavior you know they didn’t like (being quiet, starting too loudly and not having enough texture, and clapping too fast). But what are they looking for?

Scenario 3 is the most useful. They tell you what your goal is – eliminating a whole range of possible behaviors. They tell you which aspects of your behavior will help you towards optimal performance. They tell you what they don’t like as well. And they even give you some ideas for behaviors or techniques you may not have thought about.

Remember the three clapping scenarios the next time you’re giving feedback.

The situation is that you have someone coming in to interview for a supervisory job. Usually, HR gets involved, along with the hiring manager and maybe a few employees who would be peers of the applicant if hired.

But what about including workers who would answer to the applicant? Some companies are doing it. Here, from their experience, are three typical problems and the solutions:

1. Problem: The worker feels in charge and free to grill the applicant, setting up an adversarial relationship before the manager is even hired.
   Solution: Set some boundaries before the interview — maybe asking the worker to formulate a few questions beforehand, which you can review. Ask the worker to stick with those questions, and possibly a follow-up or two.
2. Problem: The applicant appears to resent being interviewed by a potential underling
   Solution: When setting up a meeting time, try to be sure to tell the applicant who’ll be in the interview. That’s the best time to gauge the applicant’s reaction. Someone who seems hostile to the idea could be the type of boss who doesn’t consult with subordinates for their ideas.
3. Problem: The subordinates are marginal performers who, you feel, wouldn’t represent the company in the best way.
   Solution: That’s a big problem. You have a couple of choices: (a) You can decide to can the whole idea, until you get someone on board who appears to have the right stuff. (b) You can pick the best of the bunch — if you feel that person really will handle the situation properly — and keep using that person until something better or equal comes along. Don’t feel obligated to rotate the job among several marginal people, just because you want to give everyone a chance.

The usual guidelines that seem to work best are that the worker has input into the decision about whether to hire the boss, but not the power to veto or OK the choice. In other words, the worker provides another source of information that can be used to make the decision.

There’s also the question of whether the employees will be comfortable with a boss’s friend request.

So what should managers do? HRMorning readers had a lot to say on the subject, commenting on the recent story “Warning to bosses: Don’t ‘friend’ employees“:

AAS: “The only winning move is not to play.” This is true for employees and managers. Ask the police officers in Lexington KY who were fired for posting improperly on MySpace as well as hundreds of other examples of how we as a society have become far too open online. It is far more complex than just friending someone, it has to do with the social fabric of our businesses, and our employees’ day-to-day lives.

Mary D.: I accepted friend requests from co-workers and subordinates. Then one day, a coworker was telling an outside-the-company friend of hers about a new benefit that had not yet been announced. Since she too had many employees as friends, as well as me who knew about the benefit, half the company was alerted and the confusion started. Since then I have cleaned up my Facebook page to friends and family.

Jilly: I worked side by side with my staff for two years, as line staff with them. Then I got promoted to manager. Am I not supposed to be friends with them now? I feel by cutting all ties as friends would cause me bigger problems in the long run with my staff.

Tiffany: I am a supervisor who has friended subordinates and also have been friended by my supervisor on Facebook. The person receiving a friend request does have to accept the request in order for it to be finalized, but what does it say to your boss if you refuse their friend request?

What’s your opinion?

It’s a time when the anxiety level is high, and people are on edge. You’ll have to deal with all that, and at different levels:

With other members of the group. You’ll have to acknowledge that someone’s gone. Ignoring it just creates more tension, gives the appearance that something covert is going on and fuels the rumor mill.

How to handle it:

• Avoid the “why.” You could be stepping into a legal gray area of privacy if you go into the details of the termination. Simply say, “As you know, Bill has left the company.”

• Explain the short-term plan. His former co-workers will want to know who’s going to cover for Bill, when and whether he’ll be replaced, and so on.

With relevant organization departments outside your group. Often, others in your organization will have had contact and business with the former employee.

The approach in that situation is to have a one-by-one sit-down with the supervisors of those departments.

Explain to them that Bill has left the organization, that you’re establishing new contact people for outside departments and who those new people are. Don’t try to explain the situation to workers in another supervisor’s department, unless that supervisor asks you to.

With customers or other outsiders. If Bill dealt with people outside the organization, simply explain to them he has left the company and who his replacement will be.

Outsiders may need assurance that it’s “business as usual” and they should expect no breaks or drops in service.

A new book, “Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You,” attempts to explain the whole thing — and the financial collapse — by using neuroscience and psychological analysis.

To try to boil a few hundred pages of a book into a few hundred words is perhaps another bad decision, but here goes:

• People tend to think if something worked once, it’s guaranteed to work again. This is the reverse of “Experience is the best teacher” — especially when the experience is misapplied. We saw it happen on Wall Street when experienced money managers thought they could ride to the rescue simply because they’d done it before. What they, and everyday supervisors, fail to recognize is that rules and circumstances change, so a solution that worked 10 years ago might be useless today.
• Self-interest can be a poor guide. Let’s go back to Wall Street and Alan Greenspan’s observation that he failed to realize that big banks wouldn’t operate in their best self-interests. Actually, companies don’t control self-interest; people do. And people tend to see only what’s best for themselves in the short term. Likewise, many good supervisors — maybe because of business pressures — can’t see past the next 30 days. So they take the quick fix for themselves and hope for the best — and often get the worst.
• Data gets filtered based on prejudgments. Here’s the way this works: Let’s say a  supervisor is convinced someone’s a star employee and gets four reports on that employee — three bad ones and one good one. The supervisor will tend to focus on the good report because of the prejudgment that the person is a good employee.
• Buy-in can be bad. You know the old technique of giving people responsibility for their own ideas by making them responsible for the sucess of the idea? What happens is that they become so married to the idea that they’ll ride it — and everyone else — into the ground in a vain attempt to prove the idea is brilliant.
• Everyone has a bias. And everyone needs someone else to point out when that bias is a road to ruin. “Yes men” need not apply for the job. The someone who points out the destructive bias has to be strong, honest and smart.  We hope the folks on Wall Street are reading this book.

Her story:

When we recruit people, we sell them on the idea that our company believes in continual learning and improvement – meaning we support training as a way to reach career goals.

The problem with that: Our supervisors and HR were always
challenged to come up with new and different training employees could attend offsite and onsite.

Plus, of course, the training had to be relevant to the goals of the employee and the company. Keeping on top of that was almost a full-time job in itself, and we couldn’t
afford a training coordinator to do it.

Our solution: Make employees their own training coordinators – but it took some work.

Two stipulations
The cornerstone of the solution was to have employees find and choose their own training. No one really knew for certain whether employees would like the idea – many were skeptical or didn’t want the responsibility – or whether it would work.

• So we tried it for about a year on an experimental basis with a few employees. We told them they could choose their own training, but approval would be based on two major stipulations:
• The employee had to show the connection between the proposed training and their jobs and careers.

Cost would be a factor in approval. The more expensive the training, the greater the benefit the employee
would have to show – to the company and the job.

We rolled out the program and held our breath, waiting to see what would happen.

Early results
One of our first successes was a customer service employee – let’s call her “Jane” – who told her boss she was interested in the quality-control end of our business, and asked for training in that area.

Jane picked out her training, got the OK, and ended up moving into quality control and being a top performer.
We used that success story as a template to show others how the program might work for them. And an interesting thing happened.

Not all employees embraced the idea – some still wanted the
supervisor to pick the training. But we found that the ones who did take control of their training often also happened to be our most motivated, top performers.

In other words, the top people used the program to get better or to help themselves advance with the company. That assured us the program was working.

(Norma Anthony, Medford, NJ)

Her story:

Squeezing in affordable management training was always a challenge for us.

Our operation runs pretty lean, so it’s hard for supervisors to head off to some remote site for several days for management training. And then, of course, there’s the cost involved.

We did try to do some onsite training, but you usually have to have a large group for that to be cost-effective — not practical in our small outfit — and you have to schedule a block of time that may not always convenient for everyone.

We had to figure out a way to address our management-education problem.

As a start toward that goal, I decided to call some education experts – the business department at our local community college.

Late-day classes
I explained our goals to the department head, and we worked out a solution. He’d send us a list of management courses that ran only from 3 to 5 p.m.

That way, our supervisors could attend at the end of the day for an hour or two without breaking up a whole day or going to some far-away site. The school even helped us work on getting a state training grant to help pay for some of the classes.

So we ended up with management training that’s effective, convenient and affordable.

(Lynette Kautz, HR director, Denison, TX)

Question:
Our performance-appraisal system is based on “doesn’t meet,”  ”meets” or “exceeds” expectations criteria. We’re thinking of switching to a 1-10 scale that supervisors can use to rate employees.

Any thoughts on whether one system is better than the other?

Answer:
From the standpoint of being able to legally defend an appraisal, the doesn’t meet/meets/exceeds system is generally better. So says James Loots, a labor-relations attorney. But of course you have to have specific criteria on which to base the rating, meaning you have to define what productivity or quality criteria are used for each term.

The problem with a 1-10 scale is that one supervisor may give an employee a “5,” for instance, and another a “6″ but be unable to explain why or may be using shades of difference that depend on “feel” rather than measurable markers.

In that case, you could have a legal problem if the person with the lower score is a minority or pregnant or falls into some other bias-prone category.

Supervisory trainer Lynne Curry often hears the three reasons managers give for overlooking harassment that seemingly goes on right under their noses:

1. “No one ever asked her for sex.” That defense is common because too many supervisors think sexual harassment is only about sex. Of course, it’s not, nor is it about “romance.” Supervisors need to be aware that the category includes comments, innuendo, insults and so-called “harmless” physical contact.
2. “She never complained.” Victims do have some responsibility for ringing the alarm, but in many court cases, judges and juries have warned that supervisors have responsibility, too. The reason: The law recognizes that victims often are intimidated and reluctant to make waves for fear of losing their jobs or just being branded as troublemakers. That means the supervisor has a responsibility to be proactive about suspicions, and not wait until the victim pleads for help.
3. “He’s a great employee who’d never do something like that.” Good people do dumb things all the time. And sometimes a supervisor may be reluctant to take action against a high-performing or well-liked employee, for fear of losing the employee’s services or having to find a good replacement. Here’s how that looks to a court: You let someone victimize another employee because of business convenience. Then things start to get really expensive for the employer.

The facts: 

The upper-level manager of a male supervisor got complaints that the supervisor was showing favoritism toward a subordinate he was dating. At the time, the company had a policy banning relationships between supervisors and subordinates. The upper-level manager ordered the supervisor to stop dating the employee or be fired, using company policy and the complaints as the reason for the order. The supervisor refused the order and was fired. He sued, saying the company was violating his right to privacy by trying to monitor his relationships.

The employer said:
The company noted that it had a policy against such dating for the very same reason that caused problems in this instance: friction among other employees who perceived that the relationship resulted in favoritism for the subordinate.

Who won the case?

Answer: The company. 

Why: While recognizing the employee’s right to privacy, especially outside the workplace, the court noted the company had a right to set policies and regulate behavior that might affect the efficient operation of business.

Terminating an employee for violating such policies – especially after warnings about the behavior – was a valid action by the company. 

The court agreed with the company that supervisors have a special responsibility to maintain the appearance of fairness. Subordinates have to have trust that no employee has a special “in” with the boss. 

Cite: Barbee v. Household Automotive Finance.