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The reasons I do evaluations

In churches we don't like to do evaluations sometimes because people feelings can get hurt, but what about the other side, what if our people are knocking the ball out of the park and we never see it because we never take the time to evaluate them. I'm not a huge fan of hard metric evaluations but I am ALWAYS evaluating the ministry I have responsibility for.  On a personal level, I know I am accountable to God for how I, for lack of better term, 'steward the flock'.  So, I'm constantly writing things down so I can find the best way to celebrate them or work on them. I was thinking about a couple of reasons I do evaluations (regardless if they are hard metric evals or soft metric):

• 1. Evaluation clarifies outcomes - makes documenting your desired goals and objectives and progress towards them easier
• 2. Helps people know how they're doing - gives them a clear picture of where they stand.
• 3. Encourage more discussion - opens up the floor to find out what's working and why it works, OR what's not working and why it's not.
• 4. Makes putting systems to our ideas easier - once everythings on the table building system to move forward gets a tad easier.
• 5. Separates real outcomes from vague hopeful feelings - defines "what we're really doing" versus what we "think" we're doing.
• 6. Exposes areas that need attention - sometimes evals are the ONLY things that "catch" problem areas.
• 7. Focusses attention - pinpoints needed leadership competencies and directs our attention to mission critical issues.
• 8. Encourages that we never stop learning - sometimes evals uncover an area we need to work on or a new area we need to "learn".
• 9. Influences future actions and decisions - We move forward FROM the foundation we're on today.  So decisions about tomorrow can't be made without a realistic view of today!

I do evals differently depending on the person so know the approach to doing an eval might need to be taylor made for the person who you're evaluating.  Different people respond differently so try not to assume everyone is like  you...because I hear they're not.  Have fun with this too, evals can be stressful but it's up to us as leaders to make this a positive experience. Feel free to add more reason why we should do evals.