Lots of you enjoyed my previous post “The coaching session from hell”, featuring a video nasty in which my erstwhile friend and colleague Spencer Holmes perpetrated the most psychologically damaging coaching session you have ever seen. I know it was only make believe, but I am still trying to get over it.
So I thought you might like another one from the same school of horror. This time I get my revenge on him, and the topic is closely associated. I get to do his annual Appraisal, hoorah. Plenty of room to dish out some dysfunctional behaviour and keep him nicely suppressed in his little box.
He and I undertake these videos without any form of prior discussion. We literally sit at his kitchen table and agree on a topic, and who is doing what role. We hit the record button, and 10 minutes later we have a video demonstrating how not to do the skill we are featuring. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it: where does our ability to demonstrate how not to do this stuff come from? We haven’t written it down, talked it through, planned it in any way. Somewhere deep down in each of us there must be a reserve of dysfunctional behaviour, acquired I guess by watching others do it, doing it ourselves and realising it should go into the Dysfunctional file, or some other process of osmosis. Slightly worrying in a way: how do you make sure that the drawer with that file in it is kept firmly locked? Maybe we could all do with a Shredding function, enabling these files to be destroyed once and for all? But then we wouldn’t be able to have so much fun playing with the file every so often. How boring.
Anyway, see how many gaffes you can spot in the next 10 minutes. Spencer and I have counted over 20. And if you reckon you are on the wrong end of this type of stuff, why not suggest that your Appraiser takes a look at this before your next Appraisal? You never know, he or she might spot themselves and decide to do it better on the day.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jln-liAnN8Y]
Enjoy! And let us know what topics you’d like us to work on next – we’re open to suggestions.
