Have you ever felt like a mistake you made long ago unfairly influenced your performance review, or found yourself judging an employee too positively or negatively based on just one trait?
This is the halo/horns effect, a bias that occurs when we allow a single characteristic to skew our entire evaluation of someone’s performance. In the context of performance reviews, these biases can lead to inaccurate feedback, unfair assessments, and distorted perceptions, which ultimately harm team development and individual growth.
To ensure fair and effective performance reviews, it’s crucial to recognize and overcome these biases. This article will discuss the halo/horns effect and provide strategies for giving balanced, accurate feedback.
What is the Halo Effect?
The “halo effect” is a cognitive bias where our overall impression of someone influences how we perceive their specific traits. If a person excels in one area, we tend to assume they excel in others, even without evidence.
For instance, if John is well-liked because he is friendly, his manager might also rate him highly in areas like leadership or productivity, even if his performance in those areas is average.
The term was coined by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920 during studies on how military officers rated their subordinates.
What is the Horns Effect?
The “horns effect” is the opposite of the halo effect. It occurs when a negative impression of a person influences how we view their other traits or abilities. In this case, if someone displays a single unfavorable quality, we may unfairly assume they perform poorly in unrelated areas, leading to biased evaluations.
For instance, if Sarah is often late to meetings, her manager might assume she is also disorganized or inefficient, even though she excels in her work. This single negative trait clouds the manager’s perception of her overall performance.
Like the halo effect, the horns effect is rooted in the cognitive biases first explored by Edward Thorndike.
How Does the Halo/Horns Effect Happen in Performance Reviews?
The halo/horns effect is a type of bias that can occur in any relationship, but especially during performance reviews. The halo/horns effect occurs when a manager allows one positive or negative trait to ‘color’ their whole evaluation of an employee.
In other words, the manager becomes either too lenient or too critical of the employee based on a single trait. This can lead to inaccurate and unfair performance reviews.
For instance, in company ABC, John is the marketing manager and is in charge of Sally who has been tasked with finding cheap email marketing software for their company. Sally forgot about it and consequently missed the deadline for finding the tool they needed, causing a major headache for John as he ended up doing it himself.
Instead of coaching Sally and helping her get better so that it didn’t happen again, he wrote her off as a bad team member and stopped trying to help her grow.
When it was time for the performance review, instead of taking into consideration the countless great things that Sally had done over the last 6 months, all John could think about was that one mistake. So he gave her negative grades across the board in her performance review.
We can all see how unfair it is to treat someone like this. None of us would want to be treated this way for our mistakes. So, it is essential that we are aware of this cognitive bias, and take concrete steps to overcome it.
How Do You Avoid the Halo Horns Effect in Performance Reviews?
1. Be aware of your biases
We all have them! If you know that you tend to be too lenient or too critical of a type of person, make a conscious effort to counterbalance that tendency in your performance reviews. We can also be aware of our biases by being mindful of how we are feeling when we are rating someone’s performance.
For example, suppose we are feeling angry or frustrated with a member of our marketing team because they failed to properly audit our website causing our Google rankings to suffer, or feeling annoyed at our salesman who messed up a big presentation a while back costing us a large client. In that case, we will likely be more critical in our rating.
By taking a step back and objectively evaluating the situation, we can make sure that our biases do not affect our judgment.
2. Treat them as an individual
Try to view each employee as an individual, rather than lumping them into categories.
For example, don’t think of all ‘millennials’ as lazy and entitled just because you read that somewhere on the internet — get to know your employees as individuals and treat them accordingly.
Similarly, don’t give all of your employees the same rating just because they are in the same department or have been with the company for the same amount of time. Each person has different strengths and weaknesses, and each deserves to be evaluated as an individual.
3. Incorporate 360 Reviews
Incorporating 360-degree reviews helps mitigate the halo and horns effect by gathering feedback from multiple perspectives, leading to a more balanced and objective assessment of an employee’s performance.
For example, if an employee named Emily is highly regarded by her manager for her positive attitude, her manager might overlook areas like time management (halo effect).
However, feedback from Emily’s peers and subordinates could reveal issues such as missed deadlines or unclear communication. This well-rounded input helps create a more accurate and comprehensive evaluation, preventing any single perspective from dominating the review process.
To enhance your performance reviews with multi-rater feedback, explore Engagedly’s 360 Feedback tool, designed to offer in-depth insights from a diverse range of evaluators.
4. Use a performance review template
A performance review template can help you to ensure that you are evaluating each employee fairly. By using the same template for every performance review, you can avoid any potential biases that may come into play.
The critical thing to remember is that it’s still possible to let bias influence you as you fill out the templated review, however, it serves as a guide to help keep you fair and unbiased. A good performance review template is an essential tool in the review process.
5. Focus on behaviors, not traits
Rather than saying ‘John is always late for his shifts,’ try, ‘I noticed that John has been coming in late for his shifts the last few Mondays.’ This helps to keep the review objective and focused on specific behaviors that can be changed.
The more that we can focus on the concrete examples of behavior we’d like to see changed, the better the employee will receive it. And the more we can show that we truly want to support them in their changes (instead of just bossing them around), the more likely they are to improve their behavior.
Consider equipping them with some specialized third-party coaching, helpful decision-making tools to improve their processes, or regular one-on-one time to accelerate their change.
The more that we can come alongside them and support their change, the quicker we will see the results in them we’d like to see. Think of how you can support the employee, instead of focusing on the few things they are doing poorly and need to improve.
6. Use objective data when possible
If you’re struggling to remain objective, look at hard data such as sales numbers, PPC campaign performance, punctuality records, and other KPIs (key performance indicators) that your company tracks. This can help ground your performance review in reality and avoid undue bias.
Taking a step back from the emotions of the situation and examining the data with an unbiased eye when evaluating our people objectively can make all the difference in the world.
This is where performance review software can really shine. It helps remove biases because when you are looking at the raw data, feelings or prejudices will not influence you.
6. Seek input from others
If you’re struggling to get a well-rounded picture of an employee’s performance, seek input from their co-workers, direct reports, or even customers/clients if possible.
Just make sure that you’re not taking this input at face value; use it as a starting point for further investigation rather than the cornerstone of your review process.
When in doubt, seek third-party insight and perspectives – in the counsel of many, there is wisdom.
Conclusion
The halo/horns effect is a type of bias that occurs all the time during performance reviews across the world. Most people don’t realize they are doing this until someone points it out to them, which is what this article does.
If you have experienced adverse effects from the halo/horns effect, take some steps to rectify the situation and move forward in a fair, productive manner.
By following the tips above, you can avoid the halo/horns effect and ensure that your employees are getting accurate and fair performance reviews.
