appraisal of a problem employee

I get a email saying that he is not satisfied with most of rating and therefore would like to close it as part of process. I encourage him to have face to face discussion as even that is part of process. The risk was the differences being surfacing once again.
Suddenly there was a mail from system that today was the last day and I had to have a telecon with the problem employee to close appraisal.
There were few mistakes from my side that I corrected. He had no problem with the ratings that were not good but with the comments that I had put. At few places I tried to explain with real examples but he created his own thread and asked in end. Did you mean that? I said No and explained my point of view again. He gave some explanation that a partner Director is not our customer and its okay to reply to him more than necessary. He asked for favor and wanted me to go through each of email and suggest him the changes. I said if he is interested than I could help him in future. But he wanted specific examples of complaints that had come against him but I was willing to give a generic feedback. I could not risk exposure to my poor young teammates from the problem employee. It would have been violation of their confidentiality too.
The guy could not give a time when his task would be complete even after multiple personal queries in person and in mail. He could not update his dependents in team about his work-styles and they would come and tell me that he is still not in office and this could cause a delay in their respective module. His test plan was more or less a english essay and even in that he had left sections for others. I could see his discomfort and suggested in a team meeting that all of the team should help with the test cases. He took it otherwise and thought that his responsibility was only creation of template and add few initial test cases. The work was not starting so I atleast wanted him to do something and thus gave simple task like finding a template, customizing to our need and atleast think and put some test cases.
He said if half the team had complained about him why didn’t the other half also do so. He must have planned for full rejection from team but failed in his goal.
Change management, mentoring and team work are related behavior competency and How could I differentiate on each and bring out instances in each where he failed to bring some positive to the team.
Also he expected people to provide him regular update of progress but he on his part forgot to update his team or his manager.
The little experience ones were able to provide more commitment and better updates then why should I bother to work with difficult people. From learning perspective I should.
Few of his points are valid that given the dynamics of the system should he be performing more that a fresher is expected to do. We should have a separate rating mechanism for dynamic environment. He will quit and then I should not be concerned as to why I could not help it?
Bottomline-- If 1 out of 10 of your team is strongly believing that you have a personal mission to spoil their career then it should not bother you. There are 9 careers that you can mentor and prosper but don’t let this learning go idle. Participate and learn from it. Only they provide you with material to write. Are you a difficult employee?

self appraisal - first round of escalation

Do not miss out on valid points because that will loose some learning experience.

Whatever changes happen , it should be demonstrated well, both to team as well as to higher management. Otherwise people may not realize why this change is happening.

Feedback is for people to give and it is for our mind to take it up or not. Criticism is different from feedback.

Is appraisal done so strictly for each line of referred parameter across or is it applicable for this instance?

All demos done on time. No customer complaint. One people issue only. No attrition despite no onsite, no client, constantly changing work environment.

Negative analysis--
Promise of success enables creating space for one self even at the cost of incumbent.

The appraisal was not balance with over emphasis on a single failure if want to call it so. I would view it as collective failure.

post self appraisal

I remember the traffic cop. The fine will be extracted no matter how.

I could not negotiate.

I could not sell well.

I also lost cool after 45mins.

Even I am convinced that in the last 4 week only there have been improvement and I was playing gotti before that for 1.5 yrs.

How much can you transform in 2 months?

Do I really deserve such negative ,irrational and strict feedback?

Do you truly believe that everyone here goes through such a razor like scrutiny?

What is your story now?

Now can you say you played a game?

Did you get enough masala for a write-up?

Is it that bad? Am I so good? Do I need to tell how good am I?

Can I simply do good and allow people to notice? What happens mostly is people don't notice?

My 360 feedback is screwed and now appraisal is screwed. What next?

Will it matter 6 months down the line? Will I remember it in long run?

Taking into account the wider perspective, what did I learn from this exercise? Don't mess with misses ??

a letter to appraiser before the discussion

There are two styles of management and both might have achieved substantially in the past. I appreciate that you have taken out time to provide feedback based on your perception and style of management.
We have differing outlook towards tools and their need. I need to justify the improvement in productivity and why we should use them and thus it should make sense. There is a time and complexity level before a tool usage starts to make sense.

These styles can converged if handled sensitively. Thus we can create a hopeful story. All can benefit from each other's style of working and achieve our targets more efficiently.

Targets should be clearly defined and set in beginning. Bottom-line should be clear and achievable. Priority needs to be set for development teams and urgency of each item has to be properly defined.

What is your expectations? Is it clearly defined in beginning? Or is it a moving target, ambiguous and constantly changing? If you assign 5 task with equal priority and we have limited resources and time then all cannot be completed in time.

I will take feedback from people I have interacted to boost my confidence and strengthen my self-belief. Its not an assurance for approving my style of management but to encourage you to look and appreciate that even this works.

One style of management is freestyle and its encouraging for research and dev kind of projects that will allow creative freedom to learn with high level of motivation and drive.

Second style of management is very methodical and process rich and is required for timely completion of projects above a certain size (both team and duration).

Your recommendations were direct with disregard to individual's preference and style of working. This created one major conflict.

Self-Appraisal -- first cut

There are no expectations set but evaluation is based on some assumed expectations. Prioritization should be top down and it should clearly be mentioned that this is your first priority and this is next. You cannot say that all is equal and use your discretion, How can I if I don’t know what the top really wants. The clarity of vision coming from top cannot be blurred and ambiguous. Thus bottomline would be clearly defined and I will know what top achieve and then will plan accordingly.

The dynamics in solution work environment does not allow you to respond in a structured way. The request in system are random in nature and far in between, you also cannot predict their entry and exit points but you are expected to bring some structure to it.
It may seem to you that your intervention has helped bring order but I can claim that final work product lifecycle could have been reduced by a month without it.
The reason being increasing the team unnecessary just because others did not have work and giving task in random way to resources who did not take similar work in last one year, avoided it is how I would put it. One senior resource is a good individual contributor but is uncomfortable in working with people much junior.
We were putting effort on feasibility and would have graduated to completion just after that. But then more people and one senior person conflict with team and manager and too much micromanagement too soon spoilt the party. Unnecessary tension is not well received. Even I would have passed on the tension but other people issues were nipped in the bud.
Should a solution development team be accountable for failure to market or sell their product features?
Should email be used as a stick with recording every one-to-one conversation and also the warnings with CC to all? Is that mark of respect or distrust? You are essentially telling the superiors that this guy is taking a risk and if something goes wrong then only he is responsible for the consequences and I want to wash off my hands because I had already earned with this email? In solutions you need to take calculated risk based on certain assumptions which you know will not work against you.
My key strengths were empathy. Do you think empathy alone can achieve so much?
There is a separate forum for discussing 360 degrees, why should you have its inputs here?

dinner is off

The technical lead did not have dinner for the past few nights. He called for an update. I was sitting on the chair and he was standing and was dramatic in his exclamations that client demo work was very important. Also emphasized the fact that he has been missing meals for the last few night. My fault? Incidentally he was going on leave for a day before going onsite for demo and the work responsibility was mostly assigned to a young engineer who lost his temper the other night because he was not allowed to go to dinner with his brother and said not so nice things. Thus was the reason for the update and the warning that the more senior engineer will not be working with young one if he continued to give his piece of mind. An additional update was late approval of his travel plans because neither his manager's manager, nor her manager, nor her manager knew who would take the decision. And he luckily got hotel reservation at 11:45Pm in the night.
How would you handle the hot potato?