I think the issue is that while it’s true that the manager shoud know if they are generally effective or not, employees should also have a decent understanding

I think the issue is that while it’s true that the manager shoud know if they are generally effective or not, employees should also have a decent understanding of what the goals and objectives are of the organization. I feel that there should be an alignment on what the expectations are and how people are graded and these tools should be applied before the evaluation and information should be provided to employess on how they are doing on a regular basis. I would say that if a manager sucks, it might not be the employees total fault, because they haven’t clearly delineated expectations to the employees. To just apply analysis retrospectively makes no sense and it should be applied regularly, so that people know where they are and can improve. I’ve definitely worked at organizations that are totally unorganized and it’s totally unclear what the objectives are and they will just call you up and give you different objectives every day and then the performance review addresses totally different objectives from what we’ve been actually doing the entire period.