A good post on how on how to evaluate the non-technical side of employees. They used this framework to evaluate Product Design & Development collaborators:
They used what they called the "four pillars". And evaluated by asking a person's peers to score them:
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Getting things done: Pretty simple. Do you do what you say you are going to do? Do you go the extra mile to complete work that needs completing? Are you where problems go to die? This pillar is both a measure of dependability and prolificacy.
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Creating strong relationships: Product development is a team sport. As I mentioned in Three Years in San Francisco, Intelligence X Collaboration = Results. Note that the relationship is multiplicative. If either I or C nears zero, so does R. Unless you are running the world’s worst interview process or physically sucking brain matter out of your co-workers, I is never really in danger of hitting zero. C, however, always is. If you score highly in this pillar, not just your direct colleagues will love working with you, but your cross-functional colleagues especially will. Know that designer who all engineers want to work with? That’s this woman.
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Improving the team: One of the benefits of working at a company with other great designers, engineers, PMs, and researchers is that the sum can be a lot greater than the parts. Not only that but by virtue of being around so many talented teammates, your own career growth can happen almost automatically without having to spend nights and weekends learning new skills. We encourage people to make their teammates better by doing things like brown bag sessions on prototyping, brainstorming, and other important skills. Additionally, we encourage people to proactively help their teammates out on projects even if the project is not their personal responsibility. Improving the team can come in many other ways, including recruiting new teammates, but the point is to be a great teammate above and beyond being a great designer, engineer, etc.
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Technical skills, empathy, and vision: These are the individual skills that most people initially assume are the only keys to success and promotion. We purposefully made them account for only 25% of the total formula to stress how important the other elements are. These are also the skills that are most customized to Design & Research. If you want to adapt this entire framework to PM, Eng, or any other function, you could probably leave the first three alone and just change this one pillar a bit.
