Forcing an approval rule to trigger?

Summary:

I am in our test instance and I am testing out our performance process. We have a first approval step in our performance document set up with the Approve Performance Document rule configured to send the approval to an HR rep for that AOR. In my test I am finding that when the document is submitted to this step from the manager the Approve Performance Document rule is not being triggered. Is there a way to force the approval rule to trigger? I am not seeing anything that would indicate an error is occurring in the transaction manager. This is