What was your time at school like?
The Organisational Development Consultant Peter Block gives a rather disarming view of his own experience:
When I went to school we competed. When I got my “B” I needed somebody to get a “D” or an “F” or I was in trouble.
If I had any integrity — which I don’t — I’d have said:
You got an F this semester and I just want you to know I am grateful. You took the hit for me and I didn’t want that to go by unnoticed, so thank you very much.
I need you to fail, that is what the normal curve is. This is what the competitive economy is about this is what the ranking of people and appraisal is all about. This is what pay structures are about, to make the normal curve part of our nature and who we are.
And I would have said to the failing student, one more thing:
Listen there is one more semester coming up. Will you take the hit for me one more time? Because the worse you do the easier it is for me to get my B.
Got it?
An interesting perspective on teamwork and organisational dynamics.
Of course it only happens in schools
It doesn’t happen where you work, after all, it is easy to see that the best people drive the best performance.
The management challenge:
Take your performance appraisal process and split it down into its may parts:
- Feedback
- Development
- Incentive Payments
- Merit Rises
- Setting Objectives
- Relative Ranking
- Forced Distributions
- Promotional Readiness
- Disciplinary Procedures
- Identifying Potential
Now ask yourself, does this all have to be lumped together?
What would happen if you kept the useful bits and stopped the rest? How could you redesign your H.R. processes to do that?
Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed – every one – cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft ~ Kirk Eichenwald.
Thanks to Maz Iqbal for sharing the video.
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Image by Robert Hruzek
James,
Your post made me think about fractals and how the closer we look the clearer it is that they are ‘self-similar across different scales.
Will we ever be able to get away from the ‘normal’ curve when it comes to performance improvement and management? Or, do we need to find a very different way of looking at the same picture?
Adrian
As long as we believe that we can measure and judge others accurately and that doing so is the right thing to do I guess we will always look at the picture the same way.
Sadly
I would just like to know when the performance review process got so convoluted … and why. Why do we over-complicate providing feedback? And the subsequent (hopefully) merit increases?
Annette :-)