|
|
|
|
|
|
The Struggle To Measure Performance, Business Week:
“The system forced me to turn people who were excellent performers into people who were getting mediocre ratings,” says Eric Wisnefsky, Chemtura’s vice-president for corporate finance. “That demotivates them, and they’d follow up with asking: ‘What could I do differently next year?’ That’s a very difficult question to answer when you feel that people actually met all your expectations.” Chemtura’s new process still assigns grades. But to better motivate employees in the middle, labels such as “satisfactory” have been upgraded to phrases such as “successful performance.”
As we mentioned in our previous thread on performance without appraisal more organizations are acting on what most people know - performance appraisal process is counter-productive. Deming on Performance Appraisal, Out of the Crisis, page 101:
From Business Week’s article:
There are no easy answers, but what it should be about is managing the system to produce the best results. My best advice is to read chapter 9 of The Leader’s Handbook and read the rest of the Leader’s Handbook and other great management improvement books. And manage using the ideas of Deming, Ackoff, Scholtes, McGregor, Ohno… Refer back to the great books as you gain experience and continue to learn and practice management improvement. It still won’t be easy but the chance of you managing systems and people effectively will greatly increase.
Two great books on managing people: Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What to Do Instead by Tom Coens, Mary Jenkins and forward by Peter Block - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.
Related Links
Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2008 powered by WordPress
June 25th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
[...] Performance Appraisal Problems by John Hunter [...]
January 15th, 2007 at 9:20 am
[...] Good execution of performance appraisal is not the solution. More people are realizing that improving how performance appraisal are done is an attempt to do the wrong thing better. If you insist on doing the wrong thing, I suppose you might as well do it better but how about just not doing the wrong thing at all? [...]
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:42 am
Optical illusions provide evidence that you cannot always trust what seems obvious…