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Related: Dr. Deming on performance appraisal


Annual Performance Reviews Are Obsolete

Posted on November 15, 2010  Comments (0)

Sam Goodner, the CEO of Catapult Systems, wrote about his decision to eliminate the annual performance appraisal.

the most critical flaw of our old process was that the feedback itself was too infrequent and too far removed from the actual behavior to have any measurable impact on employee performance.
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I decided to completely eliminate of our annual performance review process and replace it with a real-time performance feedback dashboard.”

I think this is a good move in the right direction. I personally think it is a mistake to make the measures focused on the person. There should be performance dashboards (with in-process and outcome measures) that provide insight into the state of the processes in the company. Let those working in those processes see, in real time, the situation, weaknesses, strengths… and take action as appropriate (short term quick fixes, longer term focus on areas for significant improvement…). It could be the company is doing this, the quick blog post is hardly a comprehensive look at their strategies. It does provide some interesting ideas.

I also worry about making too much of the feedback without an understanding of variation (and the “performance” results attributed to people due merely to variation) and systems thinking. I applaud the leadership to make a change and the creative attempt, I just also worry a bit about how this would work in many organizations. But that is not really what matters. What matters is how it works for their organization, and I certainly believe this could work well in the right organization.

Related: Righter Performance Appraisal – When Performance-related Pay Backfires – The Defect Black Market – articles, books, posts on performance appraisal

Problems With Student Evaluations as Measures of Teacher Performance

Posted on June 16, 2010  Comments (1)

Dr. Deming was, among other things a professor. He found the evaluation of professors by students an unimportant (and often counterproductive measure) – used in some places for awards and performance appraisal. He said for such a measure to be useful it should survey students 20 years later to see which professors made a difference to the students. Here is an interesting paper that explored some of these ideas. Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors by Scott E. Carrell, University of California, Davis and National Bureau of Economic Research; and James E. West, U.S. Air Force Academy:

our results indicate that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement, on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes. Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value‐added but positively correlated with follow‐on course value‐added. Hence, students of less experienced instructors who do not possess a doctorate perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course but perform worse in the follow‐on related curriculum.

Student evaluations are positively correlated with contemporaneous professor value‐added and negatively correlated with follow‐on student achievement. That is, students appear to reward higher grades in the introductory course but punish professors who increase deep learning (introductory course professor value‐added in follow‐on courses). Since many U.S. colleges and universities use student evaluations as a measurement of teaching quality for academic promotion and tenure decisions, this latter finding draws into question the value and accuracy of this practice.

These findings have broad implications for how students should be assessed and teacher quality measured.

Related: Applying Lean Tools to University Courses – K-12 Educational Reform – Improving Education with Deming’s Ideas – Learning, Systems and Improvement – How We Know What We Know

Get Rid of the Performance Review

Posted on February 25, 2010  Comments (3)

How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews? by Bob Sutton

Deming emphasized that forced rankings and other merit ratings that breed internal competition are bad management because they undermine motivation and breed contempt for management among people who, at least at first, were doing good work.
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If you want to read the most compelling and complete case against the traditional performance evaluation, however,I suggest that you pre-order UCLA Professor Sam Culbert’s new book Get Rid of the Performance Review. He first made this argument in the Wall Street Journal, but the book digs into this argument in far more detail and offers solutions for managers and companies who want to replace the traditional review — or at least reduce the damage that they do. To help spread the word about the book, and to find out if as many people despise the performance review as Sam (and I) believe, he has — a bit like the ARSE — designed a ten-item test called How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews? I just took it and scored a 36, which means I really hate them.

Related: The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer – Deming and Performance Appraisal – Performance Appraisals, Good Execution is not the Solution?

The Trouble with Incentives: They Work

Posted on January 28, 2010  Comments (0)

Gipsie B. Ranney has a great new article – The Trouble with Incentives: They Work

I have wondered whether the escalation of pay, perks and parachutes for CEOs actually tends to attract individuals who are primarily extrinsically motivated, rather than individuals who are seriously interested in creating value. Several recent examples appear to be consistent with this view.
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An important issue with regard to incentives is possible effects on teamwork and cooperation. If the incentive system is set up as a zero-sum game, then for me to win, you have to lose. This is a very effective way to ensure that there is little or no teamwork or cooperation. Interactions between individuals and groups are likely to become negative, to the detriment of the organization as a whole. When incentives are based on narrow functional objectives, achieving those objectives may guarantee that the system as a whole will be suboptimized.
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the Mayo Clinic, “which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost healthcare systems in the country.” He reports that “decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focused first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.” He goes on to say, “the core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is ‘The needs of the patient come first’ – not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients.”

Could it be that physicians, insurers, drug companies, and patients are simply acting rational to the system? The players are incentivized to behave as they do. The system delivers what it is designed to deliver.

She sums it up very well:

There may be cases in which incentives work only as intended, but I suspect they are relatively rare. The trouble is that we are usually dealing with complex systems (people and organizations) that may behave not at all like our myths would predict. The best policy may be to avoid incentives altogether and focus instead on creating systems in which intrinsic motivation, cooperation, ethical behavior, trust, creativity, and joy in work can flourish.

Find more articles on management improvement in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library, including: An Interim Report on Motivation in the Workplace by Gipsie Ranney, Remembering NUMMI by Gipsie Ranney and Improving Problem Solving by Ian Bradbury and Gipsie Ranney.

When you can’t prevent arbitrary targets and rewards based on meeting them the strategy I attempt to put in place is figure out how the system will be distorted in order to meet those targets and then put in measures that will discourage such distortions. It isn’t perfect but can help prevent some of the worst distortions (and degradation of system-wide performance they cause).

Related: Righter Incentivization – The Defect Black Market – Dr. Deming on the problems with managing with targets (and incentives based on them) – Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity

No More Executive Bonuses!

Posted on November 30, 2009  Comments (5)

Henry Mintzberg, wrote an excellent article for the Wall Street Journal today, No More Executive Bonuses!

Don’t pay any bonuses. Nothing.

This may sound extreme. But when you look at the way the compensation game is played – and the assumptions that are made by those who want to reform it – you can come to no other conclusion. The system simply can’t be fixed. Executive bonuses – especially in the form of stock and option grants—represent the most prominent form of legal corruption that has been undermining our large corporations and bringing down the global economy. Get rid of them and we will all be better off for it.
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So, again, there is but one solution: Eliminate bonuses. Period. Pay people, including the CEO, fairly. As an executive, if you want a bonus, buy the stock, like everyone else. Bet on your company for real, personally.
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All this compensation madness is not about markets or talents or incentives, but rather about insiders hijacking established institutions for their personal benefit.

Too many large corporations today are starved for leadership – true leadership, meaning engaged leadership embedded in concerned management. And the global economy desperately needs renewed enterprise, embedded in the belief that companies are communities. Getting rid of executive bonuses, and the gambling games that accompany them, is the place to start.

It is an great article on bad pay systems that let a few top executives (and their hand picked board members) in many companies to loot the treasury of the company. I have written about this problem many times, including: CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers – Excessive Executive Pay (2005) – Narcissistic Cadre of Senior Executives – The Best Leadership Is Good Management – Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay – More on Obscene CEO Pay – More on Failed Executives

There are executives that don’t act like corrupt dictators looting their country, unfortunately they are less common than those that act like looters. And they all seem to have built cultures that taking respect for people is more important that feeding a few bloated egos. Akio Toyoda’s Message Shows Real Leadership, Tony Hsieh, the Zappo’s CEO – Warren Buffett – Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year

The obscene pay is not just a matter of people taking a tens of millions of dollars they don’t deserve. Companies whole management systems are distorted in ways that lead the company to risk all the other stakeholders future for the potential gain of a few senior executives.

Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity

Posted on September 21, 2009  Comments (4)

If you read this blog, you know I believe extrinsic motivation is a poor strategy. This TED webcast Dan Pink discusses studies showing extrinsic rewards failing. This is a great webcast, definitely worth 20 minutes of your time.

  • “you’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity… This has been replicated over and over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators, if you do this then you get that, work in some circumstances but in a lot of tasks they actually either don’t work or, often, they do harm.”
  • “there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does“
  • “This is a fact.”

What does Dan Pink recommend based on the research? Management should focus on providing workplaces where people have autonomy, mastery and purpose to build on intrinsic motivation.

via: Everything You Think about Pay for Performance Could Be Wrong

Related: Righter Incentivization – What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? – Dangers of Extrinsic Motivation – Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation – Great Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation

An Introduction to Deming’s Management Ideas by Peter Scholtes (webcast)

Posted on September 14, 2009  Comments (1)

An Introduction to Deming’s Management Teaching and Philosophy by Peter Scholtes – webcast from the Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 9th, 2008. My previous post on this speech: 6 Leadership Competencies.

Next month, the Annual Deming Institute conference will be held at Purdue on Oct 10th, 2009.

Related: Peter Scholtes’ Life – Curious Cat’s Deming on Management – The Leader’s Handbook – Performance without Appraisal

Unfortunately I cannot actually use the website to watch more than 5 minutes because the site fails to support linux operating system with their solution for longer videos. Google will only allow 10 minute videos without special permission – YouTube has not replied to my request for over 6 months. Update: Twitvid let me upload the whole video.

Dr. Deming Webcast on the 5 Deadly Diseases

Posted on August 26, 2009  Comments (4)

The W. Edwards Deming Institute has posted Dr. Deming’s 1984 video on the 5 deadly diseases of western management.

  • Lack of constancy of purpose
  • Emphasis on short term profits – “creative” accounting, focus on quarterly profits
  • Annual Performance Appraisals – management by objective, management by fear
  • Mobility of management – [see Toyota for a great example of a company that operates on different principles - where the leadership has been with Toyota for decades]
  • Running a company on visible figures alone – many important factors are “unknown and unknowable.”

Dr. Deming added 2 diseases to reach his famous 7 deadly diseases: excessive medical care costs and excessive legal damage awards swelled by lawyers working on contingency fees.

Personally I believe all 7 of those diseases are still prevalent and causing damage. I do think some progress has been made on longer term thinking but far too many organizations still are extremely short term focused. And I would add two new deadly diseases of management: excessive executive compensation and an outdated intellectual property system.

Related: Deming Companies – Purpose of an Organization – Continual Improvement – Creating Jobs – New Management Truths Sometimes Started as Heresies

When Performance-related Pay Backfires

Posted on August 3, 2009  Comments (2)

When Economic Incentives Backfire by Samuel Bowles, Sante Fe Institute

Dozens of recent experiments show that rewarding self-interest with Economic incentives can backfire when they undermine what Adam Smith called “the moral sentiments.”

Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn, is a great book on this topic. The area of “motivating” employees is one it is often hard for managers to learn. Even managers that have been studying Deming, Ackoff, Ohno… for years still have trouble with the idea that trying to find the right incentive scheme to motivate the right behavior is the wrong approach. Read the The Human Side Of Enterprise by Douglas Mcgregor (in 1960) to re-enforce the understanding of human motivation provided by Toyota’s respect for people principles.

Managers need to eliminate de-motivation in the work systems not try and find bonus schemes to motivate behavior. Eliminating de-motivation is often much more work. You can’t just get some money from the bonus pool and start giving it away. You have to manage. But if you are a manager you shouldn’t be afraid to actually manage the system and make it better.

Related: “Pay for Performance” is a Bad Idea – Reward and Incentive Programs are Ineffective — Even Harmful by Peter Scholtes – The Defect Black Market – What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? – Problems with Bonuses – Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses – Stop Demotivating Employees

When performance-related pay backfires:
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The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Posted on July 6, 2009  Comments (2)

The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Managers don’t like giving appraisals, and employees don’t like getting them. Perhaps they’re not liked because both parties suspect what the evidence has proved for decades: Traditional performance appraisals don’t work. But as my colleague and fellow Stanford professor Bob Sutton and I pointed out in our book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, belief and conventional wisdom often trump the facts. And when it comes to performance evaluations, companies ranging from HR consulting firms to providers of software that automate the process have a big stake in their continued use.

The most basic problem is that performance appraisals often don’t accurately assess performance. More than two decades ago research done by professor David Schoorman showed that whether or not the supervisor had hired or inherited her employees was a better predictor of evaluation results than actual job performance.
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Possibly the biggest issue, however, is that performance appraisals focus managers’ attention on precisely the wrong thing: individual people. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught a long time ago, company performance often results more from variations in systems than from the individuals doing the work. One of the reasons Toyota Motor has been so successful for decades—even as leaders have come and gone and the automobile market has changed—is that the fundamentals of the Toyota management system, which emphasizes quality, continuous improvement, and standardized tasks, provide the advantage. By focusing on the presumed deficiencies or strengths of people, individual performance reviews divert attention from the important task of eliminating the systemic causes, such as inferior technology, behind poor performance.

Another good article pointing out the harm of annual performance reviews. As I have said many times managers need to do better. See chapter 9 of the Leader’s Handbook and previous posts: Don’t Use Performance Appraisals – – Deming and Performance Appraisal – Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame – Performance Without Appraisal

Red Bead Experiment Webcast

Posted on April 22, 2009  Comments (3)

Dr. Deming used the red bead experiment to present a view into management practices and his management philosophy. The experiment provides insight into all four aspects of Dr. Deming’s management system: understanding variation, understanding psychology, systems thinking and the theory of knowledge.

Red Bead Experiment by Steve Prevette

Various techniques are used to ensure a quality (no red bead) product. There are quality control inspectors, feedback to the workers, merit pay for superior performance, performance appraisals, procedure compliance, posters and quality programs. The foreman, quality control, and the workers all put forth their best efforts to produce a quality product. The experiment allows the demonstration of the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the various methods.

Related: Fooled by Randomness – Performance Measures and Statistics Course – Performance without Appraisal – Exploring Deming’s Management Ideas – Eliminate Slogans

Get Rid of the Performance Review

Posted on October 27, 2008  Comments (1)

Get Rid of the Performance Review! by Samuel Culbert

To make my case, I offer seven reasons why I find performance reviews ill-advised and bogus.
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Inevitably reviews are political and subjective, and create schisms in boss-employee relationships. The link between pay and performance is tenuous at best. And the notion of objectivity is absurd; people who switch jobs often get much different evaluations from their new bosses.
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Raises are then determined by the boss, and the boss’s boss, largely as a result of the marketplace or the budget. The performance review is simply the place where the boss comes up with a story to justify the predetermined pay.
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Managers can talk until they are blue in the face about the importance of positive team play at every level of the organization, but the team play that’s most critical to ensuring that an organization runs effectively is the one-on-one relationship between a boss and each of his or her subordinates. The performance review undermines that relationship.

As I have said numerous times, I agree with Deming that management by performance appraisals doesn’t work. Most people seem to realize they are fake, cause harm, and do little if any good. But they continue to act as though it is impossible to stop activities that cause harm and provide no significant benefit.

Related: Righter Performance Appraisal – Performance without Appraisal – Deming and Performance Appraisal – Problems Caused by Performance Appraisal

Performance Appraisal Problems

Posted on October 6, 2008  Comments (0)

More and more people are willing to state the frustration with the performance appraisal process. Some have been willing to take the logical step of eliminating that which causes problems but many still don’t think elimination of performance appraisals is acceptable. Performance Reviews: Many Need Improvement

According to one study by Watson Wyatt, the human resources consulting firm, only 3 in 10 employees believed that their companies’ performance review system actually improved performance. In another study by the firm, almost half of the employers surveyed thought that their managers were at best only slightly effective in helping underperforming employees to improve.
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Mary Jenkins, a co-author of Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What to Do Instead advocates a system in which employees themselves seek feedback from people they work with or who have skills they seek, then review a self-designed growth plan with their supervisor. She is using this approach at Genesys Health System in Michigan, where she is vice president for organizational learning and development.
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When the Wei dynasty in China rated the performance of its household members in the third century A.D., the philosopher Sin Yu noted that “an imperial rater of nine grades seldom rates men according to their merits, but always according to his likes and dislikes.”

I would go with the elimination of performance appraisals, myself (see related links below for details). I strongly suggest chapter 9 (Performance Without Appraisal) of The Leader’s Handbook, by Peter Scholtes, for those thinking about this topic.

Related: Don’t Use Performance Appraisals – Continuous, Constructive Feedback – Performance Appraisals – Is Good Execution the Solution? – Performance Without Appraisal

Individual Bonuses Are Bad Management

Posted on August 7, 2008  Comments (1)

Gojko Adzic provides a nice post on Mary Poppendieck’s presentation at Agile 2008 on bonus, compensation and motivation: Paying programmers: are bonuses bad and what to do about it?

In software development, it is very hard to establish the effects of individual contributions and good teamwork is key to the project. Most individual compensation schemes, according to the presentation, absorb vast amounts of management time and resources and leave nobody happy, but team compensation strategies are not easy to implement. Mary presented results from HP’s experiments during the beginning of the nineties, when HP allowed 13 local organisations to experiment with team-incentive plans. All programs were discontinued by the 4th year, due to constant changes to the plans which were needed to distribute available money among the teams and a wide dissatisfaction with the plans by employees.
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Use profit sharing schemes instead of bonuses to tie people to the organisation goals.
keep in mind the norm of reciprocity — if people feel that they are being treated generously, they will reciprocate it with increased discretionary effort.

As usually Mary Poppendieck provides good advice: Mary Poppendieck webcast on Leadership in Software Development. The idea that bonuses are bad management is one of the more difficult management improvement ideas for people to accept. See related posts for much more on the problems with them and what to do instead.

Related: Interview with Mary Poppendieck – The Defect Black Market – Deming on the problems with targets or goals – Incentive Programs are Ineffective – Problems with Bonuses – Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations

“Pay for Performance” is a Bad Idea

Posted on July 21, 2008  Comments (0)

Pay for performance is a bad investment by Pete Waters

“Teacher pay set by the results” was the headline of a (Baltimore) Sun article I read the other day which suggested that “performance-based bonuses (were) cropping up across Maryland” in our state education system. Bonuses would be given to teachers and principals that were successful in raising test scores of students.
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One of the many shortcomings of the program was that job duties were often not well defined, and favoritism was difficult for most supervisors to avoid.
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Deming specifically considered “performance appraisals, merit ratings and annual reviews” as one category under the heading of Seven Deadly Diseases of Management. He thought that the notion of “teamwork” was destroyed by these evaluations. Deming further believed that the morale of the organization suffered because of these individual evaluations.

As Deming said (page 102 of Out of the Crisis): “The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.” Understanding enough about managing organizations to know why it doesn’t work is not easy – which I think is a big reason why people go for the nice sounding, but flawed idea, I think. Read our posts on performance appraisals and the works we reference to learn.

Deming and Performance Appraisal

Posted on April 22, 2008  Comments (1)

Guest post by Ron Kingen (originally posted to the Deming Electronic Network)

Several weeks ago someone in the DEN list ask what did Dr. Deming recommend about this issue, well I ask that very question of Dr. Deming back in the 80′s when I had the good fortune to work with him. I had expressed my concern to Dr. Deming about several of his fourteen points that I either didn’t understand completely or did not fit with my experience and/or education. Dr. Deming suggested we talk about it over dinner – during the subsequent dinner discussion Dr. Deming made several points relative to performance improvement (not appraisal):

  1. Hire good people – one of the most critical decisions we all make.
  2. Train and educate them – even if they come from the best universities and are at the top of their class.
  3. Coach them, constantly, don’t wait for an annual appraisal to correct an issue or behavior.
  4. It is the system that must be improved to ensure people work to their potential.
  5. Recognize your top performers, but money isn’t the best method of recognition, in fact, it can be counterproductive.
  6. Work with your low performers to understand their issues and difficulties; give them support and assistance. If they can’t improve and are truly performance outliers , don’t keep them, they will affect the over system.

The advice seemed valid, but I told him my company insisted we do performance appraisals. He laughed, he suggested I change the system; but Dr. Deming knew I worked for General Motors and that wouldn’t be easy. So he recommended I become a rebel and change my part of the system; which I did try. At the time I worked for one of the most progressive divisions within GM and was fortunate to work with many talented GM people and several well know and recognized experts, but I was convinced the best system change option was to leave GM.
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10x Productivity Difference in Software Development

Posted on April 2, 2008  Comments (4)

10x Software Development

The original study that found huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years’ experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1; the ratio of debugging times over 25 to 1; of program size 5 to 1; and of program execution speed about 10 to 1. They found no relationship between a programmer’s amount of experience and code quality or productivity.
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In years since the original study, the general finding that “There are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers” has been confirmed by many other studies of professional programmers (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and McGarry 1989, Boehm et al 2000).

I think these orders of magnitude are not present in between people in many jobs. And I think people’s ability to correctly access who are orders of magnitude better is often faulty. But my experience leads me to believe the difference between exceptional software developers and average (not even below average) is very high. High enough that large increases in pay (say tripling would be sensible). Also accommodating their desires is sensible: freedom from dealing with pointy haired bosses and eliminating other such de-motivators.

While salespeople seen as successful can often be rewarded very well, exceptional software developers rarely are. Most managers don’t seem to be able to grasp that software development is a rare field where such orders of magnitude differences are somewhat common (not one in a million, maybe one in a thousand for a random guess). There are other fields where this is true but most for most fields I do not think this is the case.

In many fields interruptions are costly (and multi-taking is wasteful). In software development those interruptions are often much more costly than in other fields. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams is an excellent book on managing software development.

Related: People are Our Most Important Asset – Joy in Software Development – Hiring the Right People – Performance without Appraisal – Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations

Don’t Use Performance Appraisals

Posted on February 11, 2008  Comments (4)

I like to continue to push for some things that might not seem achievable to many. It is too easy to accept that things have to stay the way they are. Several of Dr. Deming’s list of Seven Deadly Management Diseases are now accepted as serious problems by most. Performance appraisal is a strange disease: most people agree performance appraisals are not effective and indeed are harmful. Yet, most still don’t think anything can be done about it. But we can, and should, take steps to improve. Just don’t do it.

Managers are from Mars, Performance Appraisals from Venus discusses Mary Poppendieck‘s recent presentation – Appraisals and Compensation: The Elephant in the Room

Mary says that there is no valid research showing benefits of performance appraisals. Simply said, “it doesn’t work”. Her biggest complain is that appraisals target individuals (sometimes teams) rather the system itself. She also condemns judgment rather than feedback (system dynamic).

Mary went over the false assumptions behind individual pay-for-performance (money, motivation, individual assessment), and the negative effects they have on the system.

She finished by a case study done by HP across 13 organizations over a year 4 year period where each division implemented a different type of incentive plan. The results are just mind boggling. They all failed and got canceled.

I strongly suggest chapter 9 (Performance Without Appraisal) of The Leader’s Handbook, by Peter Scholtes, for those thinking about this topic.

Related: Righter Performance Appraisal – Problems Caused by Performance Appraisal – Performance Without Appraisal – Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame

Performance Appraisals are Worse Than a Waste of Time

Posted on December 13, 2007  Comments (4)

Appraisals are a waste of Time

Most British workers will certainly leave their appraisal fired up and motivated, but only to look for a new job, new research from workplace and HR body Investors in People has concluded. Nearly half of those who had an appraisal did not trust their managers to be honest during it, with a third dismissing the annual chat as a waste of time and a fifth leaving it feeling they had been unfairly treated.

The poll of nearly 3,000 workers also found a quarter who had had an appraisal suspected their managers simply saw the annual review as a “tick-box” exercise. And a fifth complained managers rarely prepared for the meeting in advance – a key bit of advice you’ll always get in appraisal training – and did not even think about it until they were actually sat down in the room.

That is just a start on the problems with annual rating of people. On page 101 of Out of the Crisis Dr. W. Edwards Deming states the following as one of the seven deadly diseases:

Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review… The idea of a merit rating is alluring. the sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.

Related: Dr. Deming on performance appraisal – Continuous, Constructive Feedback – Performance without Appraisal – Righter Performance Appraisal – The Leader’s Handbook

Getting and Keeping Great Employees

Posted on November 29, 2007  Comments (1)

I am not convinced of the premise of The new war for talent: that there will be a great shortage of talent soon. But the article makes some interesting points.

The Conference Board CEO Challenge of 2007 points out that “Cracking the U.S. Top 10 this year is finding qualified managerial talent and top management succession.”
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If we neglect to engage our own employees, those who are frustrated can surf hundreds of job boards to see what other opportunities await
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A cumbersome and complex ERP system will not suit the masses of young talent joining today’s workforce.

I think the main thing to do is to respect employees (and have that visible in the management decisions made in the organization). Stopping the demotivation would be a big step for many organizations. And to manage your organization with the understanding that the organization’s purpose should be to benefit the various stakeholders (shareholders, customer… and employees).

Related: People are Our Most Important Asset – How to Improve – What is Wrong with MBA’s – soul crushing work (comic)

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