Tag Archives: Performance Appraisal

Annual Performance Evaluations are a Poor Management Practice

Posted on December 6, 2022 by John Hunter

Sports provides visible examples of the futility of accurate performance appraisal. We have athletes who thousands of people devote a huge amount of time to dissecting their strengths and weaknesses and those evaluations are constantly shown to be wrong. Teams are constantly paying free agents tens of millions that completely flop. Others hire someone no-one else wanted for the league minimum and they become a big contributor. Yes, it isn’t hard to figure out Stephen Curry is a far better … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Deming, Performance Appraisal, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , ,

My Willing Worker Award

Posted on January 22, 2019 by John Hunter

Here is an image of the employee of the quarter award I received from Bill Scherkenbach. I have received other awards and I don’t think those awards were given with any more understanding of the contributions to results due to the management systems in those cases than was shown when giving me this award. Even knowing how little impact I could make on the results I was still happy to receive this award: psychology is not always (often? ever?) sensible. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , ,

Annual Performance Reviews Are Obsolete

Posted on November 15, 2010 by John Hunter

Sam Goodner, the CEO of Catapult Systems, wrote about his decision to eliminate the annual performance appraisal [the broken link was removed]. 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. … 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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, IT, Management, Performance Appraisal | Tagged , , , ,

Problems With Student Evaluations as Measures of Teacher Performance

Posted on June 16, 2010 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Education, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Get Rid of the Performance Review

Posted on February 25, 2010 by John Hunter

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. … 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. … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Deming, Management, Performance Appraisal | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity

Posted on September 21, 2009 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, quote, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

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

Posted on September 14, 2009 by John Hunter

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

Posted in Creativity, curiouscat.com, Deming, Education, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Performance Appraisal, Popular, Process improvement, Psychology, quote, Respect, Science, Systems thinking, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Dr. Deming Webcast on the 5 Deadly Diseases

Posted on August 26, 2009 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Economics, Lean thinking, Management, Performance Appraisal, Popular, quote, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Posted on July 6, 2009 by John Hunter

The Trouble with Performance Reviews [the broken link was removed] 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. … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Performance Appraisal, Respect, Systems thinking, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair

Posted on June 30, 2009 by John Hunter

Toyota has developed a thought-controlled wheelchair (along with Japanese government research institute, RIKEN, and Genesis Research Institute). Honda has also developed a system that allows a person to control a robot through thoughts. Both companies continue to invest in innovation and science and engineering. The story of a bad economy and bad sales for a year or two is what you read in most newspapers. In my opinion the more important story is why Toyota and Honda will be dominant … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Science, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Red Bead Experiment Webcast

Posted on April 22, 2009 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Education, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, quote, Respect, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Get Rid of the Performance Review

Posted on October 27, 2008 by John Hunter

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. … 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. … Raises are then determined by the boss, and the boss’s boss, … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Performance Appraisal | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Performance Appraisal Problems

Posted on October 6, 2008 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Performance Appraisal | Tagged , ,

Individual Bonuses Are Bad Management

Posted on August 7, 2008 by John Hunter

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. … Continue reading →

Posted in Competition, IT, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Respect, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

“Pay for Performance” is a Bad Idea

Posted on July 21, 2008 by John Hunter

Pay for performance is a bad investment [the broken link was removed] 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. … One of the many shortcomings of the program was that job duties were … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Performance Appraisal, Systems thinking | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Management Blog Posts From June 2005

Posted on June 24, 2008 by John Hunter

Here are the blog posts from 3 years ago this month on the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog: From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking – Targets Distorting the System – Dilbert and Deming. The Dilbert site has learned to take advantage of the web and allow embedding of the strips on blogs and web pages. Good for them, but you really would have thought they would have lead this trend not delayed so long. [Was displaying Dilbert strip from 21 … Continue reading →

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