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Get Rid of the Performance Review! – WSJ.com
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Another bogus element is the idea that pay is a function of performance, and that the words being spoken in a performance review will affect pay. But usually they don’t. I believe pay is primarily determined by market forces, with most jobs placed in a pay range prior to an employee’s hiring.
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Most performance reviews are staged as “objective” commentary, as if any two supervisors would reach the same conclusions about the merits and faults of the subordinate. But consider the well-observed fact that when people switch bosses, they often receive sharply different evaluations from the new bosses to whom they now report.
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Worse, bosses apply the same rating scale to people with different functions. They don’t redo the checklist for every different activity. As a result, bosses reduce their global sentiments to a set of metrics that captures the unique qualities of neither the person nor the job.
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The No. 1 reason for that reluctance is that employees want to turn to somebody who understands their distinctive talents and way of thinking, or knows them sufficiently well to appreciate the reasons behind the unique ways they are driven to operate.
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That’s because the performance review is so one-sided, giving the boss all the power. The boss in the performance review thinks of himself or herself as the evaluator, and doesn’t engage in teamwork with the subordinate. It isn’t, “How are we going to work together as a team?” It’s, “How are you performing for me?” It’s not our joint performance that’s at issue. It’s the employee’s performance that’s a problem.
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Instead of stimulating corporate effectiveness, they lead to just-in-case and cover-your-behind activities that reduce the amount of time that could be put to productive use. Instead of promoting directness, honesty and candor, they stimulate inauthentic conversations in which people cast self-interested pursuits as essential company activities.
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Keep in mind, of course, that improvement is each individual’s own responsibility. You can only make yourself better. The best you can do for others is to develop a trusting relationship where they can ask for feedback and help when they see the need and feel sufficiently valued to take it. Getting rid of the performance review is a necessary, and affirming, step in that direction.
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Bob Sutton: Sam Culbert in the Wall Street Journal: Get Rid of the Performance Review!
Although an entire industry of consultants, HR professionals, and software firms seem bent on devoting more and more time and money to performance evaluations, all the energy devoted to these things over the years have done little to change Sam’s observation about the difference between the promise and the problems:
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- The Promise: Performance reviews are supposed to
provide an objective evaluation that helps determine pay and lets
employees know where they can do better. - The Problems:
That’s not most people’s experience with performance reviews.
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.
- The Promise: Performance reviews are supposed to
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Sam’s article is also in the spirit of design thinking, as in many cases, after people have spent years trying to perfect some procedure, gadget, or feature that they — usually mindlessly — accept as something they cannot do without and then a breakthrough happens when some clever person (often someone who isn’t an expert in the field) comes along and removes it or unwittingly goes forward and succeeds without it. Then everyone realizes that they never needed it at all.
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Creative people, often unwittingly, often have a huge impact by removing things that everyone assumes are essential.
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I spent the better part of yesterday locked in a brainstorming room with a client and my team as we discussed what a next generation intranet should look like. I was struck by how little some business assumptions have changed in the last few years. We forget these assumptions as we strategize, design and build next generation intranets. Here are a few of those assumptions.
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Why the Financial Crisis is (Mostly) Good News for Gen Y – Tammy Erickson
And here’s the irony. Despite a slowdown in immediate career opportunities, the current financial crisis is likely to reinforce the overall happy, fortuitous economic life of Generation Y.
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And unlike Boomers, who are racing to build up a nest egg before retirement hits and in many cases trying to make up for a life of limited savings, Y’s have no such time pressure. The key job challenge for Y’s in this job market will be to find the challenging opportunities for learning that they crave. In many ways, their greater financial flexibility may give them an advantage over older generations for some of the interesting opportunities.
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