Pay and Play LO4860

Rol Fessenden (76234.3636@compuserve.com)
14 Jan 96 01:33:36 EST

Replying to LO4832 --

Sb: Pay and Play LO4832

Roxanne, I am really enjoying this discussion about performance
assessment. I repeat, I know nothing about the theory or the practice. I
only know what I do within my environment. It may well be that your
evaluation is accurate in many environments, but I am trying to figure out
if it is in my environment.

I liked what Barry described, although I would eliminate the numbers (they
seem like grades) and just use the sentences instead. I gather there are
well organized action steps behind these assessments which employees can
choose to use for self-improvement. Intuitively this is in the right
direction.

Another posting made a great comment about the WIIFN (what's in it for
me?) factor. I will have no trouble remembering that. It seems to me
that part of the process must be to make that explicit as part of the
conversation.

Roxanne, you state that the name says it all. Below are your quotes.

"employee: to be effective we must shift the focus of performance
measurement from the individual level to the organization level.

performance: to help employees be more effective (and have more fun) we
must shift our focus from performance (results) to learning.

review: to help the organization and the individual we must shift our
focus from evaluating the past to enhancing the future."

Ok, without being overly legalistic, we have a different name. We call it
the MPI process. Most people can't remember what the acronym means, so it
is just a bunch of letters. It means Managing Performance Improvement.
Does this resolve the issues you raise about the name? There do not seem
to be any loaded words here.

Our process -- when it works well -- pretty much meets the 6 criteria I
laid out in a prior memo. Here they are again, more abbreviated.

Feedback is immediate.

It is a constructive, reflective process. It is about behavior or
actions, it is not personal. The process is not about labeling and
judging.

People participate in setting their expected levels of performance, in
deciding what actions they will take that will allow them to succeed, in
designing the evaluation instruments, and in the evaluation.

Self-evaluation is important. If the process makes a person feel attacked
or vulnerable, then they will not do an honest self-evaluation, and the
greatest learning opportunity will be lost.

There is mutual agreement on the indicators of success, and they are
defined unambiguously.

The indicators are action-based, not outcome based. IE, we agreed on
certain actions, and if we carried those out, then we succeed, even if it
did not result in the expected outcomes. However, part of the process is
to conduct a clear assessment to learn why the actions did or did not
achieve expectations.

Does this meet your requirements? I would value feedback on this issue.

I have some concerns about quotes above. You may be right, but I have a
different viewpoint. For example, you want to shift the focus of
appraisal from the individual to the organization. This cannot work. As
someone pointed out to this list just last week, there is nothing in an
organization except its people. Therefore, we can appraise the
organization, but we are only appraising the people. There is no escape
from personal responsibility.

Deming said essentially what you say. He said systems are the problem 90%
of the time, not people. This is a rare case where I think Deming is
insufficient. Surely, systems and processes _are_ the problem 90% of the
time, but systems and processes were created by people, and only people
can improve them. What is wrong with asking someone to fix a system or
process, and expecting -- providing it is within their skills -- that they
will do so?

Second, you want to shift the focus from performance to learning. I agree
that learning must be a significant part of the appraisal process, and it
is too often ignored. However, I think the appraisal process must be
about both. This could be the subject of a book -- probably already is --
but it boils down to accepting personal responsibility for doing what you
as an individual promised you would do. It is also about the other people
in your organization who depend on you to do what you promised to do.
Again, it is about personal responsibility.

We have to be careful here not to hold people accountable for doing things
that the system then prevents from doing. I know some of that occurs, but
that is not a reason to eliminate expectations. We have done too much of
that with our children already (small editorial).

Finally, you want to shift the emphasis from evaluating the past to
enhancing the future. My concern here is that only through some kind of
reflective review of the past can we learn. No assessment of past actions
means absolutely no learning. The assessment of the past is critical to
your goal of enhancing the future.

Written assessments are an excellent historical record. I refer back to
my own self-evaluations all the time. I work in a complex process, and I
can't always remember what the environment was two years ago, or how some
activity worked out. The written record is an invaluable reference. It
is also gratifying to go back and see how much I have learned in the last
few years.

I suspect that the biggest problem with performance assessment processes
is captured in your last statement. "We need to learn how to give and
receive feedback effectively." If we do that, the process will work. I
suspect this is where most processes break down.

What do you think?

--
 Rol Fessenden
 LL Bean
 76234.3636@compuserve.com