http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobaltfish/
Hi guys, new year is here and words like “performance review”, “goals” and “targets” will be heard on a daily basis. Is the time of the year As Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins describe in their book: “Abolishing Performance Appraisals”, where “Employees and the supervisor are expected to identify areas of performance weakness (often a minimum of three) and then write out specific goals to overcome those weaknesses.”
In this post, I want to challenge the utility of these matters called “goals/targets”. Prepare yourself, this will not be easy and it requires an open mind :D.
Tom and Mary also refer that: “Conventional wisdom says that a good coach should use goals. People like goals. Goals motivate people. Goals get you good performance. But are these really useful? They are if we think in terms of reflecting on the potential of goals, but unfortunately most of the times managers and companies take this as pure gross generalization.”
Organizations have oriented their appraisal processes toward goal setting because it is believed to generate more objective ratings. They think that using measurable goals they can remove bias and subjectivity of human judgment. A lot of times goals are a target number, the employee either achieve it or not. This process removes personalities and biases from the equation. Of course most of the time these kind of goals, like Daniel Pink refers in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, narrows people action. People will do the minimal to achieve the goal, after the moment the goal is met people will stop performing.
Establishing Individual goals hold people accountable for performance outcomes. And now you think but that is good right? Well I do not think so, the outcome usually is generated by the system in which they work, they do not have much control over the system, any person on the same place would perform in the same way. Tom and Mary provide a great example:
” A production supervisor can only increase output if the machines and employees are able to work faster while preserving safety and keeping the final products within required specification. This is not a matter of leadership and supervision but may depend on the type and quality of the materials, the process and equipment, availability of engineers, technology, and capital investment, the local labor market, training resources, delivery and shipment schedules, and scores of other factors.”
In this case anyone would perform most probably in the same exact way, the system dictates the outcome not the individual.
Most of our managers are not even aware of system theory, without understanding this topic they cannot define any kind of goals to employees because they do not understand what is going on around them. The supervisor must take time to understand the origin of a performance deficiency.
Typical behavior is to pass the responsibility for performance outcomes to individuals. It’s far easier to assign a goal than to try help an employee figure out the cause of the deficiency and what to do about it.
Answering questions like: is it a lack of skill or training, is the employee uninterested or unmotivated, etc., requires though and open communication with the employee. After this is the manager´s role to define how can he help the employee to overcome the deficiency. At that point, setting a goal most probably will not help the employee at all. In order to set a goal the manager needs to do much more than just throw some numbers into the table.
During the next blogs, I will continue this discussion. Do not worry I will present good ways to measure and define performances, stay tuned.
This blog post is part of my new book: Get Rid of Performance Appraisals that you can find here. Below you can get a free chapter of the book…
|
