PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL: THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN THE DELUGE IS HERE!

PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL: THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN THE DELUGE IS HERE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 13, 2010

REFERENCE:

My missive yesterday was to point out how good and bad intentions have consistent unintended consequences.

Feudal lords were not all bad. They simply wanted order and for people to behave and appreciate the little they were given.

Capitalists were not all bad, but they wanted people to behave and appreciate the little they were given.

In our post capitalistic society with the same sex marriages of communism and capitalism (China), and Islam and capitalism (Indonesia), to name a couple, Christianity and capitalism considered the appropriate heterosexual marriage of good people is floundering. It has been floundering since World War Two.

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There has always been a ruling class with few breakthroughs throughout history. Power is always reluctant to share even a modicum of power, and so it has been, so it will be, and so conflicts will be on periodic display.

When I was coming into the world, good men, brave men, but poorly educated and skilled men, took or the Carnegies, the Mellons, and the Rockefellers. Many lost their lives fighting for a decent wage, hygienic working conditions, a proper return on their productivity in terms of benefits, and the dignity of work.

The Robber Barons met workers’ demands with strike busters armed with guns and clubs. Don’t’ take my word. It is all in our history books. It happened in Europe as well. It happened in Russia, too, only to give birth to the Soviet Union. It is happening today in China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa and elsewhere in emerging economic powers and is being met with draconian methods.

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What I have found astounding in my career is the behavior of grandsons and granddaughters of these workers who took on the Carnegies, Mellons, and Rockefellers. Eighty years ago men picketed their workplaces and bled on American streets. They had their knuckles busted as they refused to remove their hands from the fences locking them out of their work.

Today, their grandsons and granddaughters are far better educated more knowledgeable and therefore more relevant to their work than their bosses, indeed, to the whole idea of corpocracy. Yet they allow themselves to be repressed compressed and grinded into conformity with hardly a whimper of protest.

They are professionals.

Being professional has come to mean they are docile, timid, impotent, cowardly, submissive, retiring, nonconfrontational, passive-aggressive, and counter dependent on a pusillanimous system that pays them a structured salary and gives them miniscule increases. The mechanism that keeps them in place is performance appraisal. Human Resources, its architect, has become management’s union. HR has all the skills of Madison Avenue advertisers.

Those at the top earn sometimes 1,000 percent or more than those with the brainpower that is the lifeblood of the operation. Meanwhile, the well heeled are steering that selfsame operation in far too many instances into bankruptcy, reorganization, redundancy exercises, mergers, reengineering, or some other claptrap justification of the moment

While this is going on, these professionals are expected to behave and appreciate the little they are given. And they do.

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It has become a cradle to grave phenomenon and the unintended consequences of grandchildren and great grandchildren becoming primarily interested in getting and not giving, in escape rather than confrontation, and in living a surreal existence rather than a real one with some electronic contraption.

Eighty years ago parents were determined their children would never suffer as they had, never have to fight as they had, never have to stand up for their beliefs and their dignity as they had. They wanted their children and grandchildren to avoid pain and risk that was a constant companion to their lives. They forgot that it was that spirit that won World War Two, a legacy they refused to pass on to their children.

Ordinary Joes and Janes – I had many in my clan – put on the military uniform and fought the Axis Powers the same way their parents had fought the Robber Barons, and they won the war, or did they, actually?

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I propose they unwittingly killed the spirit that won the war. They kept the truth from their children and the painful lessons of that truth, while forgiving their children the consequences of their actions, being always there to break their fall, apologize for their missteps, or deny them the integrity that had made them what they were. .

My greatest advantage in life was to be born to poor parents with no grandparents on either side, no safety net other than my own cunning, knowing that when I fell there would be no one to pick me up. Many of my generation avoided having their spirit killed for the same reason as mine, but what did we do to our children?


I was educated with a mindset of that grandparent generation. Although mine were gone when I was born, I had it programmed into my soul. I road the easy life to a fine education, and rapid promotion in the 1960s when the heritage that had made us strong as a nation was unraveling. We were already living in nostalgia.

The survival spirit was too deep in my soul for it to happen in me. I never forgot I was a poor boy, and I have never joined those of wealth who would be patronizing to the poor. Never. I never joined the club. I am comfortable with a poor boy’s mindset into my advanced years, while not being poor, but I have the anger and fight of my grandparent’s generation that mounted the battle against the Robber Barons eighty years ago. It is why I write.

The biggest disappointment of my life has been how my children and the children of their generation have been finessed by sex and economic wealth. You only have to look at PBS on television or at the most popular books to see that these two subjects dominate. Sex is of prurient interest because we are human beings. Wealth is seen as the panacea meant to cure everything.

Have you ever noticed that only weeds grow on parched earth? We have become a society of weeds.

Casinos are the current weeds in our economic parchedness. They are everywhere even in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa. “The answer to economic woes.” Florida’s governor Crist is flirting with $1.5 billion from Seminole Indian casinos over the next ten years as an answer to a budget deep in the red.

It is that old “catch 22” – the profits come from those least able to afford to gamble, thinking by gambling they will no longer be poor when the house is designed to kill that hope.

Artificial stimulants are the rave today to a hapless sex life, while plastic surgery is a multibillion-dollar industry. We don’t want to grow old because that would mean we would have to grow up.

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Our nation is dying, not because of immigrants, not because of the fears of Anglo Saxon and Christian entropy, not even because of the economic challenges, which have always been with us.

Our nation is dying because we are preoccupied with such issues when entropy is a normal fact of existence and the persistent challenge. We are failing to reinvent our nation for its role in an emerging world. We are stuck with what we were and where we were in those glory days, and have forgotten what it was like to be unstuck.

This is the macrocosm of the microcosm that I address. Focus on the wrong ball and that one rolling down the hill will eventually bury you.

So, what does this have to do with performance appraisal? I won’t attempt to answer that as I have had a plethora of responses to my missive, showing that the idea of performance appraisal resonates with many of you in alarming ways. Here is a representative sample of those responses

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A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

You have hit the nail, plucked a note, struck a chord, rung the bell and started the chant reminding us again of the most tedious, clichéd and non-value adding process used in business today.

One of my former bosses, a VP of Human Resources, once told me the job of HR was to keep the company out of court. Hence, the performance appraisal, the sole purpose of which seemed to be justification for terminations. Unfortunately, our mostly spineless managers found it difficult to ever document on paper anything really bad about one of their employees, primarily because it would mean having a discussion about improving that performance. Nor could they say anything too good for fear that someone on top would notice and promote the employee.

Tom Coens wrote a book in 2002, "Abolishing Performance Appraisals." I had an opportunity to speak with him briefly after a presentation he gave on the subject. He seemed very sincere. In the book he provided several alternatives. Apparently, now, eight years later another one has surfaced

The problem is that HR is the keeper of the flame, holder of the records and designer/ perpetual redesigner of the process. I'll admit I fell into this trap early in my career. Part of a team established to re-design our appraisal process.

We cleverly tried to focus on competencies and the understanding that required competencies varied from function to function. Nice, but shallow attempt at forcing thought. We succumbed to the scale, one to five points. When we presented our process to the executive board the GM from England suggested we use a ten-point scale to avoid managers giving half points. They (managers) gave half points even on the ten-point scale. Talk about an inability to commit.

This was the beginning of the end for me. The naiveté of youth began to give way to the cynicism of experience. Managers and executives I held in high regard because of what they had accomplished and their presumed intelligence became increasingly disrobed.

It was about this time I discovered some of your books, which fueled the journey. A friend, who is on your mailing list today, told me about your writing. He talked about your edginess as compared to other 'sacrilegious" management/leadership/OD authors of the period.

A final step in the process, after several years of pushing, the company I was with, thanks to the leadership of a thoughtful Division President, finally did "abolish appraisals." The monitoring device was a quarterly red/yellow/green review of project status. The only qualitative evaluation was whether the employee was maintaining company values - teamwork, respect, development, and integrity. In other words, there were no bodies in the wake of an accomplishment.

I suppose there is hope. I believe it starts with wresting control of "appraisal" from the HR function and leaving it to those who use the tool to shape it. Clearly, based on past application of PAs, management does not want to rate people. Now, ranking, in the Jack Welch 10/80/10 mode, is the next disparaging tactic to address.

Thanks for the reminder. Pound the nail, bang the going, push on the flywheel, it will eventually gain its own momentum.

Michael

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DR, FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

Thank you. I feel I’m talking to the choir. It is those that have no church, speaking metaphorically, that are the challenge.

Be always well,

Jim

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