A recent article in Business Week declared: Pointless Management Practices to Nuke . The list is "Forced Ranking Exercises", "Key Performance Indicators", "360 degree feedback programs", "Engagement Surveys", and "One-size-fits-all performance reviews".
The article falls for the age old trick of saying ... look at these poorly implemented practices - we should stop doing them. We agree with nearly everything in the article other than the conclusion. If you use 360 feedback to allow people to say things they wouldn't say to someone's face then you may have an issue. If you design a performance appraisal system that doesn't reflect what the employees/staff want from performance appraisal then again you will have an issue. Don't nuke the practices - nuke the way you are doing it.
If you take great care on your 360 feedback design and make it an open, inclusive process; if you build a performance review process that balances the individual's requirements equally with the organisation's needs; then you will find you have great, core tools for supporting your team in their personal development and in achieving the company goals.
Best practice in 360 feedback and best practice in performance reviews (and KPIs, and engagement surveys) will lead to fantastic results.
One Response
Why not?
Hi – I thought the article, brief and light as it was and nothing more than an opinion, was spot on. It focused on outcomes not elaborate, over-engineered, event based, tired processes.
Quite simply if what we do in all our interactions as managers is engaging that maybe we don’t need a suvey, if we promote a culture of trust, candor and feedback then maybe we don’t need 360 feedback processes, if managers discuss performance, results and expecatations on a frequent basis we don’t need performance management processes.
All worth thinking about. Unless of course you have a vested interest 🙂
FYI – we (140,000 people organzation) are now implementing a performance management process with no ratings (see item 1 in the Businessweek article). We realised that the way we did PM (‘best in class’ practices and process) wasn’t actually driving performance – so we are trying something different.