Bob Sutton: Sam Culbert in the Wall Street Journal: Get Rid of the Performance... - The Diigo Meta page

• 21 Oct 08
  

  Bertrand Duperrin

  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:

  performance performancereview designthinking evaluation humanresources

  • • 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.
  • 
    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.
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • Creative people, often unwittingly, often have a huge impact by removing things that everyone assumes are essential. 

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