High ball lies

It was suggested that I pull together a few points from several previous posts regarding the well known performance management practice of grading staff effort far too high during the appraisal process.  Of apparent greatest interest to my readers is my continuing insistence that roughly 20% of all staff employed by your company would not be subject to rehire if you had to do it all over again.  This premise seems to irk a lot of managers who defend their staffs with admirable zest.  Never, they say, would they harbor 20% of their team if job performance was less than par.  Said a friend recently who manges over 200 employees, I just couldn’t afford to have that many people below standard. Fair enough.

Low Bar Performance Standards

The problem is so defending the good work of so many well meaning employees in a world that has utterly lowered the bar on what good job performance looks like beyond what most managers seem to appreciate. It is a pretty simple concept to grasp that if more than ½ of your staff are “exceptional” then it is simply too easy to earn that distinction in your organization.  Inherent in the idea of being exceptional, after all, goes with it the notion of being the “exception” not the rule.  If you are blessed to have an unusually crowded field of “great” workers on your team, then change the definition of “great” to be more akin to “good” and stop lavishing praise on so many people, so often, for doing so much of the same good thing.  That sounds counter-intuitive to supervisors who have been trained over the years to be positive feedback robots, looking everywhere for the opportunity to give heap-big praise every time someone does something that he or she is paid to do.

Moreover, it is critical to reconsider what we now define as “poor” performance. When I speak of the bottom 20% of employees who you would not rehire, I am not at all suggesting that they are each-one bad apples.  We are not talking “poor” performance here.  We can’t. That bar is buried in the mud.  The work world has so narrowed the definition of “unsatisfactory” to the lowest common denominator that the standard is down-low silly anymore.  Let’s check the personnel file–Here’s a young man who was absent unscheduled 8 times last year, late 17 times and who kicked a hole in the vending machine.  He showed up wasted (only once). He snaps at co-workers and pissed off three customers. He has a 13% error rate, improved from 16% last year.  Okay, he’s marginal. Give him only a 2% raise this year. That will show him!

No, we can’t apply that standard.  Instead ask, would you rehire them? If you could go back in time, would you make the same decision to bring him or her on board or would you have preferred to select someone else? Someone not with the company yet who would, on average, be a better match.  Or do look internally. That works too. Rank your incumbents in comparable jobs.  Of a five person team, are four of the others better than fifth? Of course.  So then, chances are you would not rehire. Why?  Because four out of five times, some one else can do a better job!  It’s pretty basic.  Be honest– one in five is a miss. You would not rehire.

High Ball Lies

Then there is still this matter of job performance scores.  We are all indoctrinated into some sort of score card, typically that offers a performance spread scaling system, let’s say, that looks something g like this:

Here’s how the score card is carried out in reality. On a scale of 1 to 5 where five is best, managers usually give a “3″ when they mean three, but oddly also give “3″ when they mean two. In fact, managers rarely ever give a “2″, but when they do, they mean one.  And almost nobody gets a “1″ because, you know, that’s just mean. On the top side, supervisors are notorious for granting a feel-good “4″ to balance out that scathing two.  Although a lot of fours are really threes, sometimes truth glimmers when managers give a “4″ and actually mean four; but roughly 75% of the time when they give a “5″ they also mean four, so it’s hard to say what anyone really means. Weird, ain’t it?

These number manipulations are called “lies” by the way.  And they are, of course, far more a function of the person who is conducting the assessment vs. the person being assessed.  For this reason alone, incidentally, performance appraisals stuffed in personnel files everywhere are invalid to one degree or another—they reflect the author, not the subject.   Forced Distribution systems are specifically designed to avoid this well-known tendency to inflate performance scores. That’s why I favor such systems, very much so indeed.  I reference this in prior posts as well and if you wish to learn more about the value and practical implications of forced ranking systems I again refer you to this article from Harvard Business School.

Hard Knock Experience

Finally, I implore all leader-readers to turn to their own hard knock experience during the economic debacle that has plagued us all starting in late 2008 and still counting.  Most of you have been faced with difficult decisions to layoff a lot of employees.  Many of you have let go more than 20% of your workforce.  Some of you have downsized the loyal troops by nearly half or more.  It has been rough.  But now let’s look.  Be honest.  Of all those who you let go, how many of them will you rehire when the economy finally bounces back?  Come on now, how many of them would you actively seek out and rehire before simply trying your luck in the larger candidate pool market?

That’s what I thought.  It was about 20% of your employee population, wasn’t it?  Even more, in some cases, when you really look close.  Doesn’t that tell you anything?  And the real rub is that there are still people on your team who are less than stellar, even after all that downsizing.  Now another important caveat about the results of recent downsizing.  It is reasonable to conclude that if your company was part of the terrible termination spree across America, you now have a workforce of more topper-notches as a ratio of  all  surviving workers than you have ever had.   That is, you already let go that 20% who you would not rehire.  So now it really is completely unreasonable to slate another 20% into that category.  I get this.   I have long held that Forced Distribution systems which drop ever-better employees to the lowest ranking bottom, have limitations on workforce change strategies over time.  I proposed 4 or 5 years before the strategy is no longer effective or required, at least to the degree of aggression employed in earlier years as your change strategy starts and builds.  Admittedly four or five years may now need to be tweaked back to, say three years due to harsh downsizing that has already occurred for better or worse. This limitation is also covered in the Harvard article which pretty much says the same thing.

The actions here are to redefine what good performance looks like in your work area; employ a Human Resource Planning process, including adopting forced ranking to measure employees relative to one another instead of comparing a person to themselves year after year by high ball / lie ball score card.  Oh yes, throw out your performance review system too.  Kill the appraisals forever, purge all those lies from your personnel file forever and let the appraisals, employees and mangers rest in peace. Amen.