In his book, “Out of the Crisis” Dr. W. Edwards Deming put forth his belief that Performance Appraisals should be done away with. His case was taken up by Peter Scholtes, who championed the Deming philosophy and became it’s strongest proponent in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the concept of the Annual performance Review is still widely criticized. Unfortunately, most companies still do them, and any number of attempts have been made to justify the process or to reconcile the norm with Deming & Scholte’s teachings.
Rarely, however, is there much written on the systemic reasons why performance appraisals continue to be the norm. The answer, however, may be fairly simple: We simply don’t work in teams. Even when we say we do, we often find the overachievers dominating and the underachievers more than willing to ride along on the backs of others.
Yay, Team. Divided, isolated & focused on individual tasks.
So why the resistance to working in teams? First off, many of those who have been promoted have been rewarded for working within this system, and they have come to accept it as a good thing since they were rewarded by it. Is it the case, however, that these individuals have a super-ordinary ability to achieve high performance and overcome obstacles no matter what the situation, or are they blessed enough to have a keen instinct for finding systems they can take advantage of?
Successfully building true teams requires re-thinking the work environment and the relationships within it. Even something as simple as the layout of the office in most companies tells us that teamwork is not going to take place in any sustained fashion. Everyone sits by themselves, partitioned off from everyone else. Some say this is necessary so that people can work on their assigned tasks – but why are they assigned individually? Why is it that work is not a collaborative effort more often – where experienced individuals are expected to assist others who are less knowledgeable, the less knowledgeable are expected to seek and receive teaching, and the lazy are instantly culled out and brought into the fold by the team itself? Is it even possible for this to take place when everyone is sitting alone behind a 7-foot high wall in a blank, gray space, and paid to occupy that space for a minimum of 8.5 hours before returning home? Of course not, and the fact that we are working in these environments helps to explain so much of the dismay and malaise that exists within modern workplaces.
Clearly, this leads to situations where people are not expected to work in true teams whose members are dearly dependent upon each other and, as a result, do not gain experience and become comfortable with giving constant feedback to others. Excuses abound, however, what’s driving these excuses is the unwillingness to look bad. If managers with no exposure to teamwork and team building are suddenly expected to coach others, they may end up looking utterly inept, and will avoid doing it altogether.
Preventing oneself from looking less-than-able is a rational approach, unfortunately, it leads to situations where people end up pursuing the
The appraisal dilemma. Individual pursuits trump team goals.
best possible outcome for themselves, and stop working towards the best possible outcome for the group as a whole. The typical performance appraisal process rewards exactly this type of thinking. This dynamic can be represented as the Prisoner’s Dilemma that lies at the core of Rational Choice theories, in that each person adopts a philosophy of, “By pursuing what’s best for me, I can get the best possible outcome.” Unfortunately, this only leads to a collectively worse outcome for everyone. As each member of the group pursues his or her own best outcome, the focus on doing what’s best for the team goes away and, collectively, everyone is worse off. The end result is that those who are able to gain the rewards of promotion and pay increases in such a system have nothing to pass on other than their experiences of being rewarded by a system that yields suboptimal results to everyone.
When asked what could take the place of annual Performance Appraisals, Dr. Deming said, “Leadership!” Unfortunately, those who continue to defend the performance appraisal process almost universally point to the benefits of management’s ability to set individual goals and measure people against them, and downplay or ignore contributions to the sustained development of the team and each of its members as a whole. Unfortunately, as Dr. Deming told us, measuring is neither managing nor leading.
Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of those around you, putting together the mixture of people who can complement each other, enabling them to learn and grow from each other’s natural abilities, and contributing to the overall success of everyone around you so that every member of the team benefits financially, intellectually, and emotionally is the essence of leadership. As such, it should be cultivated from the beginning, at every level, and recognized whenever it is practiced.
Now that would be something worth rewarding.
©2010 David M. Kasprzak
