Employee Ranking Systems LO16990

T.J. Elliott (tjell@IDT.NET)
Fri, 13 Feb 1998 08:17:52 -0800

Replying to LO16957 --

Eric Bohlman wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 1998, Richard Goodale wrote:
>
> > I do know that "a good dentist knows his or her professional limitations."
> > But......how do I know that he or she is "good" without relying on some
> > sort of explicit or implicit ranking (even if it's just "some word of
> > mouth"--pun not intended, but acknowledged--recommendation from a friend)?
>
> It depends of what you mean by "good." When people recommend a dentist,
> they usually talk about how well the care he gave them met their needs and
> wants, period. In other words, they determine that he's "good" by
> comparing his performance to a set of (not necessarily verbalized)
> criteria, *not* by comparing his performance to the performance of other
> dentists. One can consider a dentist a "good" dentist even if he's the
> only dentist you've ever seen in your life. And conversely, one could
> have seen several dentists and never been satisfied with any of them.
...snip...

I think Eric does us all a favor by returning to the notion that the
language one uses in this consideration is important. Rating vs. ranking
is one example but criteria is another. That word means different things
to different people.

An additional consideration is how you get those criteria: do you get
them through some sort of participatory process or are they set by a small
group of senior managers? And then you can ask all the other questions you
ask of such processes regarding integrity, follow-up, capacity for
reflection, etc.

It is gratifying that this thread keeps growing in the variety of aspects
that respondents find in performance. For me, it raises the issue of how
useful a performance system is if it underestimates the complexity of
performance or if it fails to realize that its calculations will at best
be 'good enough' not scientific. Such systems should in a more perfect
room have sufficient wiggle room and not become ends in themselves. They
are only useful in so much as they get the people and the organization
what they want. 

-- 
T.J. Elliott
Cavanaugh Leahy
http://idt.net/~tjell
914 366-7499


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