Richard I love your posts and hope you have the time and inclination
to contribute like this...
On 8 Apr 98 at 22:05, Richard Karash wrote:
> Now, the LO movement would go further to say, "People, interdependent with
> other people and their environment, can get stuck in low performance. It
> may take some skilled intervention to free things up, get things
> started... But, never can the facilitator take the responsibility off the
> shoulders of the individual. That just doesn't work. It's ultimately up to
> the individual."
If I can add a bit. The interdepency issue is a critical one. I can't
count the number of times I have come across people who have been labelled
as incompetent by supervisors or others (and often acted consistent with
that), who, once removed from environment that was toxic to them, became
excellent employees in a new environment.
To me the judgment of incompetence is time and place specific, because
performance IS so much related to environment. I have seen people excel in
environments that were toxic and counter-productive to others.
What is ultimately up to the individual, as you put it is interesting.
Practically speaking I am not convinced this is true, or at least true
beyond the simple level. I have had colleagues who just were incapable of
making a work situation work, it wasn't UP to them. In some cases, the
organization lost the person, since their only choice was to leave..which
was a loss to the organization. Most of those people went on to excel,
although some would have called them incompetent in the old environment.
> We could state some additional truths... For example, for most of us, it's
> pretty difficult to fire people (that was the part I always hated!). It's
> easier to shuffle them off to some other department. As a result, when the
> decision is keep or fire based on performance evaluation, businesses would
> probably be healthier if more people were fired. (I think that downsizing,
> staff cuts to reach imposed numbers... that's a different story.)
The practical difficulty is that we simply don't know when bad performance
is a result of a person who is hopeless, an interaction between
environment and person that is toxic, or an environmental/system problem.
Putting aside fairness issues, there are OPPORTUNITIES here for
organizations to look to themselves also with respect to performance
failures. I think it is fair to take a systems view here: that when a
person is fired for lack of performance, the organization has played a
role somehow (hiring the wrong person, mismatching, poor superivision, job
design, etc). In HR this is a key issue, since some organizations are real
good at creating poor performers (and have huge turnover).
> This is that thinking that leads me to feel compassion for those who are
> stuck... Remember, I believe that, besides personal choice, part of the
> stuckness is the result of stable inhibiting structures between people and
> of people with their environment.
Key point of convergence. TQM, Deming and LO folks seem to have come to
the realization that performance doesn't occur in a vacuum. It makes
business sense for organizations to look to themselves, not to blame, but
to identify factors that might be contributing to performance failure.
In my view that's a defining part of the LO, continuous learning at both
the corporate and individual level.
> These thoughts are helpful to me... I'll expand on what I wrote a few
> weeks ago. This whole ranking/assessment/evaluation question is so hot
> because
>
> 1. We know that evals are flawed, their communication is flawed, and
> these can do damage; and yet...
>
> 2. We feel it imperative to manage performance, and
>
> 3. It is very hard for people to see current reality accurately and
> honestly, especially viz. their own performance; we hope that evals can
> help in this.
I think we are caught between and betwixt cultures. Performance management
and the philosophy underlying it are of the "old" school of thought, from
perhaps a simpler time. We could count the widgets made and be satisfied
determining performance that way.
The "new" sense is that performance is multi-determined by person and
environment, by systems and people, by inter-relationships. But the OLD
way is what most of us have worked under, and is embedded deep in our
culture beyond the workplace.
Some of my work on the issue of performance management is finding ways of
"transition" that will satisfy the older cultural norms, but also have
real potential to improve performance in our new systems.
I'm not convinced that even that kind of compromise is worth trying.
Institute For Cooperative Communication http://www.escape.ca/~rbacal
Coming Soon: New book: Conflict Prevention In The Workplace! Related resources at http://www.escape.ca/~rbacal/conpre.htm
Robert Bacal (204) 888-9290
--"Robert Bacal" <rbacal@escape.ca>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>