David,
Excellent post with lots of meaty issues to review.
Regarding Ben's recent point about ranking providing a check on
management's distinctions, let me give a current example. One of my
direct reports was discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the people
who work for him. He described one person as being a fully competent
performer, approaching the stage of being ready for promotion. Secretly,
I did not agree with him, but I would never say so. It is his decision,
but I want to help him apply a good process to making that decision. I
also want to hold him accountable for making good decisions, and I have
made this clear to him in the past.
I asked him to do two things. First, review the last 5 people he had
promoted, and compare them to others to see if he was comfortable that he
was applying good standards. Second, rank order (on 6 agreed criteria)
the people who were in the same class as the one he was considering for
promotion.
It was a learning experience. We had LOTS of converstion over a period of
2 months on this topic before we reached a conclusion on how to go
forward. His review of the 5 people was that he had done well, but
perhaps not great. I reminded him that his performance hinged on the
quality of the people he promoted. So if he was going to achieve certain
goals, he had to have the right people in place. When he rank-ordered the
people who were in the same class as the candidate, this person came out
at the bottom of the list, which did not surprise me.
There are two important issues here. First, we learned something that we
could apply. This responds to your point about accountability. We looked
at our vision statement, and agreed on the characteristics of the people
we wanted to promote. I would call this a success on the accountability
scale. The second issue is what you do with this new-found information
about the person being considered. For us, it became the basis for some
training and development efforts, and an agreement to see how it was going
in 6 months. We agreed this person had potential, but we also wanted to
see certain things develop before he could be promoted. So, it was not
the beginning of a termination, but of a development. This is the single
most important point. It is not about termination, but about development.
You saw that in Ben's example also, where the supervisor put the numbers
on the wall. The outcome was development and improved performance, not
termination.
The last point is that the manager developed a new tool to help him be
somewhat objective around his hiring and promotion decisions. Not very
sophisticated, but powerful.
As for your question about accountability, I totally agree with you. The
goal is not to hit certain targets directly, but to gain the ability to
hit the targets. As you learn a new ability, you assess its
applicanbility by measuring how well you hit the target. If you still
don't hit the target, perhaps the ability was not important, or perhaps
another ability is also needed. It is an ongoing, never-ending learning
process. Accoutability as a learning tool means that on the failures we
need to go through the same assessment as we do on the successes.
Just a subtle point, but I sometimes hear people say "celebrate the
failures." I personally think this is a mistake. The important thing is
to not be judgemental, and to learn. Making the same mistakes over is not
a good idea. Making a mistake and learning something so it does not
happen again is worth celebrating.
--Rol Fessenden
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