Not meaning to misrepresent anyone, John. Apologies if it appears that I
did. It may not have been presented as "the" answer. I'll accept the fact
that you offer it as "one" answer. If so, I hold to the argument that it,
as "one" answer, is a "wrong" answer.
Assuming a company or other organization has gotten accurate data, now
what? What does the outfit intend to do with it? Is the intention to keep
the "best" and shoot the rest?
After getting down to the nitty gritty, "performance" is usually a
backdoor methodology of dealing with people, not systems. As such, it is
destructive.
This does not prevent, nor should it, any company from trying to make
improvements in its operations. But the focus should be on improving the
system, not decimating the workforce, a la Al Dunlap.
What is probably needed is a bit of time spent on operational definitions,
so as to preclude misrepresentation. Performance in the context of what
the original post was deals with "paying" for "performance". That appears
to me to be dealing with paying someone based on their individual
performance. Which gets me back to the idea of subjectivity in
measurement, and ladders of inference by management.
Management creates the system. Management controls the system. Results
from the system are the responsibility of management. In this sense,
driving blind is ignoring the signal in favor of the noise, looking for
someone to blame after the numbers come in, and not knowing what else to
do.
In this sense, concentration on paying for performance, when the outfit
doesn't know how to separate signal from noise, is a waste of everyone's
time and energy. The outfit should do a better job of getting the data
straight, and not in mis-using it for management purposes. Theory Y vs.
Theory X, if you want to put it in those terms.
Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate John's ideas on this subject, and
we can all learn more in this life.
Sincerely,
John Constantine, Managing Partner
Rainbird Management Consulting
Santa Fe, NM
rainbird@trail.com
http://www.trail.com/~rainbird
--John Constantine <rainbird@trail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>