Do I Make The Grade?

In many of my coaching conversations I’ve got to hear “ It’s still very subjective. My boss who does my rating, sits down and talks to me on quarterly basis about team work, my people management skills, my ethics and things like that. For the first 2 quarters of the year I’ve been rated par in people management. But meanwhile team leaders and people from my team have been promoted to become managers and the manager from my team has made it to the next level. So I’m developing talent but as a people manager I’m just par.

My boss came to that judgement because I have one person, a peer in my Business Unit that she thinks I should be probably managing a little harder but my boss is not here to visit and see what I do and doesn’t really know how I manage these people’.

People believe that ratings are subjective, biased and not necessarily valid, so they don’t believe the ratings are fully under their control. They conclude that their performance does not necessarily translate into good ratings because of the subjective aspects of the system.

Thus at the end of the day, effective measurement systems that will drive behavior need to be simple enough to focus attention on key elements and fair enough so that people believe they can affect the measures.

Also the measurement systems cannot be so powerful in directing people that important elements of behavior and performance that are not and cannot be, fully captured in the measures receive too little or no attention, because of the unrelenting emphasis just on the quantitative measures incorporated in the system.

No measurement system is going to perfectly capture all of the important elements of performance or all of the behaviors that people need to do for the organization to be successful. So measurement should be guides, helping to direct behavior, but not so powerful in their implementation that they substitute for the judgement and wisdom that is so necessary to work towards individual development.

For example the following attributes need to be kept in mind while designing a measurement system for gauging leaders in the system along with maintaining a critical incident diary of observable behavior.

--Mentoring the team members

--Empathy towards team members

--Assertion of authority without being overbearing or inflexible

--Communicating regularly with peers

--Articulating role relationships (responsibility)