Monash Business Review
|
|
Home
| Databases
| WorldLII
| Search
| Feedback
Monash Business Review |
|
‘Preserve the outer appearance, revolutionise the inner dynamic’. Sam Wells shows how this advice from a 7th century Pope provides the solution to a modern day management dilemma.
Managers who wish to discontinue performance appraisals but who do not have the authority to overrule the ‘corporate’ policy or expectation that an appraisal of some sort should be conducted, face a practical challenge that goes beyond the theoretical debate on the merits or evils of appraisal.
This paper seeks to provide them with a way forward that enables them to focus ‘appraisals’ on management accountability, rather than on subordinate blame, without being caught up in sterile debate with head office policy makers.
For many years the theoretical battle lines have been drawn between the proponents of employee ‘performance appraisal’ and those who recommend its abolition. The proponents acknowledge that there is always room to refine and improve the design and delivery of the orthodox performance appraisal, but they insist that the accountability for individual performance reflected in the appraisal lies at the heart of a performance-driven culture – if an organisation commits to ‘performance’, it must make each individual employee accountable for individual performance. The decriers, on the other hand, argue that fiddling at the edges of design misses the point – individual performance appraisal is flawed in so many ways and so fundamentally that no amount of refinement or remodelling can render it valid or useful. It must be abolished, not improved.
Despite or perhaps because of this gulf, the proponents’ literature on the design and delivery of performance appraisal flourishes, usually without any attempt to rebut the abolitionists by arguing from first principles. The proponents see no need to engage, and refuse to be diverted by peripheral skirmishes with abolitionists. Their main focus tends to be on the particular design features of the process by which individual performance is appraised – how often, what sort of scale, weighted or unweighted objectives, whether or not linked to rewards, rater training, the role of self-appraisal, where training and development fits.
The psychological assumptions that underpin the orthodox model are so deeply imbedded that many commentators find it difficult to take seriously the abolitionist position. Even the advocates of total quality, students of one of the first and severest critics of appraisal, W. Edwards Deming, have often chosen to put Deming’s unambiguous condemnation of appraisals to one side, as a quaint aberration, a misunderstanding.
Deming supporter, Peter Scholtes, lists the main objections to the orthodox appraisal as follows:
• An employee’s work interacts with various systems and processes, but performance appraisal assumes that the performance of individuals can be gauged independently from the systems within which they work.
• Most work is produced by more than one person, but performance appraisals require us to suspend disbelief and pretend that the individual is working alone.
• The appraisal process presumes that whatever influence systems may have on individual work is consistent and predictable, but systems are often subject to changes that are difficult to understand and predict.
• Appraisals must present themselves as objective and consistent if they are to be credible, but the necessary objectivity and consistency just is not possible – we could not even expect an individual to receive the same ratings from different evaluators.
Abolitionists argue, further, that there are psychological flaws built in to the appraisal process:
• They reward ‘safe’ goals and so encourage mediocrity.
• Appraisals create pressure on employees to achieve objectives despite the systems rather than to improve the systems. “Everyone is pressuring the system for individual gain. No-one is improving the system for collective gain”, says Scholtes.
• Appraisals depress morale, undermining self-esteem and/or cultivating cynicism.
Viewed in this way, through the eyes of the objector, it is possible to identify three simple assumptions that appear to be operating at the heart of the orthodox appraisal: Organisational performance is the sum of individual performances.
It is possible, therefore, to explain poor organisational performance by reference to poor individual performance – one or more individuals are to blame.
Poor individual performance can be attributed to lack of application, or to weaknesses (personal or professional) – the former can be addressed by a ‘performance management’ process (underpinned by the threat of dismissal), the latter by training focused directly on the weaknesses exposed by appraisal.
It could be argued that there is not really much more to be said on the subject. Proponents continue to remodel and refine. Abolitionists regard with wonder the resilience of the prevailing paradigm, and re-present their arguments in the hope that corporate policy makers will eventually ‘get it’ and change corporate policy accordingly.
But this theoretical divide disguises a very real dilemma for practising managers.
When MBA students, typically middle or senior managers who are not yet shaping policy at the highest corporate levels, grapple with this issue, they divide along predictable lines. The proponents argue that it’s not ‘if’, but ‘how’ you conduct appraisals that counts; the abolitionists insist that there is no room for compromise. But the abolitionists then invariably ask a question of their own: “Performance appraisals don’t make sense to me and, if I had my way, we wouldn’t use them at all. But it’s not my call. I can only influence policy at a departmental or divisional level and the requirement for appraisals emanates from Head Office. It’s part of our corporate culture. I’m expected to go through some kind of appraisal process with my people and if I don’t, it’s a black mark on my record and an obstacle to more senior appointments. What should I do?”
The solution to that dilemma must meet corporate expectations, manage cultural sensitivities, and still enable our abolitionists to follow Deming’s injunction to “substitute leadership” by turning upside-down the core assumptions outlined above. So what does a manager do, who in principle fears the destructive impact of appraisals, but in practice must conform to Head Office expectations that appraisals will be conducted, as they have been, perhaps, for many years?
History provides us with a model. When Pope Gregory I encountered fair-headed Angle heathen slaves in the marketplace of 6th century Rome, he determined to convert them to Christianity. After his election as Pope, he despatched the monk Augustine to Britain to do so. It appears that Augustine was, in the language of pop psychology, somewhat ‘anal’. He was constantly emersed in detail and found it hard to make decisions ‘at the coal face’ without reference to Gregory.
Letters from Gregory survive which address the day-to-day challenges faced by Augustine as he grappled with a deeply entrenched pagan culture. These included the resilience of religious practice in the face of attempts to establish the central elements of the Catholic liturgy. The pagan feast days cycle was heavily influenced by the cycle of the seasons, which reflected the day-to-day lives of the people. These entrenched cultural artefacts, and the pagan temples or ‘fanes’ in which they were enacted, reflected a religious framework more concrete than the otherworldly message of the Christian liturgy.
Gregory’s pragmatic advice on this matter reflected his political awareness and talent for governance more than his ‘saintliness’. Through Mellitus, a Frankish monk, he said:
…that the temples of idols among that people ought by no means to be destroyed, though the idols that are in them ought to be destroyed. Let water be blessed and sprinkled in these fanes, and let altars be set up and relics placed in them… so that while certain external joys are preserved for them, they may more easily be led on to the joys that are within. For doubtless it is impossible to cut off everything at once from those who are slow of understanding… such people… cannot be raised up by leaps and bounds.
The idea was to preserve the outer shell of paganism while introducing some radically different ideas under its cloak – to destroy the idols, but not the temples; preserve the outer appearance, but revolutionise the inner message. The rest, as they say, is history.
So the challenge for those who have no confidence in the standard model of performance appraisal or its conceptual foundations, but who are required to conduct appraisals of some sort, is to preserve the outer appearance and structure of the culturally entrenched version, while revolutionising the internal dynamics. Appraisals need to satisfy the Head Office requirement or the cultural habit of individual appraisal – to look and ‘feel’ like the old way – but progressively to shape and promote a very different set of assumptions and principles.
The BuiLd (“Business unit and individual development” planning) model –- was developed and implemented ‘on the ground’, in an organisation with an established cultural and head office expectation of formal, individual performance appraisal.
BuiLd has the outward appearance of an orthodox individual performance appraisal – the annual manager/employee discussion about ‘performance’ – but it is, in fact, a model that focuses on performance in a very different way. Its starting point is a consideration of organisational or business unit performance. It recognises that the individual’s contribution to business unit performance is subject to many influences for which the manager, not the individual employee, is properly accountable.
BuiLd recognises the impact of the various systems within which the individual works, and over which he or she has little or no control. It considers skills and knowledge, and the behavioural capability of the individual to excel in a particular role – that is, their ‘fit’ for the job. It understands that very few people set out, or choose, to do a bad job – ‘poor performance’ is rarely just a matter of indifference or laziness. BuiLd consciously plays to individual strengths, rather than leveraging weaknesses or ‘areas for improvement’ – it gives individuals a chance to become everything they already are, in the context of their contribution to business unit performance. The late Peter Drucker called this ‘making strength productive’ and marked it as one of the central qualities of the effective executive.
The BuiLd process can best be seen as a self-audit – an audit of management accountabilities conducted by the manager – rather than a means of apportioning blame for poor performance to individual subordinates. Has the manager done everything possible to set a subordinate up for success?
Of course, the implementation of BuiLd involves a large body of supporting documentation, policy and training material, as behoves any self-respecting performance appraisal system. Together with BuiLd’s external structure, these artefacts play an important role in “keeping up appearances”.
By retaining the outer shell, the ‘fane’, of the standard appraisal process, based on the discussion between appraiser and appraisee, we have satisfied the cultural and corporate requirement for an annual performance appraisal for all employees. But on the inside, we have destroyed the idols of the old way – individual performance rating, blame, training focused on weaknesses – and replaced them with a revolution in thinking, based on business unit performance and management accountability for systems, for individual ‘fit’ leading to excellence and fulfilment, and for development focused on strengths.
Pope Gregory would certainly have approved.
Being aware of systems and the many influences on performance that are beyond the control of the individual.
(It is not seeing business performance as the sum total of all individual performances.)
Understanding that most people would like to feel good about what they do for a living
(It is not assuming that if a task isn’t done well, it is because someone has omitted to do it well, or chosen not to.)
Individuals helping to cultivate an environment in which they can add maximum value
(It is not managers controlling or having a responsibility to ‘drive’ individual performance.)
Liberating individual capability
(It is not controlling individual behaviour.)
Directly playing, always, to an individual’s strengths
(It is not focusing on weaknesses and shortcomings.)
MBR subscribers: To view the full academic paper email mbr@buseco.monash.edu.au.
Public access: www.mbr.monash.edu/full-papers.php (six months embargo applies).
Dr Sam Wells is Senior Lecturer and Associate Head, Academic, at the Adelaide Graduate School of Business, The University of Adelaide. He would like to acknowledge the assistance of Peter Prest, MBA (Advanced) graduate from the AGSB and a senior executive in the divisional business unit in which BuiLd was implemented
AustLII:
Copyright Policy
|
Disclaimers
|
Privacy Policy
|
Feedback
URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MonashBusRw/2007/8.html