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OF all the most difficult part in
management—hiring topnotch people, doing strategic thinking,
eating power lunch, etc. and perhaps the least appreciated, yet the
most important, is the manager’s sense of objectivity in work
performance appraisal.
How does our sense of objectivity work? The
simplest way to explain it without doing an exhaustive Google
research is as follows: Every subordinate—janitor, clerk,
secretary, supervisor, manager, etc.—must be presumed to be
basically good human beings who have nothing but to impress the boss
and the customer.
Now let’s test this presumption. Suppose that
you’re the boss. And you’ve just entered a room that appears
full of busy bodies. As you approach each and every person, you
begin to think—they are hardworking individuals but why can’t we
increase the company’s profit anyway?
Or why are we spending so much to maintain our
business operations resulting to minimal profits?
Your brain then transmits a signal to your hand,
telling it to go over the company’s performance appraisal policy,
thus you see and understand that as far as objectivity is concerned
there is no need to revise it.
But the question remains: Why do we continue to
lose money in the first place? And why do our people who appear to
be industrious are not contributing enough? Wanna bet? I’ll be
more than positive to tell you that 90 percent of the time, your
line executives are circumventing the principle of forced ranking.
Exactly, this concept helps to identify three
types of people in the workplace: the high performers, the average
workers and those low-flyers who must be immediately kicked out of
their jobs.
Forced ranking did not pierce management
consciousness until Jack Welch; former CEO of General Electric
devoted one entire chapter to describe the Vitality Curve in his
book Jack: Straight from the Gut (Warner Books 2001).
Welch is best remembered for being brutal to
advocate to immediately kicking people out of service if they belong
to the bottom 10 percent of the workforce. With this approach, he
has demolished the “false kindness” of managers in keeping
people in their jobs.
In his book, Welch
classifies his workers as A, B and C players in accordance with the
20-70-10 model. “A” players are composed of the top 20 percent
performers who are filled with passion and committed to “making
things happen.”
The “B” players are the vital ones who may
not be visionary or the most driven but are considered essential
because they make up the majority of the group as they meet the
minimum standards of the job.
The problem is how to pick out the “C”
players or the bottom 10 percent who are non-producers and whose
common trait is procrastination that often results to failure to
deliver on promises.
There are many, many more exciting management
techniques I could tell you about performance management appraisal.
Unfortunately I have no idea how they could be applied in government
service, especially with the kind of leaders that we’ve right now.
OK! Now that you’ve got an idea on how to
become ruthless to the C workers, it’s time to calculate one’s
Christmas bonus. How much alibi do you want to escape giving a bonus
to your A and B people? Surely, one traditional technique is to rely
much on your accounting system to twist the figures in your favor.
Taken seriously, your accountant is your best
friend come December and April. He knows the truth more than what
Rotarian Jocelyn Bolante and Euro General Eliseo de la Paz has sworn
to tell us.
That’s why I believe that someone is going to
make a good kill if Bolante and de la Paz are made to undergo
polygraph testing with only one relevant question: “Have you ever
stolen money?”
Of course, the answer would still be
questionable . . . inside a basketball court.
Rey Elbo is a business consultant specializing
in human resources and total quality management as a fused
specialty. Feedback may be sent to <kairoshq@info.com>
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