Well, first off, nobody is terrible at everything (and even if they are, who will have the heart to say so?), so the lowest overall scores across your company will probably sit somewhere in the range of 2.0-2.5 (remember, "3" is supposedly average).
On the other end of the continuum, you have more hope. After all, who wouldn't want to give their star player all 5's? Still, you're probably looking at overall highs in the 4.0-4.5 range. So suddenly your scale has shrunk from 1.0-5.0 to around 2.0 - 4.5, and 70% of your 40,000 employees fall somewhere between 3.2 and 3.6.
So what should you do? As Mike suggests you could use Behavioral Rating Scales for taking the decision. However, I would also suggest that for a promotion using a rating of a current job is a little useless piece of data.
Lets take the classic example of promoting a salesperson to a sales manager position. The competencies needed for the new role is fundamentally different from the past role's? No matter how well you've done the performance appraisal for the current role, promoting on its basis for the next role is fraught with danger.
One thing you could do before a promotion is assess the person for the competencies for the next role. However that is easier said than done, specially when there are 40,000 employees up for promotion. And what if the person is really not interested in that role? Can you give the person a growth in complexity of the role rather than the hierarchy of the role?
Unfortunately organizations are really not thinking along these lines. One reason is that would mean giving up control in the career development area to the employees.
But, would that really be such a bad thing?
You are right. Gautam, do you think we could start a list of companies that capitalize on the ingenuiety, creativity and drive of their employees?
ReplyDeleteJo
Gautam,
ReplyDeleteThere are so many gems in this post. I don't know where to start.
First off, when it comes to performance appraisals, we should be judging overall effectiveness. It calls for JUDGMENT not calculations. In the US, we have tried to take all the judgment out in an effort to make things "objective" so the organization doesn't get sued. Unfortunately, this just fuels corruption. I blogged about this here: http://www.missionmindedmanagement.com/taking_the_judge_out_of_judgment_02_oct_2007
As for talking in terms of role COMPLEXITY, I'm right with you, and we can specify all roles by work complexity level. A universal scale already exists. Here is an example: http://www.missionmindedmanagement.com/not-all-work-is-created-equal-exploring-work-levels-1-through-4
Since you are a top 25 HR Influencer (congratulations), I'm encouraged to hear you saying our current ways of viewing work and human capability may need expanding and rethinking.
Regards,
Michelle Malay Carter
Gautam - you hit the nail on the head about the different competencies needed from one role to another, with the salesperson / sales manager example being one of the best I have personally come across.
ReplyDeleteThese two positions require different skill sets. Some overlap, and some do not. If you are going to promote a salesperson to sales manager you better be darn sure that this individual has the skills needed to be a successful sales manager.
What happens if he or she doesn't and you promote them to the sales manager position? They likely don't succeed and are let go or quit. The biggest loss here is that the promoted individual was likely one of the best salespeople in the organization - the reason they were probably promoted in the first place - and now they are lost and the sales manager position is again unfilled.
I agree it is difficult to assess the talent of everyone in an organization of many thousand employees.
With my clients I recommend that they assess the potential of each new-hire when they come on board with a validated personality profile that will identify the personality traits that lend themselves to success in various positions within the organization such as the sales manager.
Keep a running file of what team members are a natural fit various positions moving up the company ladder and the task of assigning promotions will be much less daunting.
Chris Young
The Rainmaker Group
Good one GG, really liked the example of the salesperson. My take is slightly different from your view that the competencies needed for the new role is fundamentally different from the past role’s.
ReplyDeleteIMHO I don’t think that different roles in a particular career stream fundamentally differ when it comes to functional competencies. If that’s the case then the role competency mapping is something which needs to be corrected. In any particular career stream upward movement/role progression will be linked to the basic competencies required for superior performance in that career stream. For a higher role the scope and content of the job will change but essentially the technical and behavioral competencies required for any role in a particular stream will be sub set of different competencies identified for the stream. So when a sales person moves to a sales manager role his core stream will continue to be sales, manager role may change the scope and impact of his activities but to be a good manager he should have performed the role of a sales person effectively to be ready to move to the next higher role. Assessment for next role should be based on weighted average assessment of current performance, and then the potential assessment for the higher role before the promoting the employee.
what would you do in situations where skill sets are rare and highly specialised.
ReplyDeleteA superior may often want to give excellent ratings to their average subordinates, with the intention to be in the limelight/ have an enhanced work space for a longer time. The regular excuse being that "we donot get the right kind of talent in the market"
Any inputs on the appraisal process in a highly specialised environment.
Roma Ahuja
Resources-India
I agree, perhaps some kind of a graph that shows a certain 'balanced' curve depicting performance could be used to promote an employee. Thinking aloud.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to compare the effect of promotion criteria/ practices on employee performance and behaviour, between different types of organisations (like a bureaucratic one, an entrepreneurial one, a quasi-government one, for example).
I think the days of using only performance on current role are passe in most mature organisations. I have mostly seen only employees promoted based on testing out their suitability for a bigger role in addition to performance on current role.
The idea of increasing complexity of a role as an individual moved up the hierarchy is very interesting. Will be useful to take an example and illustrate. As someone said, when one gets promoted, and has 5 people reporting to him or her, one of the 5 people must be himself! (to mean that the job on promotion is the same, but more responsible and complex)
Thanks for building on these ideas. You brilliantly point out another major sin of current talent management technologies - the heavy reliance on performance management data to drive virtually every subsequent talent decision, including who to promote, who to develop, and how to develop them, etc. Your suggested approach to determining the readiness of an employee is exactly what we preach to our clients. In fact, we build competency models to reflect the differences in effective leadership at different levels within the organization. However, that kind of progressive thinking currently doesn't have much of a home in the technologies that companies are using to manage their talent.
ReplyDeleteMike