Eric
Thanks for the thoughtful post. A few questions/comments.
1. Can you "rate" someone without "ranking" them? Or, can you "rank"
someone without "rating" them. Perhaps I'm thick, but I don't really see
the difference between the hairs that seem to be being split here. Help
me, please.
[Host's Note: John Galt is the fictional hero of Ayn Rand's _Atlas
Shrugged_. ...Rick
2. Even though all I know about John Galt is what I read in LO16957 (i.e.
his name), I do know, from statistics courses taken (and passed!) at two
well-kent Universities the difference between absolute and relative
"performance." That fact of mathematics is not the point. The point is,
IMHO, once you (the leaders of an organisation) have developed a vision,
fleshed it out (through the creation of strategies) and determined what
parameters of human performance are needed to execute those strategies and
achieve your vision, how do you:
--hire people to help you do those challenging tasks
--develop them for the same purposes
--identify how your people, individually and collectively, are
performing, against those parameters, over past, present and future
time frames
--find ways to measure and then raise (or lower, if (sadly)
appropriate) the "bar" of performance
--feed back what you learn about your people and their capablities,
continuously, into a review of your vision and your strategies?
3. IMO it ain't easy, but it is even harder if you don't have "data," no
matter how fuzzy, on who's good at doing what and where and when and
why--and how much, relative to the rest of the organisation. (If you can
figure out the answer to "how," you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din).
4. Like some other posters to this thread, I'm still waiting to hear from
someone out there who can give me a concrete example of a successful
performance evaluation system that does not entail explicit or implicit
"ranking". Can you help?
5. Painful as the "dentist" analogy to this thread might be to some
readers, let me ask you finally--who would you rather treated your
infected root canal--the dentist who was first in "Root Canal 303" at
her/his school, or the one who barely scraped by (pun again initially
unintended, but acknowledged)?
We would all like life to be painless, but it ain't.
Cheers
Richard Goodale
--Richard Goodale <fc45@dial.pipex.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>