Lies, Damned Lies, and Performance Evaluations

You do their performance evaluations. Their survival in the company depends on your decision and your criteria. So when you say “I get along fine with the people who report to me because I always get good evaluations from them,” do you really think that’s evidence?

This doesn’t mean they lack courage or are being strategic. They might be entirely sincere. The asymmetry simply means you cannot know. When you hold power over someone’s professional life, that structural inequality is present in every interaction whether anyone responds to it or not. Their positive evaluation might reflect their genuine experience of working with you. Or it might not. The asymmetry makes the meaning of their feedback fundamentally indeterminate.

And while the surveys are anonymous, there are just too many managers who’ve told me they can recognize who wrote the comments by the way it was written and the words they used. So even the structural protection of anonymity often dissolves in practice. And if comments are too risky and you take them off, then you’re left with numbers. And as Disraeli said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

You might deserve the praise. But their positive evaluation, given the context, cannot tell you whether you do.

The same dynamic appears when executives cite employee engagement surveys as proof their culture is healthy. The survey measures what employees are willing to say about a culture that determines whether they remain employed. What you’re measuring isn’t engagement. It’s what people are willing to have measured.

photo by Jon Tyson

Let’s get rid of the performance review

Samuel Colbert says that

a one-side-accountable, boss-administered review is little more than a dysfunctional pretense. It’s a negative to corporate performance, an obstacle to straight-talk relationships, and a prime cause of low morale at work. Even the mere knowledge that such an event will take place damages daily communications and teamwork.

His solution? Performance previews:

reciprocally accountable discussions about how boss and employee are going to work together even more effectively than they did in the past. Previews weld fates together. The boss’s skin is now in the game.

In my experience, the workplace is not that dialogical. I side with Lucy Kellaway at the FT: few managers talk or think like that. Yet. Among other things because they have to take part in the same process themselves.

Beauty in the eye of the beholder?

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play. (washingtonpost.com)

And hardly anyone took notice.

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

Now, how about performance evaluations in organizations?

Socrates’ class evaluation

Professor Socrates is sooooo smart, I want to be just like him when I graduate (except not so short). I was amazed at how he could take just about any argument and prove it wrong.I would advise him, though, that he doesn’t know everything, and one time he even said in class that the wise man is someone who knows that he knows little (Prof. Socrates, how about that sexist language!?). I don’t think he even realizes at times that he contradicts himself. But I see that he is just eager to share his vast knowledge with us, so I really think it is more a sin of enthusiasm than anything else.

I liked most of the meetings, except when Thrasymachus came. He was completely arrogant, and I really resented his male rage and his point of view. I guess I kind of liked him, though, because he stood up to Prof. Socrates, but I think he is against peace and justice and has no place in the modern university.

Also, the course could use more women (hint: Prof. Socrates, maybe next time you could have your wife Xanthippe come in and we can ask questions about your home life! Does she resent the fact that you spend so much time with your students?). All in all, though, I highly recommend both the course and the instructor.

Socrates is a real drag, I don’t know how in hell he ever got tenure. He makes students feel bad by criticizing them all the time. He pretends like he’s teaching them, but he’s really ramming his ideas down student’s throtes. He’s always taking over the conversation and hardly lets anyone get a word in.

He’s sooo arrogant. One time in class this guy comes in with some real good perspectives and Socrates just kept shooting him down. Anything the guy said Socrates just thought he was better than him.

He always keeps talking about these figures in a cave, like they really have anything to do with the real world. Give me a break! I spend serious money for my education and I need something I can use in the real world, not some b.s. about shadows and imaginary trolls who live in caves.

He also talks a lot about things we haven’t read for class and expects us to read all the readings on the syllabus even if we don’t discuss them in class and that really bugs me. Students’ only have so much time and I didn’t pay him to torture me with all that extra crap.

There is more at The Chronicle.

Complexity and evaluating performance

… and why we hate it. The sentence is wayyyyyyyyyyy too long, but he makes a good point.

[It] is an occupational hazard for most adults — the political, social, educational, technological, communication and economic systems in which we are forced to work, and which use simplistic, bizarre and absurd mechanisms to assess our ‘performance’ within them, cannot accommodate or even appreciate complexity, which must by necessity be (over-) simplified, both to render most of what we are forced to do in the workforce un-ridiculous and bearable, and to enable us to persuade a dumbed-down public that it is actually valuable and helpful and hence deserves to be ‘paid’ for.