Golden Oldies: Twofer On Reviews
by Miki SaxonPoking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
5 years ago s+b created a video based on brain science to show how and why people often reacted negatively to performance reviews.
Ducks in a Row: Brains and Performance Reviews
Performance reviews are a frequent subject of management gurus, the media and pundits of every variety, myself included.
More recently the focus has been on what’s wrong with reviews and how they often act as a demotivator.
A new article in strategy + business uses brain science to look at exactly why and how reviews demotivate.
YouTube credit: strategy + business
A year later GE scrapped its notorious rank and yank review system as implemented by then-CEO Jack Welch. A year after that Amazon followed suit. There are still plenty of companies that use the system — whether they admit it or just change the name. Individual managers are also guilty of it no matter their company’s attitude. Be it company wide or individually the effect is the same — higher turnover, lower productivity, decreased engagement, and increasing recruiting costs.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
A Sea Change for Annual Reviews
Years ago I wrote about how to make annual reviews painless and effective — more a review of the year’s accomplishments and setting goals for the coming year than a critique of work past.
It worked because mini-reviews, coaching and conversations during the year were frequent.
Typical annual reviews were fraught with fear and loathing.
For decades, General Electric practiced (and proselytized) a rigid system, championed by then-CEO Jack Welch, of ranking employees. Formally known as the “vitality curve” but frequently called “rank and yank,” the system hinged on the annual performance review, and boiled the employees’ performance down to a number on which they were judged and ranked against peers. A bottom percentage (10% in GE’s case) of underperformers were then fired.
Jack Welch championed a lot of very bad stuff (e.g., work/life balance, HR), but the negativity of rank and yank is near the top, if not number one.
(As for GE’s stellar results keep under Welch keep in mind that businesses like GE Financial practically printed money until it all blew up.)
But times are changing.
According to Raghu Krishnamoorthy, the longtime GE exec in charge of Crotonville (GE’s in-house management school) “Command and control is what Jack was famous for. Now it’s about connection and inspiration.”
And to that end, GE has developed a new in-house app that basically does what I and others evangelized a decade and more ago.
The new app is called “PD@GE” for “performance development at GE” There’s an emphasis on coaching throughout, and the tone is unrelentingly positive. The app forces users to categorize feedback in one of two forms: To continue doing something, or to consider changing something.
If you don’t have the luxury of an app you can simplify it even further.
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- Care about your people.
- Interact with your people.
- Talk with your people.
- Challenge your people.
- Help them grow and advance — even when that means they leave for a better opportunity that you can’t provide.
Read what GE is doing and adapt it to your own group — whether your company does of not.
Image credit: Mark
