Circus of 360 Degree for Performance Evaluation

  

Now it is very uncommon to come across learned professionals talking about 360 degree evaluation mechanism as the way to go “once an organization reaches maturity” as they would say.

 

For non HR professionals like me, it’s something that is really astonishing. This is a system I have seen been deployed by some of the most “mature” organizations who are seen as thought leaders in their respective verticals.

 

So 360 degree is a “open system” wherein one receives feedback on their performance against set goals from peers, subordinates and seniors. Unlike the evaluation been done by just your manager, everyone directly working with, gets an opportunity to impact and hence reducing any manager bias. The system in itself is very good and mature indeed…but for performance evaluation?

 

Shouldn’t performance by evaluated automatically by the databases and MIS instead of “opinions”. One can understand there are possibly measures for which numerical data does not exist (typically that is what MIS and databases support), but does that mean a Performance Management System that primarily runs on 360 degree.

 

How many times do you come across such quantifiable and established “beyond doubt” measures that do a merry round in a 360 degree environment for rating on a scale by multiple people. Some interesting real life examples are follows:

 

Objective: To achieve defined sales for Product X in the next 12 months

Objective: Ensure desired level of profitability

Objective: Collections of all debtors outstanding in time

 

What purpose does it achieve by having people give ratings on these when you don’t need any individual judgment really? At the end of the day manager will get feedback from 5-6 individuals with different ratings, he will then in all probabilities take the median and finalize the rating. My bet is in these “mature organizations” this final rating with then also go for normalization…..I guess its only god who knows if there is any sense in whatever comes out of this circus J

In the end what could have helped in measuring “some” qualitative measures and help largely in developmental needs, has become “the system” in several organizations.

 

 

~~Rohit~~

Budgets, Scorecards, Strategy Plans….

For the nth time I came across a client yesterday who had done some very interesting and innovative thinking in their Next 3 Year Strategy/Business Plan. They have also been using Balanced Scorecards (BSC) for some time now. To top it all they have a very good annual budgeting exercise.

 

Painful as it is, however all three of these documents: Business Plan, BSC, Budgets: are set of three different and independent documents.

 

Budget is a combination of inside out (mark up over last year) and outside in (market potential assessment), BSC is arrived at through now almost famous, role holders workshop if you please, and business plan is 300 page document about new strategies and new plans for the next 3 years. There is absolutely no correlation of new strategies on budget…If one was to wonder if the budget would look any different had the business plan not been there…the answer is NO. Would the BSC look any different…NO.

 

Instead of having these as integrated single document, they continue to be fragmented documents. When infact one easy way out is to use BSC as the tool for capturing business plan (hence avoiding 2 separate documents atleast), and then converting the same BSC into a budget, with a line item in budget for every BSC item hopefully. I hardly come across organizations which have a separate line item for key strategies…I often wonder if budget progress is what they are likely to look at million times in a year, when and how they monitor progress on strategic interventions.

 

Problem in my view lies in obsession with templates and hence failing to notice that basis your requirements templates keep changing. Strategies are supposed to define the template and not vice versa ….there is no framework that suggests that line items in budgets remain same even after 20 years, when infact strategies have changed completely. The other large problem is with the failure to travel the last mile in any intervention….the mile that ensures ground preparation for any intention and intervention. Unless on ground simple things like MIS format, aligning review mechanisms to strategy etc is done, pace of progress would never be controllable. Number of strategies hitting the mark and missing the mark would be subject to luck instead of actions.

 

Do you also come across similar situation often..??

 

~~Rohit~~

Balanced Scorecard – Measurement Tool

Many professionals talk about how Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is such a wonderful Performance Management System. Interestingly I have seen quite a few seasoned professionals talk about BSC when a client talks about successful Performance Management Systems. It’s a strange error in correlation. BSC though is a strong support to Performance Management, is not Performance Management on its own.

 

In my financial world simply put it’s just a MIS format/tool. A MIS framework that measures performance. On its own neither does it improve performance nor reduce the same. It just tells you about absolute quantum and direction of performance.

 

Having said that, there are great advantages of BSC as a framework. While the basic ingredients within the organization remain same in any system or framework, BSC does push to look at the same set of ingredients in a more strategic manner. Some of the advantages of BSC as a MIS tool in addition to providing basic data in a pre-determined format are:

 

-    It ensures you are giving due credit to all stakeholders. While any other framework might also have the same intent, it ensures no slippages due to the basic structure of framework.

-    It ensures focus on only certain strategic items of business at every level in the organization and discourages every one to focus on every items concept.

-    It makes you look beyond just financial view of the business

-    It makes you look beyond outcome oriented approach towards business

-    Amongst all other things it confirms the life of a senior management person is not supposed to be simple and instead takes that truth head on by infact complicating it further for a while.

 

I have personally implemented BSC for enormous number of clients across globe and am great believer in the tool. However its amusing how people often fail to distinguish the huge difference between BSC and Performance Management.

 

~~Rohit~~

 

Sex and Performance

Sorry to start with a heading that sounds a bit scandalous on what is otherwise a scribe on business and People strategies J

 

I have had very interesting past few days. We were preparing for some large initiative and pretty much drove ourselves crazy preparing for that. We worked from like 7am everyday (which is almost like sunrise for many of usJ) to well past midnight. There was not a single moment when we were not thinking about adding something to our preparation.

 

Friday was supposed to be the big day for us (I have ofcourse gathered timer and energy post that getting completed today, phew!!). Thursday was the final show down of preparation. Locked inside a room for the entire day…..my mind I think had stopped working beyond that initiative that day. At one point I had to take my father to the doctor for some check up…I vividly remember him telling me about it the previous night…but somehow it didn’t register beyond a blank data point. Its like the tiny little intelligence cell in my brain had stopped taking any other data beyond that work. Next morning he sat there ready in front of me while I had my breakfast. Somehow I knew why he was sitting there but had no idea of what am I supposed to do/say. Finally I realized I was getting late and the mind was working overtime on work and I better start executing…it’s at that point I told him we will have to do this after few days.

 

In office we were all laughing, pushing each other for further improvements, almost on verge of pulling out each others hair. By that time I reached back home it was 1am or so. Like a 80s computer my brain took a long time to switch off.

 

It would be fair to say we were like robots in those couple of days. And to tell you the truth I quite enjoyed that period. We screwed up finally, that’s a different matterJ. But I felt nice actually. I had stuck quite a few multi million deals with one tenth effort…many of them were through luck, some through some intelligence I assume J

 

As we finished and set out to get ourselves a break I started to think how this effort was correlated to performance. What does this term ‘Performance’ means anyways. I guess the final test lies in emotional orgasm for lack of any better term. There were many greater achievements with lesser efforts…did that feel better or this….? The answer was reasonable simple actually in my mind. This felt much better.

 

Think of all those artists who perform, those sportsman who put their best in their games…what was common about them and this experience:

·     There was tremendous amount of focus in every situation…to the point they hear and see nothing else

·     They all leave you completely exhausted

·     They all keep you very involved and you feel a mix emotion of fatigue and fun while doing it

·     Almost in each of these situations you feel stretched

·     Interestingly it had nothing to do with winning and loosing

 

Well pardon my using this language it’s like a great orgasm during sex….it leaves you exhausted, excited, involved and feeling stretched and touched new limits (ok it does come out very corny when I read this…..J)

 

It sets me thinking when we talk about creating ‘High Performing Organizations” what do we mean…..is there a difference between organization performance (which might be achievements of tangible goals many times) and individual performance. Should we look at inspiring employees for performance where we see business results or performance where they see themselves going beyond their limits?

 

On a final note I am thinking there is so much talk about changing education system. Providing pressure free environment to a child and help him achieve his dreams….I wonder if we can apply the same principle in business without making it a non profit organization…?

 

~~Rohit~~

 

 

Kissa Kursi Ka…

There are some interesting correlations I have found in the performance of an individual and performance of the portfolio a person is managing. Very often irrespective of whether or not the person is capable or performing, he or she gets evaluated on the basis of portfolio they are managing. This is truer the higher you go in the organization.

 

How often do you find in times of growth as the business delivers better results, the person managing that portfolio also grows rapidly….ever heard of the phrase its important to be the right person at the “right time”…the admission of the right time is in a way admission of this phenomenon. Interestingly the job at senior levels is a lot about aggregation and administration….ofcourse its supposed to do much more as a leader in terms of long term planning etc…however crudely put many people can get away by just aggregation. In such times often portfolios might perform great due to market conditions, due to a good team, due to organization brand, and such other many factors. This is where corporate governance comes in conflict of shareholders interest….shareholders and stakeholders in any organization would most often stand by the individual and you see the correlation only strengthening. In growth markets it could create positive perceptions about an individual over a period of time….similarly in declining markets it could create negative perceptions about the individual.

 

Crude as it may sound, most of the organizations fail to differentiate between individual performance and business performance….while individual performance needs to be linked strongly to business performance it’s an interesting dichotomy where one needs to also know the art of separating them. Else individual performance will continue to be dependant upon how the portfolio they are managing; “meaning position they occupy”; is performing…it’s the position that you occupy that’s growing and in turn growing you by default.

 

I would love to see organizations where the correlation is broken without intent of delinking individual’s contribution to business performance. I would love to see individuals occupying top jobs and conversations doing rounds “he has grown on his capability…and not because he was the right person at the right time”.

 

Till such time I would say performance management is a lot of good talk and nothing else….in the end its kissa kursi ka J

 

~~Rohit~~