All Posts Tagged With: "performance appraisals"
Management’s Five Deadly Diseases
W. Edwards Deming was one of the world’s great management experts, and his thinking helped shape the Baldrige Criteria. Like his friend and peer, Joseph Juran, Deming believed that nearly every problem an organization faces is a problem of management. And he didn’t have a very high opinion of management.
Art Petty reminds us that Deming remains very relevant on his blog, Management Excellence (click here). He links to a 15-minute video in which Deming describes management’s five deadly diseases (click here for video). Despite Deming’s strange speaking style, the video is interesting because he forcefully makes his case against management problems he had identified during decades of work with all types of organizations.
The five deadly diseases are:
- Lack of constancy of purpose. People haven’t decided what business they are in and as a result, they are unable to plan for the future.
- Emphasis on short-term problems—also known as worshiping the quarterly dividend. Leaders have no plan to stay in business by improving the quality of their products and services. Such short-term thinking produces unemployment, which is a sign of bad management, which means there’s a whole lot of bad management still going on in this country today.
- Annual rating of performance. It’s an arbitrary and…
Misguided Management Practices
The Baldrige Criteria ask (1.1a3) how senior leaders “create an environment for organizational performance improvement, the accomplishment of your mission and strategic objectives, innovation, competitive or role-model performance leadership, and organizational agility.”
In addition to the long list of things senior leaders can do to create such an environment, there is an equally impressive list of things they should not do. Aubrey Daniels compiled his own list of no-no’s in Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money (Performance Management Publications, 2009). BusinessWeek summarized them online:
- Employee of the Month. Only one employee can earn it, which means others who may deserve recognition go unnoticed. Instead, recognize all high-performing employees.
- Stretch Goals. They’re typically set so high people get discouraged and the goals are never reached. Instead, set min-goals and celebrate achieving each.
- Performance Appraisals. Deming hated them. Enough said. Instead, evaluate people continuously based on what each individual is expected to achieve.
- Ranking. Competition should be with competitors, not with coworkers. Instead, use external benchmarks to motivate people and, again, evaluate them in relation to individual goals.
- Undeserved Rewards. Rewarding poor performers for such things as perfect attendance sends all kinds of wrong messages. Instead, recognize active behaviors.
- Salary and Hourly Pay. Getting paid for showing up does nothing to…
