Learn and Lead

So we've moved away from moderation in performance appraisal in our organization. Over the years moderation seemed the best though not always perfect way to grade performance of people. It made sense to rank people with relative performance levels. There was a bell curve to be followed forcing supervisors to push people in defined performance bands. However, the most difficult part was to push people in lowest performance bands. It was imperative that we identify the top performers and the worst performers. Not every supervisor was able to rank people in the lowest performance band. And then supervisors used moderation as an excuse. It was easy for them to blame the moderation process. "You are good but I can't help it, moderation forces me to push you in the lowest performance band" was a common excuse. People weren't too happy. Why should a stupid system force one to be in the lowest performance band even when the supervisor believed that the performance was good?

Getting rid of moderation process seems to be a brilliant idea. Afterall, all I need to compete is with myself. My performance shouldn't be dependent on others. No more bell curve was liberating. Supervisors didn't need to spend endless hours force fitting people into performance bands.

But this liberation didn't come without challenges. Suddenly everyone was either the top performer or the worst performer depending on how the supervisor set goals. Given the difficulty of giving negative feedback, almost everyone ended up being a good performer even though business results showed otherwise.

When you do away with moderation, it is critical that goals need to be measurable and assignable to individual performance. Over time, our goal setting is getting better making performance evaluation more objective. We also  need to get better at measurement. Data collection against goals is being improved. Evaluation against parameters are being optimized.  But challenges remain. Not all goals are easily measurable. Team goals are hard to evaluate against specific individual performances. And then there are circumstances during the year that impact performance against goals that are hard to take into account.

While the process is getting better, I sometimes wonder if moderation in performance appraisal was better. It gave us ability to, well, moderate relative performance. I want the best of both worlds. No matter how objective performance evaluation is, I believe some subjectivity in performance evaluation is imperative to take into account circumstances during the year, to take into account the problems with goal setting that might have been there, to take into account the expectations from the individual that might not have been considered during goal setting for a role. I wonder if it is possible to have some sort of objective subjectivity in performance evaluation?

I  love watching Grey’s Anatomy, an American television medical drama series. While the human drama in the series makes it a gripping watch, what I find really amazing is the professionalism of characters in the series. The surgeons and interns are intensely competitive, and yet are completely professional about their jobs, irrespective of the positions they hold, or not hold for that matter.

I feel there are many life management lessons to be learned from the series. What do you do when a peer becomes your boss? What do you do when a junior becomes your boss? How do you handle situations where you don’t get what you are aspiring for? How to build self-realization of own capabilities or the lack of them, for certain roles? How to fuel the hunger to continue to become better at what you are doing without worrying about the position within the organization structure? How to keep your ego aside in these situations and continue to focus on becoming better at your job?

It is hard to be in these professional situations. And painful too. It hurts our pride, our ego, when we are in these situations. It is interesting to see in the series how leaders provide clear feedback about capabilities and skills without getting personal. And the ability of the professionals in the series to take the feedback and deal with it on face value without making it personal.

I have seen some of these situations closely in my professional career. Some of these have been extremely painful and messy. As a leader I have messed up giving feedback for the fear of losing the person. As a professional, my ego has been hurt at my position in the organization. And so I strive to be the leader and professional like the characters in the series.

It was great listening to industry leaders in this year's NASSCOM India Leadership Forum. One of the sessions I enjoyed was listening to Vineet Nayar and R Gopalakrishnan. While the session was titled Cross Border Leadership, the discussion was not limited to that.

• I learned that there is thing like Upmarket FDI. That's when India invests in developed countries.
  
• While companies are going global, nations are becoming more border conscious.
  
• An interesting reflection about entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur have to deal with ambiguity. If they cannot, they would be bureaucrats.
  
• We should not be too critical about India. All countries have challenges. Nothing unique about India.
  
• In the context of effect of cultures in managing cross border organizations, one point of view was  that footballers don't think of cultural differences while playing in a club game. Why should we worry about cultures when running a business? Focus on business goals and strategies to achieve them.
  
• Indians are the only managers who think in English but act in Indian. We are very self aware and can adapt easily.
  
• The younger generation doesn't think about cultural differences much. This is the connected generation using social media.
  
• Unions are becoming obsolete to protect rights of workers. Social media is a lot more powerful to protect the interests of the workforce. Reputations can be destroyed in seconds on social media.
  
• Cash is plenty and human capital scarce. HR is going to be central to business. Finest leaders will be the ones who are people motivators.
  
• Corporations should act out of their own will rather than being mandated, e.g. CSR mandate by govt.
  
• Why do people work for you? Why do people go to temple or mosque on Sunday, spend money and feel happy. And yet they feel troubled coming to office on Monday and get paid for it. How can leaders build vision for something larger?
  
• Make managements appraisal done by employees and make results public.
  
• We are moving into an age of conscience in business.