October 7, 1988
Dear Everyone:
The big news this week is that our manager, “Hubert Sager”, broke his leg over the weekend – playing golf. It seems he tried to recover a lost ball by jumping over a creek, and didn’t make it. Gives a new meaning to “water hazard”. We don’t know how long he’ll be out, or how long he’ll be on crutches once he comes back.
We’re also in the throes of the United Way campaign. Our representative is my supervisor, “Alma”. I’ve heard a lot of arguments for donating over the years: It’s good for your soul; if you don’t give, the government will have to take up these services and will raise your taxes to do so – so you’ll end up paying for it anyway, etc. But “Alma” has one that I hadn’t heard before: Even if you don’t approve of United Way, or give to other charities, you should at least give a dollar because it will make the Company look good. Interesting approach.
In other news…
The best word to describe this week would be: Brutal.
I’ve been so busy, I didn’t get to cleaning out my In Box until Thursday afternoon. That’s because I didn’t get into my office until Thursday.
Mostly I’ve been in Performance Management Training. Think of it as a 2-day gripe session… with catering added. We met at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel where all of the meeting rooms are named after artists from the Renaissance period: The Michaelangelo Room, the Rubens Room, the Raphael Room. Da Vinci rated 3 rooms.
No one but myself seemed to be concerned that our Future Company Policy was being determined in the Dante Room.
The idea is that there will be a New Openness and Honesty from Management. They’re trying to get away from the two most prevalent management styles currently demonstration at Company.
These styles are:
Mushroom Management (keep employees in the dark and feed them lots of manure)
Management by Telepathy (I’ll think about what you’re supposed to be doing and you try to read my mind. If you guess right, I’ll let you know in a year or two at appraisal time.)
Of course, you can immediately see the fallacy of the second type: Some people can go 20 years without ever getting an appraisal.
All of this will be in the past because now we have Performance Management.
The first day we covered Performance Planning, Coaching and Interim Progress Review. We also had free coffee and tea with breakfast pastries, a buffet lunch with lemon cheesecake and a nice selection of cute little 6-oz bottles of soft drinks in the afternoon.
(Note to “Alice”: Pouring water into an urn that has had 70 gallons of coffee through it does not a cup of hot water make. Can’t they designate certain urns for hot water only? I had to siphon off several cups of coffee-water before I could make a decent cup of tea. And while we’re on the subject, I realize that Bigelow teas come in nice little foil wrappers; but don’t hotels know that Bigelow makes the worst teas this side of Lipton? Try to get them to switch to Twinings. Not criticizing, you realize; just making a constructive suggestion. Think of it as “coaching”.)
[“Alice” was working in the hotel industry at this time.]
Supervisors are supposed to “coach” their employees. This is apparently the reason for paying Fran Tarkenton $16,000 per day to appear in part of the video tape that was used in the sessions. He did the introductions, then they had some very staged-looking skits to illustrate the points. Actors played supervisors and employees showing how to handle certain situations – and how not to: Vern quickly became our favorite character. Vern was a compilation of every supervisor you ever hated for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter what, Vern had them all. Sort of like Donald Duck being all the people Walt Disney didn’t like.
The first session lasted until after 5:00, so it was a good idea that I had parked my car at the BART station. My van leaves promptly before 4:40.
The second session was a lot harder. (Same menu, except fudge brownies for dessert.)
We reviewed the previous day, including the comments that people had turned in at the end of the day. They must have liked my comments; they quoted most of them.
Then we took on the Formal Performance Review (formerly Evaluation Time). This is your basic Report Card for the year. The idea behind Performance Planning is that this should not come as a complete surprise. The supervisor and employee are supposed to sit down at the beginning of the year and plan what the employee will be expected to accomplish during that year. There should be at least one (preferably more) interim review so that the employee knows how he’s doing. If not well, the “coach” is supposed to find ways to get the employee back on track.
All of this is documented on a worksheet that both have copies of, so even if your supervisor “forgets” what he/she told you, you have proof of what was said.
After the Formal Review comes Ranking. This is where it gets fun. We had a set of imaginary employees that we ranked according to information provided in our notebooks. We came pretty close to what the video people came up with in their skit, although if Joe doesn’t shape up pretty soon, we’re going to fire him. The video people only ranked him “Improvement Needed”, we had him at “Unsatisfactory” and headed out the door.
The more effective employees came out as “Exceptional”, “Exceeds” and “Achieves” the expectations of the supervisor. In other words: A, B, C, D or F. Most people will fall into C, “Achieves”. The one word no one is supposed to use is “average”. Company sets “high standards” and doesn’t accept just “average”. So just don’t call it that and you’ll be OK.
Are you still with me?
Next comes Pay Determination. This has nothing to do with money, it has to do with percentages. You have a midpoint in the salary range for a classification and you can set people at up to 5% above or 15% below the midpoint, called the Competitive Objective. If you do place someone above the CO, you must place someone else (or several someones) below the CO so that it all balance out at 100%. Sort of like Monopoly with real lives.
None of this is really new. Company has used relative ranking for many years. What IS new is that your supervisor HAS to tell you WHERE you ranked and why. Before, it was the deepest and darkest secret in the company. You were not supposed to know who your competition was. You weren’t even supposed to tell anyone what your classification was; it was a secret between you and your supervisor and no one else was supposed to know.
This is a MAJOR shift in policy and where most supervisors are going to have problems. They will have to justify themselves to their employees. In the past, whenever a problem arose, the focus was always on the employees. Now it will be on the people who may be causing the problem. Hey, “coach”, where did YOU screw up?
All I can say is: It’s going to be an interesting year.
We spent a little time on Career Management. By this time, we’d gone over 3 hours without a break and I was fading fast. Fortunately, they didn’t have much about Career Management; the study team will come up with something later in the year.
For some reason, these sessions always go into overtime. They spend 9 hours stuffing facts into your head and then ask you to fill out an evaluation form when you’re so exhausted that you can’t remember your own name.
Session Two didn’t let out until almost 5:30. The hotel people were getting anxious as they had to set up for some other group at 7:00.
Can you imagine having your wedding reception in The Dante Room?
Love, as always,
Pete
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