Sometimes logic takes you places you’d rather not go.
Take, for example, the four fallacies of metrics described in the KJR Manifesto:
Measuring the right things wrong, measuring the wrong things (right or
wrong), failing to measure important things, and measuring employees.
I’ve been pondering the connection between fallacy #4 and the
financial meltdown. It’s a pretty good connection. Fixing it, though,
takes us into strange territory. Here goes:
Measuring employees is a bad idea because employees have a
remarkable talent for gaming the system. They can: Work the system so
the numbers look good; behave in ways that make the numbers look good
while circumstances deteriorate; or just falsify the data outright.
I pointed this out once in an executive meeting, and one of the
participants recommended firing any employee who would behave this way.
Interesting concept, as I was referring to a very large number of American CEOs.
Every time a CEO instructs managers to delay expenses just a bit so
they fall into the next fiscal year, lay off employees to impress Wall
Street, or indulge in full-blown Enron-style accounting they’re working
the system to make themselves look good — metrics fallacy #4 at its
finest, because by working the system the CEO gets to keep the corner
office and get the big bonus.
Those lousy CEOs. We should fire them all!
And we should. Right along with the IT professionals who are
supposed to fill out their timesheets accurately, including proper use
of the entry “Doing nothing.”
When we measure employees, at any level from the CEO to the janitor
and all points between, they’ll bend the data to their advantage. The
only question is by how much.
We can try to tighten up the metrics so well that no loopholes remain. Or …
And it’s the “or” that has me worried, because I can’t escape a
distressing
conclusion: We should stop measuring employees on how well
they achieve goals we set for them. The alternative? Measure them
instead on whether they do their work properly … on their technique.
Up to and including the CEO.
It stands everything we think we know about assessing performance on
its head. The standard model, after all, is to measure employees on
goals and coach on technique.
It would be as if, in major league baseball, managers no longer
assessed batters on their batting averages and RBI totals and instead
assessed them on the quality of their swings and how often they
correctly anticipated the pitches thrown at them.
If would be as if, in the practice of medicine, we no longer
assessed physicians on the health of their patients … oh, wait, never
mind. We stopped doing that years ago. Let me start over: It would be
as if, in the practice of medicine, we no longer assessed physicians on
their profitability and instead assessed them on how well they matched
diagnosis to symptoms and treatment to diagnosis.
It would be as if, instead of assessing teachers on how well their
students performed on standardized tests, we assessed them on their
classroom technique, the nature of their homework assignments, and how
appropriately they graded student results.
It’s a radical notion, especially in the winning-is-the-only-thing
culture we’ve cultivated in the United States: Miss Congeniality is not
what beauty pageant contestants aspire to.
Nor is it clear that it would be an improvement. Batters probably
should be assessed on their batting averages and RBI totals, for
example. One reason it works in the batter’s box: There’s no way a
batter can fudge the data.
For “Management By Technique” to work, there’s a prerequisite, and
in most organizations it’s something to aspire to, not an achieved
competence: We need to understand How Things Work with a great deal of
clarity.
That, in fact, is the heart of the concept: If you know how your
organization works … the buttons you can push and the levers everyone
else needs to pull in order to turn events into success … then you can
assess employees on their technique, confident that if each one
executes well then the organization will be successful.
If you don’t have this understanding, you’re best off setting goals and hoping for the best.
Hoping would be an apt description, too, because realistic goals are
a result of knowing your business, not an alternative to it.
