Friday, January 12, 2007

Performance Evaluation

If you are like me, you would be a big fan of outsourcing tasks that you are either not capable of completing (like ordering things, creating legal documents or whatever is your skill gap) or loathe doing (like filing, copying, estimating numbers for some boring planning or responding to tons of administrative tasks).

One observation I have is seeing our most talented people are doing tones of administrative at different points. Would it be better to focus on what we are good at?

This brings us to one of these tasks - performance evaluation process (one I loathe passionately). Wouldn’t be better to focus on people’s strength rather than telling them “You need to improve on x and y area” and judge them based on some stupid grading system. Imagine if we have a Mozart in our team and wanting him (a great composer) to be good at audit, running reports, and tracking projects! I feel many managers killing talents this way unintentionally.

3 comments:

BearGolfer said...

I believe that managers are train killers. If you go into management, then aren't you just becoming a tool of the administration of the company. Think about it - MANAGEMENT, the very word means nothing more than controlling. And as a manager you have to control, and how are you graded, is how well you control your people, and you can only do this by grade, outlining the faults, telling them were they need to improve - therefore I guess in some strange and crazy way you could agrue you are only helping them to become better at "X".

Mehrdad said...

Thanks for your comment BearGolfer. Well I agree that by working for someone else you are limited to challenge things. However, it is more fun and required more creativity to challenge things without hurting people – a win-win situation.

Mehrdad said...

Here is the best quote on constraint:
Composer Stephen Sondheim says:

"If you ask me to write a song about the ocean, I'm stumped. But if you tell me to write a ballad about a woman in a red dress falling off her stool at three in the morning, I'm inspired."