These are some old notes from my time spent in more “traditional” organizations, reworked for the year of the dog….

One of the more intriguing parts of introducing a new review process in which people are asked to review their managers, is how those managers respond. Not how they respond to the actual reviews but how they respond to concept of being reviewed.

I’ve witnessed this several times and it universally involves a lot of tedious arguments. The managers throw their arms up and resolve “fine, go ahead but it’s a mistake”. They demand a line in the sand that frees them from being held accountable to the content of the reviews. The reviews must not be kept on their files, “it’s just a waste of paper”. They request that reviews only be used by the manager under review in order to improve their behaviour as they see fit, and that’s all.

In making these arguments the managers produce all kinds of excuses and justifications. The people who work for them don’t understand what their jobs really entail. They don’t see all the behind the scenes work they have to do. They don’t understand how difficult their jobs really are.

What you will rarely, if ever, see is a manager in the midst of a group of other managers having one of these earthshaking discussions reach a moment of true clarity. “Wait a minute, maybe that’s the point? Maybe this whole review thing just doesn’t make sense…for anyone? How could it be such a great tool for us to use on our people yet such a wrong tool for our people to use on us? Maybe the point of this exercise is for us to realize and understand that there are flaws in this concept?”

Oh to dream.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Office Gossip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.