This is one of the threads I was thinking about where we discussed performance appraisals.
Do performance appraisals and systems thinking sit comfortably together?
Use the advanced search function for the term "performance appraisal" to find others.
Tom Peters is certainly an interesting character. I vaguely recall an interview where he once said the reason his books sold so much better than visionaries like Drucker and Deming was they looked deep into the future and he only looked around the next corner - the theory being that the book buying public weren't worried about the real future, just what was around the next corner.
Another popular writer freely admits his work is deliberately shallow to attract the book buyer - Ken Blanchard.
It is extremely difficult to stick to principle when other folks are out touting quick fixes like Management By Objective, or firing the bottom ten per cent performers and finding ready audiences of folks willing to shoot for the "safe and shallow."
When I decry performance appraisal, it is not the appraisal itself I rail against, but the purpose to which the results are put -
"determine things like pay increase, bonuses etc." rather than plans for making changes to the work environmenbt to increase performance level of ALL workers.
Consider two identical lathes running side by side operated by two different people and running two separate products.
Lathe one is running a proprietary part which no other company makes and it produces a phenomenal profit (after cost of material, labor, wear & tear on the lathe, etc.) of $100,000 per year. The lathe two runs a humdrum commodity part out of extremely tough material which causes increased wear on tooling and machine. Lathe two only generates $20,000 profit per year.
We do a performance appraisal of employees and find operator of lathe one is happy and smiling and in good control of his machine. Lathe two operator is grumpy because he constantly deals with broken tooling and minor breakdowns on Lathe 2 and spends the bulk of his time struggling to generate product. Facts are facts - Lathe one operator is obviously more successful than Lathe two operator. Does he deserve raise and bonus for luck of the draw which gave him easy part versus Lathe two operator who got the short end of the stick?
(same with salesmen and different territories)
How about the lathes? Do we discard lathe two because it doesn't generate same profit as lathe one?
Ultimately, many of the factors folks ascribe to the worker in assessing performance are really out of the control of the worker. Most folks perpetuate the unfairness by looking at the wrong root targets in assessing performance and attribute poor performance to the ones with the least power to affect the real performance factors.
Folks persist in saying THEY can select the true factors which should be rewarded. I haven't seen a convincing argument yet, but I will keep an open mind.