OPINION
Oh happy day! Pierre Nanterme, the CEO of a leading international performance consulting group, Accenture, has seen the light and dispensed with the old and thoroughly discredited annual performance review.
According to a Fairfax Media report (http://bit.ly/1OtE1ss) "the art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating", Nanterme said. "It's all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure."
The tide is turning on old-school human resource practices and their mantra of "if it moves, measure it". Somehow we had all forgotten the lessons learned from the last great dud in HR practice, Total Quality Management. Some readers may wince at recalling the endless quality teams, circles and surveys that confronted every employee almost every day. You couldn't use the staff bathroom without having to share your thoughts on the quality of the bog roll it got so bad. At the height of the madness there were quality teams formed to assess the quality of the quality teams!! It was possible for some organisations to exist of nothing but people measuring other people measuring other people.
We are all suckers for a number it seems, and the idea that we can quantify performance, rank it and compare it is too compelling for some to resist. It amounts to the ultimate over-simplification. Being dog lovers, the HR performance managers care not for the fate of Schrodinger's cat, and fail to appreciate that measurement affects the outcome. Performance measurement can often be better defined in terms of what it misses than what it captures. It plays havoc with the informal systems and goodwill work that many undertake to ensure the show is kept on the road and can result in not so much a work-to-rule attitude, but a work to the key performance indicators mentality. If I ain't being measured on it, I am not doing it. It creates a management headache.
The obsession with an annual report reflects a lack of imagination and also a lack of understanding of how work is done, and how people learn from feedback. Work generally happens in shorter bursts or projects, or conversely longer periods of time. It does not neatly conform to the idea of a year as formalised by Pope Gregory XIII. More regular, informal and light-touch feedback is likely to be a lot more effective in fostering learning and hence improved performance.
Here is a radical idea. Instead of forcing hapless managers and their staff to distort their work to fit some counting scheme, and obliging them to write endless paragraphs justifying such contortions, what about managers simply having a quick word in the shell-like of their staff members on a regular basis. Each can treat the other like humans and individuals, and a few forests can breath more easily. I agree with Nanterme, let's free up leaders to lead and inspire, rather than measure, and free up everyone else to do what needs doing, not what gets measured.
Jim Bright is Professor of Career Education and Development at ACU and owns Bright and Associates. Email opinion@jimbright.com. Follow @DrJimBright.
