When you're a kid, progress reports and report cards are a big deal. At least they were for my mom and by extension, me. Fifth grade was the first year I brought home straight A's, and I was doomed from then on out. My mom was thrilled, but little did I know that I had set the bar for the future. Anytime after that, if I had a report card with all A's and one B, she would say, "What's with the B?" I couldn't tell her that it was PE class and that I was lucky it wasn't a C. Or if my report card had all A's and one A-, she would point to the A- and ask, "What happened here?" One time I had all A's and three were A+'s. Her response, "How come the other ones aren't A+'s?"
As adults, we still have versions of report cards. One example would be credit reports, which ostensibly indicate how well you manage your finances. Though someone who does not open credit cards or lines of credit and never goes into debt will have a low FICO score (or zero) as promoted by Dave Ramsey. Another example is reviews and performance appraisals at work. These reviews are only as good as the manager who writes them, and most managers are terrible at this task.
When I worked for a Fortune 500 company, I was in an HR training seminar where they were discussing the employee rating system. Employees would be rated in various categories on a 1-5 scale. I complained to the HR rep that the rating scale was fundamentally flawed. A rating of 1 was reserved for employees who were brand new and thus too new in the job to have garnered a rating. A rating of 2 represented "needs improvement." Many people should have been rated a 2 but weren't because it involved all kinds of extra paperwork and performance improvement plans and follow-up. So, many people who should have been rated a 2 were actually rated a 3, which represented "successfully meets performance goals." They tried to emphasize that a 3 was not "average," but let's face it, most people were rated a 3. A 4 rating of "highly successful performance" was harder to get, and a 5 "distinguished performance" was even harder. Someone once characterized a rating of 4 as "someone who walks on water" and a rating of 5 as "someone who walks on water wearing sandals with holes in them."
People wanted to be rated 4's and 5's not necessarily for the prestige but because that meant higher bonus amounts. The problem is that the bonus pool was a fixed bucket of money, so if one person got more bonus that meant someone else got less. For example, a manager who puts together a dream team of high performers is penalized because she cannot rate everyone a 4 or 5 and give them all appropriate bonus compensation. I was on such a team and had to deal with a co-worker who was not a fit for the job. She should have been fired, but she was kept around in part because she was on the opposite end of the bell curve receiving zero bonus, which allowed for more for the rest of us.
When I was a manager, we could never tell employees specific things they could do to get rated a 4 or 5 because if they did them all, we'd have to give them that rating. That's not how it works. No matter how many stellar employees you have, there's only so much money to go around and you're still only handing out two or three 5 ratings for a large team.
Today I'm going for lab work, which is yet another adult report card with an objective measure of health status. I wrote a newsletter about my approach to lab testing and a detailed summary of the labs. The lab results are similar to the report cards in that we don't pay attention to the A+ or even the A's. All our attention goes to the minuses to figure out what needs to be improved.
As adults, we still have versions of report cards. One example would be credit reports, which ostensibly indicate how well you manage your finances. Though someone who does not open credit cards or lines of credit and never goes into debt will have a low FICO score (or zero) as promoted by Dave Ramsey. Another example is reviews and performance appraisals at work. These reviews are only as good as the manager who writes them, and most managers are terrible at this task.
When I worked for a Fortune 500 company, I was in an HR training seminar where they were discussing the employee rating system. Employees would be rated in various categories on a 1-5 scale. I complained to the HR rep that the rating scale was fundamentally flawed. A rating of 1 was reserved for employees who were brand new and thus too new in the job to have garnered a rating. A rating of 2 represented "needs improvement." Many people should have been rated a 2 but weren't because it involved all kinds of extra paperwork and performance improvement plans and follow-up. So, many people who should have been rated a 2 were actually rated a 3, which represented "successfully meets performance goals." They tried to emphasize that a 3 was not "average," but let's face it, most people were rated a 3. A 4 rating of "highly successful performance" was harder to get, and a 5 "distinguished performance" was even harder. Someone once characterized a rating of 4 as "someone who walks on water" and a rating of 5 as "someone who walks on water wearing sandals with holes in them."
People wanted to be rated 4's and 5's not necessarily for the prestige but because that meant higher bonus amounts. The problem is that the bonus pool was a fixed bucket of money, so if one person got more bonus that meant someone else got less. For example, a manager who puts together a dream team of high performers is penalized because she cannot rate everyone a 4 or 5 and give them all appropriate bonus compensation. I was on such a team and had to deal with a co-worker who was not a fit for the job. She should have been fired, but she was kept around in part because she was on the opposite end of the bell curve receiving zero bonus, which allowed for more for the rest of us.
When I was a manager, we could never tell employees specific things they could do to get rated a 4 or 5 because if they did them all, we'd have to give them that rating. That's not how it works. No matter how many stellar employees you have, there's only so much money to go around and you're still only handing out two or three 5 ratings for a large team.
Today I'm going for lab work, which is yet another adult report card with an objective measure of health status. I wrote a newsletter about my approach to lab testing and a detailed summary of the labs. The lab results are similar to the report cards in that we don't pay attention to the A+ or even the A's. All our attention goes to the minuses to figure out what needs to be improved.
