RWL Newsletter #121
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=nPSi
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I’m a day late sending this out and I have to confess, I went to see Avengers: End Game, otherwise I could have sent this out. No spoilers, it’s a great movie if you like superhero movies. Very satisfying resolution to the story arc. Don’t stay for the credits - there is no post-credit scene. We stayed and got to see the list of drivers, 3rd support assistant to the 4th makeup artist, etc. and were disappointed when the house lights came up without a fun final sequence.
This week turned out to be focused on employee performance evaluation, including a fun video from the Office about ethics training. The graph above is from FRED, and shows unemployment by level of education. I thought this went well with performance evaluations, since the point of evaluations is to keep the right employees. Given the unemployment rate for college grads is 2.5%, you don’t have a whole lot of choice.
Here’s this week’s links:
Read
What: Knowable Magazine, Low marks for performance reviews
https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2019/do-performance-reviews-work
Why: The message of this article is that employee ratings do very little to enhance productivity. The answer appears to address the low and high end, and leave the middle alone for the most part. I’m skeptical - this would be fodder for aggressive labor lawyers. But setting aside the probability that your company would get sued by the first deadbeat employee that gets fired under this system, it’s an interesting idea and probably true. From the article:
Most employees do just fine without constant scrutiny. “When I work with companies, I encourage them to get away from ratings and start managing by exception,” he says, meaning that the exceptional employees need the most attention. Out of 100 employees, there might be three or four who are struggling so mightily that they need an intervention or a career change. At the other end, there might be five or so excellent employees who should get special treatment because they drive the company’s success.
Watch
What: The Office - Business Ethics (Episode Highlight) (2 minutes)
Why: My students, Nicole and Emma, presented about ethics in the workplace this week during my org behavior course and brought in this wonderful clip from The Office. So at about 1:30, Michael says regarding ethics, “What is right, what is wrong, who is to say? Because it is unknowable.”
Ethics are entirely socially created, so what Michael says isn’t completely wrong. And yet it is so wrong. It’s a wonderful little clip that I laughed at, but then it left me thinking about how his statement is actually deep (even if it comes out of ignorance).
Just to be clear - I don’t think ethics are unknowable, and I think there is a right ethics if the end you want to achieve is human self-actualization. I generally reason from the natural rights and believe in a presumption of liberty, and that it is only through the exercise of liberty that human beings can reach self-actualization. But this clip is great if you want to start a conversation about ethics.
Listen
What: HBR Ideacast, What Managers Get Wrong About Feedback (22 minutes)
https://player.fm/series/hbr-ideacast/ep-679-what-managers-get-wrong-about-feedback
Why: This is a really interesting perspective on employee feedback and development. They’re advice is to fix what’s broken, but then focus on strengths after that:
But we’re saying two things. If you want to help people with poor performance, you need to focus on what step did they miss or what facts did they overlook.
And then the other thing that we’re saying is if you want to help create excellent performance, focus on what’s going well and how to turn that up. Which is to say that I think we tend to use, in the world of feedback, we tend to use our mistake fixing tools to be our excellence building tools, and then we’re sort of surprised when it turns out they don’t work that way.
I’ve recently listened to some discussion about focusing on strengths, and this fits into that management philosophy. I need to think about this some more - it seems like it makes a lot of sense, though it is very contrary to my military trainiing.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line by e-mail, or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
Have a great weekend and do amazing things!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau