How performance management evolved

Performance assessment is one of the standard acceptance measurement tools for salary increases, bonus payments and promotion assessment in an employee's organisational career.

It has turned up recently as a factor in the grievance statements tied to industrial action in our increasingly troubled industrial relations in TT. Or rather the lack of it has turned up.

There are many systems to choose from, most of them inherited from traditional stalwarts like Peter Drucker and those who learned from his valuable insights – so that names like Hertzberg, McGregor, Odiorne and Maslow are taken for granted as essential, even by first-year management students – and often are respected and followed like the ten commandments in theological colleges. System analysts in management degree courses do not question their relevance any more than we question the relevance of Shakespeare's precepts or their relevance throughout the decades of cultural and environmental change since they were written.

Personnel managers dare not question their relevance despite the decades that have passed since Drucker and his cohorts wrote their textbooks. It was what we learned from, wasn't it?

And look where we are!

I find myself quoting Shakespeare almost automatically in support of whatever human-resource-management theory I am analysing at the time.

It is only when I get to the editing stage that it occurs to me that perhaps, just perhaps, his views don't resonate with today's reality.

I then have to question my own thoughts and feelings about the systems I have used in performance assessment over the years.

I started off with the "tell'' method. Remember when your boss made an appointment with you, for which you wore your "Sunday best"? He called you into his office and, while your knees shook, he looked at a piece of paper he held in his hand with your supervisor's opinion of your work performance.

It always made me remember the comments on my report card at school. Mine usually said: "Diana daydreams too much in class but her spelling has improved this year. She needs to spend more time on her nine times tables."

Then there is the "tell and sell" method, where your manager pointed out your weak points, told you what training you should undertake to improve and convinced you to try harder.

Those were the major methods used back in the 50s and 60s, when I got my first job, and for a long time after, but only by the more sophisticated managers who had studied the importance of setting up systems management.

Then Drucker came along and your manager got you to do the work and assess your own performance, say where you wanted to reach at work, and, for the first time, you felt someone actually listened to you. That was the "tell and listen" approach.

Then, the next year, if you were lucky, you had a new manager who was not a boss. He was a manager.

I said "he" because most managers were men. In the personnel management field, as it was called then, the only female manager was a lady called Grace New who handled industrial relations, training and human resources for Cannings and Company. They used to have an office on the corner of Frederick and Queen Street, Port of Spain, and she was a real professional. What started as a corner grocery store has now become a commercial empire. She was the first that I recall.

The world turned and while management studies became respectable, Francis Bedoe started the Foods, Drinks and Allied Workers Union and decided the union should go into the grocery business. It was a great social idea in theory, but he forgot the management part of it. He thought (as do so many people who strike over disagreement at how where they work is managed, knowing they could do better) that he could do better, and experimented with a system called "workers' participation in management." It went broke.

Then a new manager, who didn’t have a PhD, but had a great and emotionally intelligent brain, and who probably came by his manners at his mother’s knee, read an article in the Harvard Business Review. As you sat in his office for your twice-annual performance assessment, he pulled out your file and reviewed what you had said the previous year.

How were you so lucky? He read it with you and respectfully asked you how it had gone and what difference it had made to the organisation’s objectives.

He actually discussed what you thought about the organisation's plans. He wanted to know, since the last assessment period, what you had done to contribute to achieving those objectives and what you planned to do in the upcoming period. Then he asked where you wanted to go in life, career-wise, and what help you needed from the organisation to get there.

That was the best performance assessment ever invented. You probably thought you had died and gone to organisational heaven – by the time you realised that what you had just committed to was a lot of hard work, intellectual effort and a totally fulfilling life.