Everyone loves to hate performance evaluations, and with good reason: Research has shown them to be ineffective, unreliable and unsatisfactory for seemingly everyone involved. They consume way too much time, leave most workers deflated and feel increasingly out of step with reality.
…more than half the executives questioned (58%) believe that their current performance management approach drives neither employee engagement nor high performance. [Click here to see the survey.]
…conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance.
Three items correlated best with high performance for a team:
I have the chance to use my strengths every day
My coworkers are committed to doing quality work
The mission of our company inspires me
It’s not the particular number we assign to a person that’s the problem; rather, it’s the fact that there is a single number. … we want our organizations to know us, and we want to know ourselves at work, and that can’t be compressed into a single number.
The new approach focuses, alternatively, on how to develop employees in the future given their current performance.
–What if you could replace performance evaluations with four simple questions? Deloitte has come up with them (and two only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer). By Jena McGregor in the Washington Post
It’s always been the major belief of our company, take good care of your people, they’ll take good care of the customer and the customer will come back.
And we celebrate them. We train them. We teach them. We provide opportunity for them. You’ve got to make your employees happy.
If the employees are happy, they are going to make the customers happy.
–J. W. Marriott, Jr. speaking of his father, the founder of Marriott Hotels
I was very pleased to see an international expert on software development express the following clear insights into the types of workplaces my executive coaching seeks to foster.
Visionaries are designing organizations for collaboration. These firms remove the bottlenecks imposed by the strict hierarchies of the past. [In hierarchical firms] no one was being rewarded for taking the kind of risks that lead to innovation or other breakthroughs in performance which thrive in a climate of collaboration.
Knowledge workers spend a large proportion of their time seeking information, much of the rest making sense of what they’ve found, and relatively little time in applying what they now know.
Transitioning from a hierarchical way of working … requires letting go of habitual behaviors that may have worked well in the hierarchy, but no longer serve anyone when collaboration becomes a critical part of the work process. …
[The result is] … humanized work with an emphasis on mastery of our craft, a focus on rapid learning and feedback, delivery of business value (sooner not faster), and close connection to customer needs (even ones the customers’ haven’t noticed yet). …
— Diana Larsen on Agile Fluency, Barriers to Agility & the value of Open Space Technology in InfoQ
Wise and wise cracking, funny and flexible, an amazing teacher of yoga, meditation, and living has created an entertaining and enlightening new television program. Here’s the preview of my friend Jonathan Foust‘s new program, One with Everything.
I just noticed an interesting feature of the Amazon Kindle software. It can display passages most often highlighted by other Kindle users. Here are some quotes favored by readers of my first book.
Our desire to belong is a life and death concern. It’s not a weakness or personal failure.
I realized that everything I wanted in life required the actions of other people.
Shame is being pushed out, excluded, and rejected by others. Avoiding shame is a universal human priority. It always has been.
Shame is so frightening, belonging so vital, it seems that we are continually confronted with this dichotomy of choice. We must either risk being emotionally vulnerable and open to attack and rejection, or we cover up, we fake, we pretend, we stifle ourselves.
We go along to get along.
Vulnerability is choosing my actions with the knowledge that other people participate in my life.
You can’t hide when you need other people. Pulling away from pain or risk, or responsibility, just leaves us alone and incomplete; fitting in but missing out.
“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” (quoting Brené Brown)
Courage is being true to your heart, your core. Bravery is a cover-up, hiding your true self so that people might respond to the way you’d like to have them think you are.
Scientific evidence and personal experience tell us that sincere, engaging personal relationships are essential for health and happiness. Yet, little is said about how we might actively nurture such relationships for ourselves and for people near us at home and work.
This short book offers specific advice and motivation to open up, reach out, and connect with all of our community members.
I am not a consultant. I do not create documents or deliverables.
I do not parachute in to do the job of my client or of their employees.
I do not press my advice on clients or try to make their decisions. (Click to read how a client describes being coached by Tony Mayo,)
I do not fix or cure people. I’m not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist. (Read more on the distinction between executive coaching and therapy by clicking here.)
I am not an entertainer. My goal is not to have my audience enjoy my presentations, feel more comfortable or pleased with themselves, laugh at my jokes, or like me. I am only interested in coaching people toward causing lives they love.
Results matter. If what I do makes no difference I have failed.
I’m out to make people’s lives satisfying and fulfilling, to help them matter and have positive impact. I foster workplaces of humanity and prosperity by coaching the leaders of organizations.
The core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. …less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way.
…[Of] those who had received the mindfulness training. Not only did they report fewer negative emotions at the end of the assignment, but their ability to concentrate improved significantly. They could stay on task longer and they switched between tasks less frequently. …They also remembered what they did better than the other participants in the study.
Productivity and success in this industry are based a lot of the time on insights and prioritization and actually on doing the right thing, not necessarily on 15-hour work days. Google is very results-oriented.
–Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube
She is home for dinner with her family almost every night — her husband, Dennis Troper, is a director at Google — and she generally doesn’t answer weekend emails until 9 p.m. on Sundays.
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