You have to love it when the bible of Corporate America, The Wall Street Journal, actually runs something that sticks the knife pretty much where it belongs for a change.
I'm referring to an article that I saw on Yahoo this morning and that the WSJ ran on April 11. It's titled "Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews" and it was adapted from "Get Rid of the Performance Review! How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing -- and Focus on What Really Matters," by Samuel A. Culbert with Lawrence Rout. (Published by Business Plus, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.)
Culbert (pictured above) is an interesting fella. Not exactly a blood-spitting radical, he is a professor in UCLA's Anderson School of Management. (For his full bio, see below.) The good prof looks at management practices and cuts away a lot of the BS. Of course, while there are several nice nuggets of truth and fairness in what he writes, one must remember that he's still supporting a world view in which a relatively small number of people have their hands on the levers and the vast majority do the grunt work. He's a capitalist with some slightly different and interesting ideas. But sight should not be lost of the fact that he's hardly trying to turn the world into one big caring and sharing co-op.
The thrust of Culbert's article is that performance reviews are demeaning hogwash and should, as he says, finally be put out of their misery.
He makes the point that evaluations should be dictated by need, not a date on the calendar -- a pretty common sense point.
But most tellingly, he says: "Performance reviews instill feelings of being dominated." That's the point: It's just another way that corporations get people to toe their line. And this doesn't mean that every manager and supervisor is "in on it." Most of those folks are far removed from the real avarice and just believe they're doing their job by carrying out these reviews.
Harrah's Entertainment, where I work, loves performance reviews with more passion than Julius had for Cleopatra. We have monthly reviews, half yearly reviews, annual reviews, and "360s," which involve your colleagues anonymously reviewing you as well. Needless to say, the latter turn into a kind of open season of denigration from the safety of the shadows. More meaningless "information." I've been reviewed a bunch of times in my 15 months here and it hasn't made a flake of difference. In fact, the way they are done, they do seem artificial and stupid.
That's why it was so refreshing to see Culbert's article so prominently placed on the Internet. And even though he's essentially a corporatist, he does say: "[Performance reviews] send employees the message that the boss's opinion of their performance is the key determinant of pay, assignment, and career progress. And while that opinion pretends to be objective, it is no such thing. Think about it: If performance reviews are so objective, why is it that so many people get totally different ratings simply by switching bosses?"
Culbert goes on to talk about the "damage done" to the individual and the time and energy squandered by the company. And he makes decent recommendations for improving the appraisal system -- within the current capitalist work paradigm.
Sadly, the Culbert piece didn't stay on the Yahoo home page for long. Too many good stories about dancing cats and reality show "stars" trademarking the names of their body parts.
Still, I did manage to disseminate the URL to everyone in The Studio here at Harrah's Corporate before the story folded into history. It seemed the least I could do.
Til next time: Keep reading, keep thinking, keep talking, keep agitating. It's your world, after all.
Adrian Zupp
SAMUEL A. CULBERT BIO
Samuel A. Culbert is an award winning author, researcher and full-time, tenured professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. His laboratory is the world of work where he puts conventional managerial assumptions under a microscope to uncover and replace dysfunctional practices. He holds a B.S. in Systems Engineering and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. Culbert has developed a blunt yet sensitive way of framing situations that allows for all parties to engage in open, non-judgmental discussions. He believes that only by laying bare ALL the forces that drive people's opinions and actions -- including subjective, self-interested and political biases -- is it possible to have an explicit, honest, yet matter-of-fact conversation. He has spent a career perfecting the skills and style that illicit such straight-talk.
Widely recognized as a candid speaking expert and theoretician, he is author of the recently published Beyond Bullsh*t a probing inquiry that reveals how bullsh*t became the etiquette of choice in corporate communications, and how to develop the conditions required for straight-talk. SmartMoney Magazine named this book to its 2008 list of ten top reads. Dr. Culbert is winner of a McKinsey Award for an article published in the Harvard Business Review, is a frequent contributor to management journals and has authored numerous chapters in leading management-related books. More about this and some of the other books he has authored is available at the www.straighttalkatwork.com website. In press is a book titled Get Rid of the Performance Review: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing - and Focus on the Results That Really Matter. This book, written with Larry Rout, builds on his media grabbing Wall Street Journal article of the same name and is awaiting April 2010 publication. His other authored and co-authored books include The Organization Trap, The Invisible War: The Pursuit of Self-Interests at Work, Radical Management, Mind-Set Management and Don't Kill the Bosses!.
Throughout his career Professor Culbert has creatively welded together three activities: consulting, teaching, and writing. Consulting is where he encounters work effectiveness problems in their contemporary forms, demystifies the basic elements, and formulates alternative modes of functioning. Teaching provides a forum for extrapolating from problems to issues requiring his investigation. Writing is where he packages his understanding for public consumption. His clients include a diverse representation of the private and public sectors: small companies and members of Fortune's 500, international and U.S. governmental agencies, privately funded and not-for-profit organizations. In short, Culbert has been around and gets what's happening. His unconventional views have received a good deal of press, both in the U.S. and overseas.
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