{"id":8738,"date":"2018-12-11T09:58:53","date_gmt":"2018-12-11T08:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=8738"},"modified":"2018-12-11T10:01:15","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T09:01:15","slug":"advance-booked-appraisal-scores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/8738\/","title":{"rendered":"Advance-booked appraisal scores"},"content":{"rendered":"

Allow me to pluck excerpts from two comments from beneath my post<\/a> on HR robots. The first from MJW<\/a>:<\/p>\n

To get into senior management\/exec ranks they need patronage. Ability and tacit understanding is not so crucial as decisions made may destroy the organisation, just not immediately, anything likely to cause immediate damage should be routed to an underling who understands what they are doing. If the senior manager\/exec knows what they are doing it\u2019s a brucey bonus, if they don\u2019t it doesn\u2019t matter, the \u2018managerialist\u2019 approach treats the business does as a black box administered by generic techniques.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rotating senior managers\/execs through posting for \u2018for experience\u2019 is mainly done to boost CVs so their patron can elevate them if\/when opportunity to put one of their clients in place emerges. It also helps to diffuse accountability and protect both client and patron.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The second from Fay<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Managers were informed by HR that they could no longer rate employees as \u201coutstanding\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These two comments are actually talking about the same problem. The golden boys and girls who are fast-tracked to senior management need to give something back to their patron that they can wave around as proof their prodigy deserves such rapid promotion. The best thing they can offer besides hours of grovelling to senior management is an “Outstanding” score on their annual appraisal – the highest level. If the prodigy scores Outstanding in successive years, the patron can point to it when haggling for his golden child to take the next plum position, and use it to fend off their detractors. This got to the point where the golden children would be pretty much guaranteed to get an Outstanding score, no doubt due to pressure from the patron on the manager doing the appraisal. Perhaps that’s not even necessary: most managers are fully aware if they have a golden child in their team and get with the programme of not doing anything which might upset their ascendancy. Who knows, they might need to call in a favour sometime in future?<\/p>\n

This was working well until someone decided a few years back that too many people were getting Outstanding scores. With brown-nosing so ubiquitous and modern managers wanting the love from their team they can’t get from their wives, pretty much everybody was scoring well on the appraisals (it’s also quite hard to mark someone down if they turn up and merely do the job). Hell, even I got reasonably good appraisals. So they tweaked the system and decided only a certain percentage of people could get an Outstanding score.<\/p>\n

What this meant was the patrons in senior management advance-booked these scores for their golden children and issued instructions to the middle management that no mere pleb could score Outstanding, regardless of actual performance. I was in the room when this was announced and I twigged straight away what had happened and started laughing (it’s not like it would affect me<\/em>). But a lot of people, especially those who probably deserved the highest appraisal grade, were absolutely livid and rightly so. For fun I asked our department manager how any appraisal system worthy of the description can eliminate an outcome before it’s even started, and all I got was a pathetic shrug and bleating that “this is what management have said”<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It seems that with Fay’s anecdote, this wasn’t only happening in my company. What made it worse is the quota system made it necessary for managers to assign bad appraisal scores to people as well. I was a ripe target for that but I could tell my manager had no stomach for the sort of battle he’d have if he tried that on me, so we tacitly agreed I’d get a middle-ranking score. Instead, he hauled in the quietly spoken Asian bloke and spent two hours coming up with one excuse after another as to why his performance had been rubbish that year.<\/p>\n

Welcome to modern management, and modern HR.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Allow me to pluck excerpts from two comments from beneath my post on HR robots. The first from MJW: To get into senior management\/exec ranks they need patronage. Ability and tacit understanding is not so crucial as decisions made may … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[57,113],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8738"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8738"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8741,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8738\/revisions\/8741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}