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An opposing viewpoint from Andy Grove's High Output Management: Let's talk about surprises. If you have discharged supervisory responsibilities adequately thro
by lquist 8y ago
An opposing viewpoint from Andy Grove's High Output Management:
Let's talk about surprises. If you have discharged supervisory responsibilities adequately throughout the year, holding regular one- on-one meetings and providing
guidance when needed, there should never be surprises at a performance, right? Wrong. When you are using the worksheet, sometimes you come up with a message that will startle you. So what do you do? You're faced with either delivering the message or not, but if the purpose of the review is to improve your subordinate's performance, you must deliver it. Preferably, a review should not contain any surprises, but if you uncover one, swallow hard and bring it up.
- mewse 8y agoI don't think that's an opposing viewpoint. If a manager discovers a long-standing issue whilst preparing for the performance review, then yes, they absolutely must "swallow hard and bring it up". But not having noticed or provided feedback about that issue at any point in the past is still a failure of management.
- davidkclark 8y agoHence the hard swallowing.
- dbcurtis 8y agoI was a manager at Intel during the Grove era. The ranking & rating process of those days forced a team of 8 or so peer managers to look at the performance of all of their reports together. Having 7 other managers point out an issue with one of your reports tends to help you get calibrated. Is it a failure of management to be poorly calibrated about your own people? Yes, a common one.
- danek 8y agoThe cost-benefit still doesn't make sense to me. He's talking about doing a very expensive & generally counter-productive activity in the off chance that you might uncover some insight about your employee. I usually tell people the first half of High Output Management is good, but to skip the second half...
- paulddraper 8y ago> swallow hard I think that's the moment the "failure" is realized.
- elgenie 8y agoThat's an opposing viewpoint to "If anything in your performance review is a surprise, then I have failed as a manager" if and only if managers are infallible.
- analog31 8y agoIn my view, giving someone a negative review is only one among many options for dealing with a performance issue. You could always give a neutral review (in terms of the overall rating) and discuss the issue with them verbally, or pledge to resolve the issue in the next year. If it means you have to let someone have a neutral review that they don't deserve... swallow hard, and start managing after the review is done. Remember that your employees will be interpreting the review in light of the corporate culture, which they are fully aware of. They will also know whether the problem that you discovered is real or not.