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The Golden Rule and Performance Evaluations
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
on January 6, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
We often deal with pain and suffering through humor. I have read many jokes about performance evaluations. For example, I found a list of the worst sentences to see on a performance evaluation:
- Works well when under constant supervision.
- This person has delusions of adequacy.
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This employee should go far--and the sooner he starts the better.
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His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.
They are funny for a moment. Of course, if we take them seriously, we realize that they are cruel, insulting sentences, born out of hostility like the classic putdown:
"This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot."
Our laughter covers our own anxiety. We fear that someone might say something like this about us. And when they do, we are more likely to cry than to laugh.
Until the 20th century most people in the United States worked on farms, and the size of their harvest was the evaluation of their performance. Often the growers of crops like fruit paid farm workers a piece rate for their harvest work. Even with the growth of industry tying salary directly to production has still been possible in some positions. Back in college, I was a waiter in a Howard Johnson's Restaurant where I was paid a dollar an hour, and tips. Real estate sales and car sales are also examples. Most salespersons in this work are paid by commission. Publishing is another example. About nine years ago I published a book, and the royalties I received were based on the actual sales of the book.
However, much work today is group work. When a group does the work, making a direct connection between the work of a particular individual and the success of a business is more difficult. When the work is not part of a profit making organization, such as the government, it is even more difficult to decide the value of the work of a particular individual.
Performance evaluation is made even more difficult when we are trying to follow ethics and morality in living our lives. As a minister, I find it very difficult to dismiss someone from a job. This is all Jesus' fault. His teachings made me this way. In the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7, verse 12, the Gospel writer quotes Jesus as saying, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. . . ." This Golden rule states a fundamental ethical principle. It is not, however, peculiar to Christianity. Its negative form is to be found in Jewish writings one hundred years before Jesus' birth, and in the writings of Confucius five centuries before Jesus. It also appears in one form or another in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.
In a book on ethics entitled, "How Good People Make Touch Choices," Rushworth Kidder calls the Golden Rule "Care-based Thinking." It asks us to test our actions by putting ourselves in other people's shoes. The Golden Rule asks us to imagine how it would feel if we were the recipient, instead of the perpetrator of an action. It is a very popular rule of ethics. Over the past twenty-five years, when I invited people to write their own list of ethical commandments, "Do to others what you would have them do to you" always comes first.
Trying to follow this ethical commandment is difficult when it comes to performance evaluations in modern business or government. If I were working in a business or in government doing my best, I would not like someone in an annual evaluation of my work to give me low marks. Therefore, if I try to follow the Golden Rule, I would only say positive things in my evaluation. On the other hand, I have a responsibility to the larger community of the business for whom I work. If I work in government, I have a responsibility to the taxpayers, to also follow the Golden Rule. This calls on me to give a negative evaluation, if appropriate.
This is what Rushworth Kidder calls a really tough ethical choice. It is not a simple right versus wrong choice. It is a genuine, ethical dilemma. In the case of performance evaluations, the choice is between the individual and the community. Following the Golden Rule, the individual had the right to be treated with kindness and patience. They might want special attention and training so that they can become a more effective worker. On the other hand, also following the Golden Rule, the others who worked in the business, and the customers, the investors and the stockholders, or the taxpayers, have the right to expect that individual workers to perform efficiently. This is a true ethical dilemma.
Most Chief Executive Officers, feeling the responsibility of the success of the organization, choose the rights of the community over the rights of the individual. They design, or hire a personnel or human relations expert to design, a performance evaluation. The variations on the design are limitless, but most of them include the following basic elements:
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First, a supervisor or a personnel officer writes formal job descriptions for various positions.
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Second, the supervisor assigns the workers day to day tasks, and gives day to day opinions to the workers on their performance.
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Third, the supervisor holds a periodic formal evaluation of each worker's performance. Most often the supervisor uses a standardized rating form.
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Fourth, a formal meeting is held between the supervisor and each worker in which the supervisor informs the workers of the ratings, the reasons for them, and the possible ways the workers can improve them.
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Fifth, others in the organization use the rating form as a basis for making decisions about possible salaries, promotions, dismissals or layoffs.
In talking with members of the four congregations I have served as a minister, I have yet to discover a performance evaluation system that people like. People in the congregations I serve, tell me that when they are evaluated in their work world, they often feel threatened. They dread hearing that they have not done a good job, or that their work is not satisfactory, or that they are a three on a scale of 1 to 5.
Supervisors also dread performance evaluations. They know how the process lowers a person's self esteem and how it destroys trust between people in the work place. They are often required to fill out rating forms that contain a list of traits such as creativity and thoroughness. It is impossible for them to evaluate objectively. Extreme variations exist in the standards and the rating practices of different supervisors. Each supervisor has biases about how rating should be given.
One supervisor will say, "Nobody gets an excellent rating from me."
Another will say, "I never rate anyone below average, because if they are that bad I shouldn't keep them."
Supervisors often make an overall judgement of a person's performance, and then rank all specific items consistent with the general rating. The administrative decisions a supervisor may have to make in the future often strongly influence ratings. In a bad economy when lay offs may be coming, good workers may get negative evaluations. The performance evaluation process often creates unpleasant office politics as people cultivate their relationship with the boss, cover up their mistakes, and attack fellow workers behind their backs. Most performance evaluation systems focus only on past performance. They look back on what has already happened, instead of encouraging effective performance in the future. The bankruptcy of Enron Corporation (which every six months rated all employees on a five point scale with the bottom 15% having six months to either improve or be fired, Time June 18, 2001) is a tragic example of the complete failure of the traditional performance rating system. In the case of Enron, the traditional performance evaluation served neither the individual nor the community. Yet this "Rank and Yank" system is used by 20% of the U.S. companies.
According to an investigative article in the Washington Post: "Industrial psychologists say they have little proof that annual performance reviews keep the promise of their designers to make the organization more productive." W. Edwards Deming, the legendary expert on management said that the American performance review system, "nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry, and . . . leaves people bitter." (March 20, 1994, Business Section)
I do know of an alternative. Back in 1978 I read a book on leadership by a man named Thomas Gorden. I first became aware of Gorden in 1974 when I read his book, Parent Effectiveness Training. Although the book has fallen out of fashion, Gorden's Parent Effectiveness Training, which is based on Carl Rogers's ideas, remains for me the best book on how to be a parent that I have ever read.
Parenting, however, was a sideline in Thomas Gorden's work. His main focus was consulting in the work place. After more than twenty-five years as a consultant in business and government, Gorden developed a radically new approach to performance appraisals. He called it the Periodic Planning Conference (in Leader Effectiveness Training, Wyden Books, 1977, a new edition was published in 2002). I believe it comes closest to following the Golden Rule when it comes to work place evaluations.
In place of the performance evaluation, the Periodic Planning Conference is a regularly scheduled meeting with each of a supervisor's employees, generally every year or every six months. The worker brings to the meeting a list of goals that he or she wishes to accomplish over the next six months or the next year. In the meeting the supervisor and the worker lay out a plan of what the worker intends to do during the next six months. Instead of focusing on past performance, the Periodic Planning Conference requires the supervisor and the worker to focus on future performance. The supervisor asks questions like:
"What do you want to accomplish in the coming year?"
"What changes would you like to make in the next six months that will make you more effective in the work you do?"
The Planning Conference shifts primary responsibility for the evaluation of the worker's performance from the supervisor to the worker. Trust is key, trust in the worker's desire to do the job well and to accomplish their goals.
The Periodic Planning Conference largely eliminates the most distasteful feature of most merit-rating systems--the supervisor evaluating, judging, and rating a worker's past performance.
Instead, both the supervisor and the worker focus on the future. Also, the Planning Conference requires that the worker and the supervisor focus on the job, the work, the goals, the mission of the organization, and not on subjective traits such as friendliness or creativity. Furthermore, the Planning Conference is a two-way conference, in which the workers participate in setting their own goals and planning their own activities.
Most humans are not strongly motivated to accomplish goals set by others, but most of us work hard to accomplish goals we set for ourselves. Most of us are happier when the people for whom we work give us a chance to accomplish a goal that we set. We have a sense of accomplishment, a feeling that we have done something worthwhile. The Planning Conference is a way for a supervisor to give workers an opportunity to accomplish more. It also, I think, comes close to following the Golden Rule as applied both to the individual and to the community. Both the individual worker and the individuals in the larger community are treated with dignity and respect.
Gorden's book on leadership, with the chapter on the Periodic Planning Conference, was published nearly twenty-five years ago, and it is not widely used. The ranking system remains the pervasive system of performance evaluation. A ranking system, highly structured, and in appearance measurable and objective, deals with the anxiety that all parties may be feeling as they approach the process of evaluation.
It is tempting to resort to sarcasm. As I said at the start of this sermon, we often deal with pain and suffering through humor. So someone wrote on an evaluation:
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"Since my last report this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig."
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Another wrote, "When she opens her mouth, it seems that this is only to change whichever foot was previously in there."
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And still another wrote, "He sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them."
They are cruel insulting sentences, born out of hostility. Our laughter covers our own anxiety. We fear that someone might say something like this about us. And if they do, we are more likely to cry than to laugh. At its worse, a performance evaluation is an organizational structure that gives one person official permission to dump on another person.
If you find yourself the subject of a performance evaluation that you feel is demeaning to your dignity, trust your feelings. You may endure the experience because of the many things that you like about the job, but remember in the back of your mind that it is the process that is the problem, not you.
If you find yourself able to influence the design of a performance evaluation, I encourage you to look at creative alternatives. There are ways to work out issues in the work place that are more likely to treat people with dignity.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7, verse 12, Jesus is quoted as saying, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. . . ." Performance ratings and rankings are not consistent with the teachings of the world's great religions.
In the beginning of our hymnal it says that we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. The Periodic Planning Conference, or whatever you might call the experience of sitting down with the people who work for you, and together talking about what you would like to see happen in the future, while perhaps more anxiety provoking in the beginning, can lead to more effective and productive and humane working conditions for all.
Office@CedarLane.org
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