I have a machine, which constantly fails to meet my objectives. It has lot of performance issues. I could easily decide to throw away and purchase a new one or send the machine to a repair shop. Unlink of machines addressing performance issues of people who work for you is not an easy thing. That too when it comes to people with ‘attitude’, it becomes a great challenge to address the matter. Performance management is still an area where a lot of research is going on and is an area using which business consultants make handsome money. There is no standard performance management practice across the globe. Each organization adopts or creates its own practice, which none of its employees agree that that is good. In most of the companies there is no ‘performance management’ only ‘perception management’.It’s quite usual that we have to face people with performance problems at work. There were many instances during when I wanted to sack people out of my project (if not out of the company). As a boss I could easily decide whether a person would scale up or not and whether to sack him or keep him. But it is the phase that comes next which always makes me sick. I think of the consequences to that person after sacking. Empathy would occupy me all over and I would not be able to make a decision which is of organization’s interest. I would try to find at least one or two qualities in the person to keep him. Who am I helping by sacking a person who has real performance issue? Is it me? or my boss? or my boss's boss? Who is the 'corporate'? Are those mortars and bricks the corporate? The consequence of keeping or sacking him ultimately goes to the investor, the one who enjoys or suffers the good or bad results of the company.
A few weeks ago, I felt pathetically helpless when I had to reject 7 out of 8 people whom I interviewed for recruitment because they did not meet the expectation. When I had to reject people from rural background, from a small unknown village I would feel like hell. I put my legs in their shoes to realize how would they feel or react to the negative result of the interview. This may be because of the fact that I myself was not from a great background. In one of such situations, in my previous organization, my class mate from my college & I who were in the panel decided to select a person instead of reject. We justified ourselves saying that when we could survive that candidate would also survive. Was it unethical?
Mr. Jack Welch, ex-CEO of the empire GE was a great manager. He is one of the best managers of the century. When I read his autobiography ‘Straight from the Gut’ a few years ago it was very motivating. I have strongly recommended to many people to read this book. Being a CEO for 20 years for an empire like GE and growing it multi-fold is not an easy job. He is notoriously known as brutal & ruthless for the way he managed his human resources to ensure good performance. In his saga he had laid off 100,000 people from his organization. In his autobiography he explains how to manage & ensure performance of your people. It goes somewhat like this: (sorry that this is not a verbatim recital from that book) When a shop owner approached him of advice on how to manage the performance of the people employed in that shop, Jack advices to lay off bottom 10% of the people in terms of performance. When the shop owner said that all in his team was performing pretty well, Jack advised to go ahead with the lay off rule so that it would result in improved performance of the others too. This is how threat is injected into the veins of the employees and more ‘performance’ is extracted using the survival of the fittest concept. Unlike most other organizations GE demands year on year productivity improvement from its offshore vendors. Terror, eh?
I like Mr.Welch. I liked his style. But Playing Welch is not easy. I can’t do that. I am too sympathetic to have the guts to bite the silver bullet as Mr.Welch. I am experimenting ways which work for me & will adopt in the longer run. Who knows one day some one might write a blog on ‘Playing Seeni’.
