A Small Gesture of Defiance

September is here. Summer, such it ever arrived in misty moisty Scotland, where I lurk, is over. Its pissing with rain. Its not all bad though. The Edinburgh festival is over and all the overconfident public school kids are heading back to the home countries to work on a better version of their one man shows that relate the plays of Henrik Ibsen to American imperialism. The trees will start to turn soon and the streets will fill with coloured leaves. Its time to get a new hat and scarf after last years have inexplicable vanished. Soon it will be time to put whiskey in everything again.

Its downhill to the end of year from here. Next stop the clocks go back, then its Haloween, bonfire night, Christmas. In the corridors of our nations corporations something else is stirring though. Its nearly Performance Management time.

Performance management time is the least magical time of the year. If my experience of three separate multinationals in three separate industries is anything to go by, the process will feel very similar. Groaning, unhappy people will be forced to dig out all the promises they made under solemn troth to their managers at the start of the year (aka ‘objectives’) and will realise that the year has not worked out like that and their objectives are mainly rubbish. Next, a flurry of emails will arrive from people you might once have gone to a boring meeting with asking for feedback. Then, stung into action, you send out your own email, hoping for a good word from someone important enough for your boss to pay attention to. All of this is pulled together into a document, probably using a horrifically unfriendly template or knuckleheaded online system and the resulting tissue of lies, assertions, spin and desperate nonsense is submitted to your boss. Your boss then doesn’t pay any attention to the document anyway because they have already made up their mind about how good, bad or indifferent you are based on nothing more concrete than their own view, which might be based on an email from March or a tricky meeting over the summer and they assign you a score, usually a number. The number then gets plugged into a reward system and you get the same tiny rise whether you are a genius or the zombie spawn of Saddam Hussain and Dick Cheney. Whoop whoop.

There are a few things very, very wrong with this picture. I’d like to propose one small way of fighting back against it.

First, the things that are wrong with it.

Remember school? Schools, bless them, are set up to rate the kids. This might not have always been true - hell, I heard this crazy story that one point their purpose was to teach kids stuff, but now more than ever they are designed to find out how ‘good’ the kids are. The whole system is set up for assessment, Kids are assessed, examined, graded and compared. They are tested on their knowledge, their behaviour, how they tie their ties and the neatness of their handwriting. In this age of New Labour’s management gone stark staring bugshit crazy, they are examined from primary school through to leaving the place. Assessment is constant, both formal and informal. Teachers have a view on you and tell your Mum and Dad about it, the scabs. There are loads of separate subjects so your quality can be judged in different areas. Exams are a constant threat. They are set up to be objective - external examiners and national standards proliferate. Schools are basically engines of assessment, And yet they still get it wrong as many times as they get it right.

How many times at school did you get a mark or a score and think, yeah, spot on, got me there? And how many times did it feel that the mark had basically been randomly assigned by a monkey? Even exams are little better. I recall getting an A in one part of my History A Level and an E in the other. That’s quite a gap. Many of my friends got worse marks in the subjects they were good at and enjoyed than in the ones they hated. Some really smart kids got poor results and ones that were quite obviously just robots with sparks coming out of their backs got straight As. Sometimes schools get it right - I’m not here to slag the whole system (not today anyway), but they still get it wrong far, far too often. And schools are there to assess.

Now look at a business. They are not there to assess. They are what all the bloody assessment is for. Businesses and organisations have other things to do. They are there to pump oil, or publish magazines or print money. The little roles we play in these organisations are cogs in a giant, inefficient machine that spits out widgets and only after it has outsourced most widget manufacture to the Chinese does it think to assess its people. Its starts to think about it round about now in fact, but it never thinks about to too hard. In other words, getting a score - one sodding number - that is meant to capture all the things you did in the year and pin it down behind glass is a sick joke. Everything you did is meant to be there. The difficult meetings, the aced presentation, the audio call you spent drawing picture of elephants on your notepad, the tricky customer, the soft sell, the new boss who doesn’t understand what you do, everything. In one number. Is it any wonder that it feels like the monkey is back and pulling numbers out of a hat somewhere in HR?

There’s also the fact that even if it was possible to reduce your whole year to one number and then if some all knowing eye in HQ attached to Solomon himself was able to correctly assign the number to the wicked and the righteous alike, it would still piss off more people than it pleased. Put simply, most of us think we are doing a better job than we are doing. So if you get a high score, then it feels okay but nothing special, but if you get a medium or low number, even a humble ‘met expectations’ you are reduced to teeth grinding fury. How could they? How could they not see? In other words, we go through this awful process and at the end most people are mad as wasps, then try and leave early and slag off the company in the pub.

There’s lots more wrong with the whole thing. (See here for a brilliant review of the whole sorry mess.) Its that the process itself is utterly dehumanising for assesses and assessors alike. People don’t do scores. Scores are for sport and that’s where they should stay. There is something mechanical about the whole cold thing. It is a process of metal gears and wires. People are not allowed to just be. We are coached and developed and encouraged to be more like some crazy idea of a corporate superman, who is both wise and just and tempers project management with mercy. Fuck that. The person who is the glue who holds the team together is not rewarded because what they do can’t be measured. The fools! Very little of actual value can be counted. In companies where the dreadful ‘rank and yank’ forced distribution holds sway people are compared to each other even when who they are, what they know and what they do is utterly different. This competition is dehumanising and degrading. It is a tribute to the essential decency of so many people that such organisations don’t descent into a Hobbsian war of all against all to get the best score.

I’d like to propose one small gesture of defiance in the teeth of this hideous, inhuman process.

Refuse to be told the number, Just flat out refuse to be told. Have the conversation about what went well and what didn’t, what you are good at and what you could be better at. Hell, you might learn something. Just refuse the number. Its a meaningless nonsense anyway that bears little to no relation to your year. Tell then you don’t want to know. Tell them they can’t reduce a year of your professional life to a simple score. Fight the power. Tell them you are a free born Englishman. Don’t take any shit.