Employee Performance Reviews Do More Harm Than Good

"The worst part of performance reviews is the message you send overall — that work is an employee vs. employee competition. I can think of countless senior managers who lament how their employees don’t work well together and don’t collaborate. I can think of countless line employees (and senior managers) who complain about the brutal and vicious politics in their workplace. How surprising that people don’t work as a team when their personal compensation (and more importantly, their sense of self-worth) is impacted so directly by a system of employee vs. employee competition."

http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2009/05/21/employee-performance-reviews-do-more-harm-than-good/

Deming on Management - Performance Appraisal

"The fact is that the system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance."

http://curiouscat.com/deming/performanceappraisal.cfm

Deming and Performance Appraisal

"Performance appraisals were replaced with ‘development appraisals’ which focused on how they achieved the goals relative to company and team values, etc. Customer satisfaction and Teamwork where key values. Coaching was done throughout the year.. An employee education process and center soon followed to help employees and teams improve their performance; the company supported pursuit of undergraduate and advanced degrees and most important, partnering with nearby universities and professional associations to help every level of the organization improve and share our experiences with others."

http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2008/04/22/deming-and-performance-appraisal/

Deming on the problems with targets or goals

"From Dr. Deming's 14 obligations of management: Eliminate numerical goals, numerical quotas and management by objectives. Substitute leadership. As Deming said: "A numerical goal without a method is nonsense." and "Where there is fear you do not get honest figures.""

http://curiouscat.com/deming/management_by_target.cfm

Total quality or performance appraisal: choose one.

"Most advocates of total quality believe that total quality management (TQM) and performance appraisal are incompatible. For them, company managers can choose to promote either of these two approaches but not both. Since fundamental TQM requirements contradict the basic elements of performance appraisal, it would be impossible to combine them. Thus, companies may have to reexamine their approaches to corporate leadership."

http://deming-network.org/files/tqmorpa.txt

"At the center of the case against performance appraisal are the fundamental values and principles of TQM. TQM requires customer-consciousness, systems-thinking, an understanding of variation, an appreciation of teamwork, a mastery of improvement methods, and an understanding of the process of personal motivation and learning. These very requirements of TQM are subverted by performance appraisal. TQM requires us to understand, control, and improve processes for the benefit of the customer. Performance appraisal aims at controlling an individual's behavior to the satisfaction of his or her manager. The two approaches represent a fundamental choice for leaders: one or the other; not both. "

[...]

Five Whys

"... asking why five times.

When something goes wrong, we tend to see it as a crisis and seek to blame. A better way is to see it as a learning opportunity. Not in the existential sense of general self-improvement. Instead, we can use the technique of asking why five times to get to the root cause of the problem."

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/five-whys.html

Deming Management Method

"Eliminate numerical quotas and goals"

http://members.aol.com/kaizensepg/deming.htm

"a person, to hold a job, meets a quota at any cost with out regard to damage to the company

[...]

* quality is compromised to meet quota "

W. Edwards Deming

"William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900–December 20, 1993) was an American statistician, college professor, author, lecturer, and consultant. Deming is widely credited with improving production in the United States during World War II, although he is perhaps best known for his work in Japan. There, from 1950 onward he taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing and sales (the last through global markets) through various methods, including the application of statistical methods. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming


"Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Deming.27s_14_points


http://www.bvwglobal.com/consulting/downloads_consulting/BvW_White%2520Paper_Deming.pdf&ei=cktaSO6hLqa80QSG_YyLAg&sig2=mEHHmKkiCH5b3Pxb1Quodw&ct=w

Software Engineering - Peer Reviews

"Peer Reviews are considered a best industry practice for detecting software defects early and learning about software artifacts. Peer Reviews are composed of software walkthroughs and software inspections and are integral to software product engineering activities. A collection of coordinated knowledge, skills, and behaviors facilitates the best possible practice of Peer Reviews. The elements of Peer Reviews include the structured review process, standard of excellence product checklists, defined roles of participants, and the forms and reports. Software inspections are the most rigorous form of Peer Reviews and fully utilize these elements in detecting defects. Software walkthroughs draw selectively upon the elements in assisting the producer to obtain the deepest understanding of an artifact and reaching a consensus among participants. Measured results reveal that Peer Reviews produce an attractive return on investment obtained through accelerated learning and early defect detection. For best results, Peer Reviews are rolled out within an organization through a defined program of preparing a policy and procedure, training practitioners and managers, defining measurements and populating a database structure, and sustaining the roll out infrastructure."

http://members.aol.com/ONeillDon2/peer-reviews.html

The five whys

The five whys is a question asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem. The following example demonstrates the basic process:

* My car will not start. (the problem)

1. Why? - The battery is dead. (first why)
2. Why? - The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
3. Why? - The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
4. Why? - The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and has never been replaced. (fourth why)
5. Why? - I have not been maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, root cause)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

"Good enough" is the enemy of "At all"!

"Forget about your lack of talent, skills, knowledge, time, resources, or whatever else you need to be "good enough". Start an inane blog, take bad photographs, upload boring videos to YouTube, write bad software, create useless products, play bad music, and make ugly art. Forget "good enough", and then simply indulge in the joy of creation."

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/04/perfect-is-enemy-of-good-enough-and.html

"Passive consumption is the boring old form of entertainment. Joyous creation is the future of entertainment!"