Being the Future: creativefacilitating.com Blog

performance management and stars

February 21st, 2010

In watching Olympic events, I realize I am not in the majority, or at least not in the flow. As I expressed it to my offspring and my larger family, I value the artistry of the Olympic performances and the judging seems to go to pure technique. I began to say, for ’sports’ they need to calculate specific techniques, and my journalist son, Kyle, pointed out that these are games not sports.

A central truth of performance management and performance evaluation is that people do what they are evaluated on. When we determine evaluation criteria intentionally we can expect the performance we are requesting.

It is simply my problem that I would like skaters and skiers to be evaluated based on their creativity, their interpretation, and their embodiment of music or concept. I guess nobody asked me. I noticed that the point system that the judges were using determined what activities the individual skaters and skiers were willing to undertake. A men’s skating performance that was a beautiful, coherent interpretaion of a particular piece of music was deemed of low value because very particular techniques were not present in it.

We can argue at length about the scoring system for the Olympics. The lesson here is that it is not dissimilar to what each of us goes through regularly in our own organizations.

And the lesson comes back loud and clear yet again. If it is really important to the organization, articulate it in the evaluation process. And also be very careful of everything else. Let us not unintentionally devalue other important contributions.

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