And the Award Goes to...!!!

I love watching the Oscars and wait for it every February. The dry humor of the hosts (although I prefer the acidity of Ricky Gervais at the Golder Globes), the montage created for some of the awards and the live performance of the nominated songs captivates me. The other quirky thing which I keep an eye on is the reaction of the nominees who end up not winning. They know the camera is on them so they can’t really punch their neighbors or swear out loud, but I am sure they utter some unmentionables under the breath.

Because who doesn’t like recognition and appreciation. Praise and compliments cannot but gladden the human heart and soul. In fact, the explosion of social media revolves to a large extent around hunger for appreciation.

In the corporate world recognition and appreciation take the shape of the annual performance reviews or awards handed out periodically. While the performance reviews are “secretive” in nature, a good rating goes a long way in assuaging one’s self worth. The awards are public and supposed to work wonders for the morale of the recipients. Or do they?

Although the year-end appraisals or performance reviews have become the butt of many jokes, it’s a serious source of discontent for 90% of the employees (since they weren’t in the top 10%). The awards handed out periodically to high performers don’t lead to as much heart burn but neither do they seem to have the desired boost. Hence many employee surveys still throw up “Lack of recognition” as a sore point. The leaders keep scratching their heads on what more can be done. Should we just throw more at the folks and more often or create new democratized modes of recognizing the effort. While no one really loses sleep over this, it’s an irritant nonetheless since it can be linked to attrition and churn.

Instead of holding forth with my views, I will share few real-life instances related to this which have stayed with me. These are true incidents which I experienced first-hand.

When it comes to performance reviews, the famous (or infamous) bell curve was once the crowd favorite but has lost most of its mojo in recent times. Few years back I was part of a company which was transitioning out of the bell curve way of rating employees to a less restrictive and less quantitative way of bracketing people. So, there were a bunch of us managers trying to align on the ratings for our teams. Anyone who has been part of these calibration exercises, will agree that they would rather be in a fish market. In this instance we were happy that the absence of bell curve will allow us to be a bit more generous and come out looking rosy in front of our teams.

When we presented the output of our rating exercise to our manager, he came back with an observation. He pointed out that 60-70% of the entire team had been rated as top performers by us. Top performers were those who had exceeded expectations substantially. His question to us was simple. If more than 2/3rds of the team are performing substantially above expectations, how come the overall team’s delivery is just scraping by? Shouldn’t the overall team also be performing way beyond expectations? Shouldn’t the clients be thrilled to be working with us? On the contrary our performance was just about ok. Escalations from clients weren’t uncommon and while some of them can be attributed to clients being clients not all of it was devoid of merit. So how could we justify this anomaly? He gave us the freedom to stick with our ratings but asked us to answer for this inconsistency. While we knew that we hadn’t been completely true to the spirit of evaluating performance, this simple observation made us squirm quite a bit. We went back and corrected it and to our surprise the revised numbers almost adhered to a bell curve.

What I understood was that individual performances cannot be completely deviant from the overall group’s performance for the most part. While there can obviously be gems in a poorly performing team, a team of gems won’t make a poor team.

Next episode is related to above. Why did we feel so many of the team members were high performers? The answer lies in what is valued and considered as a sign of performance.

I was new to the company, and the team I had joined was getting a quarterly excellence award. I was asked to tag along and was sitting through the ceremony where many project teams were being awarded for their work. Each team would collect the trophies and their lead would speak a few words as a thank you note (one more thing from the Oscars which I love….). The guest of honor for this ceremony was our Head of Delivery. Once all the awards were done, he was asked to address the audience. He said all the regular stuff, but he ended with something which has stayed with me. He pointed out that every team seems to have burnt the midnight oil, worked weekends, and put in ridiculous hours to achieve the results. He said, “I wish to see a day when we are able to achieve similar results without having to spend nights in the office or sacrificing weekends”.

Late nights, weekends in office are all well known in IT projects and people who put in those hours are rightly appreciated but somewhere performance has been equated to how many hours you put in. The fact that the need for such back bending hours originates in poor planning, lack of proper processes being followed and, in many cases, just bowing to external pressure is forgotten. So, we keep repeating the inefficient ways of doing work, which leads to spending more hours than should be necessary and then applaud ourselves. Performance should be looked at with the lens of quality and not only quantity. One should also wonder why the planning is so poor.

Last episode deals with the conundrum of “Lack of recognition” being a constant complaint. The lazy way is to do more of it. If you recognize everyone, is it really recognition? Or is it distribution?

I worked at a place where the team was led by one of the gentlest and kindest human beings. Honest to a fault and genuinely kind-hearted, he wished to make everyone happy and motivated.?The company had an award scheme where selected people were given a plaque every month. Now this manager had a list, and he wanted every team member to get this award, lest they felt unappreciated. So, every month he would see who is yet to get it and then pick few of them and award would go to them. If they did the same at the Olympics, India would have won many more medals.

Recognizing high performers or achievers is not about democracy or equality. There should be a clear criterion for what is considered as worthy of recognition and recognized accordingly. The value of recognition lies a lot in its exclusivity. If everyone gets it by turn, is it really recognition??

#recognition #performance #leadingpeople