Would you get 3 out of 5 stars?
Lisa Earle McLeod
Author of Selling with Noble Purpose | Keynote Speaker | HBR Contributor | Executive Advisor & Member of Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches
What if everyone who interacted with you had the opportunity to rate your performance?
Guess what? They already do.
Peruse LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Yelp, and you’ll see personal comments on everyone from CEOs to a specific waitress at a coffee shop. RateMyProf.com changed the game on professors by giving students the opportunity to give the professor a grade. If the instructor shows up disorganized or rambles off on self-absorbed lectures, the world will know it by the end of the semester.
It’s not just buyers, employees and students who have gone rating-happy. Uber drivers rate their customers. If you get too many 2-star ratings, and you can forget getting picked up in the rain, the driver will choose someone else.
In a hilarious South Park episode, every Joe and Jane in the city claimed to be a food critic. Upon entering an Applebee’s equivalent, they smugly announced, “I’m a Yelper” with all the gravitas one would say, “I’m the New York Times Food Editor.” They demanded special treatment by lording over the owner the threat of a bad Yelp review.
There are even sites to rate your ex-boyfriend or spouse. “Bill was nice, but kind of boring, I give him 3 out of 5 stars.”
We’ve become a star-happy, rate-everything culture. It’s only a matter of time before your Facebook or Google page includes an option for family and friends to provide assessments. “Lisa is fun, but she talks too much, and falls asleep after three glasses of wine. Two stars.”
What if you didn’t wait for a Yelp review, what if you asked the important people in your life to rate you now? Let’s be honest. People are already rating you, and if you think they’re not sharing their assessments of you, you’re delusional.
Think about it, don’t you consciously or unconsciously assess the people in your life? Whether it’s a boss or spouse, they way you experience that person makes an impression on you.
Companies do exit interviews to find out how their employees experienced their jobs. No one writes a resignation letter saying, the leadership was poor, the benefits were mediocre and my job was meaningless. The real resignation letter shows up on Glassdoor where they spill the beans. Smart companies try to prevent that problem by using the data from an exit interview to make changes.
What if you did an exit interview on every failed friendship or relationship?
What would you learn about yourself?
What if you didn’t wait for your kids to discuss you in therapy, after which they will inevitably confront you about your failings when you’re too old to change?
What if you asked the five most important people in your life – business or personal – to provide you with honest feedback about the way they experience you?
How might you change?
What if the top 20 people in your life were asked to rate you? Would you be like Graham “Skroo” Turner, CEO of our client Flight Centre who gets a 92% approval rating on Glassdoor? Or would you be like Sears, whose people rated their employer 2.6 stars out of five and gave the CEO a 10% approval rating?
You want the people close to you to care for you unconditionally on good days and bad. But this is real life. Even people who love you assess their experiences with you.
If you want to know what they really think, consider asking.
Georgia State University - College of Law
8 年Mrs. McLeod, thank you for writing again on a great topic! To be effective ratings need to be reliable and valid, but mostly important is the call for action that should follow. You are right, social media made it convenient for us to evaluate companies, employers, employees, products and services, so now we don’t make any decisions without searching the opinions of others first. I heard a lady so happy that Facebook made it possible to just hammer down customer services with nasty ratings that she admitted would not otherwise do. I saw reviews praising a product without providing any cons, but still awarding 3 out of 5, leaving you wonder why is that. Further, I met a plethora of professors who would not award maximum of points to students, no matter how greatly they performed, but in the same time, they would award a passing grade to underperformers, because everybody has to pass, right? When the difference in grading is so perfunctory between an A player and B or C players, what message is conveyed? I also met managers that would have the same mentality regarding performance reviews, a particular one saying that he does not really know his employees, does not know their duties or how should they perform or behave, but he would not award to anybody more than 85 points out of 100, of course no feedback for improvement attached. An ambitious employee departing such a boss/company would never get a stellar recommendation from a notorious HR with I-don’t-care attitude, and even if he/she gets one, how reliable would it be? So then, as you say, they take it on Glassdoor. Although both companies mentioned have more than 10,000 employees, they are different industries. At a glance, one anonymous employee of Flight Centre rating the company 5 out of 5 stars wrote, “I am writing this because it is a requirement that we fill it out”, while an employee of Sears rating the company 5 out of 5 would love the opportunity of more hours. There are only 405 reviews (the CEO of Flight Centre getting 92% approval out of 175 ratings), while out of 7.5k reviews, Sear’s CEO got 19% approval out of 2,130 ratings. I wonder if the large discrepancy would still exist for similar numbers of reviews. On another note, I wish companies would designate more people to acknowledge and answer to at least some of their employees’ concerns on Glassdoor. Stories of famously successful people who did not get many stars at first are plenty, many already posted on LI: Jeffrey Immelt and Steven Ballmer voted “least likely to succeed”, Walter Disney fired because, “he lacked imagination”, Albert Einstein considered “mentally handicapped”, Steven Spielberg rejected three times from the University of Southern California School of Theater, Film and Television, Stephen King and J.K. Rowling having their books rejected repeatedly by publishers, etc. Others, like Vincent Van Gogh, never experienced success during their lives (today his paintings bring in hundreds of millions). Successful people had someone believe and invest in them. I love Patrick’s Lencioni’s fable on The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, where a retired CEO who kept getting his orders wrong from a restaurant got a temporary job there to diagnose and fix the issues. Backgrounds, cultures, education, circumstances, interests, values and preferences affect how we feel. We are no longer satisfied with something or someone that only meets our expectations; we need them to exceed. The purpose of ratings is enriching our lives and others, but ratings made in the heat of the moment may lead to acrimony. Venting about something that we dislike without providing a way to fix is futile. If we look at people not the way they are, but the way they could become with our guidance and support, we may have the opportunity to offer to the next Van Gogh the chance of success while still alive….
Strategic Advisor on Talent | Global Executive Coach | Public Speaker I Brand Ambassador | HBR Contributor I Helping organizations attract & retain the best people.
8 年Great post Lisa. In my book, Talent Magnetism, I suggest that employees replace exit interviews with stay interviews. You do a stay interview so that you can learn what areas may need improvement, before an employee chooses to depart!