You can have honest conversations about how different members of a team scored differently along personality dimensions. Actual personality psychologists know that there are no personality types, only personality dimensions. The presence of types on a personality test is the single biggest sign that the test you’ve chosen might be useless. Or more specifically personality tests that seek to label people with a set of 4, 9, 16 or however many common personality “types.” The bad idea creeps in when the method of uncovering each other’s differences is chosen: personality tests. There isn’t a bad idea in those previous sentences. So, it’s obvious that people in organizations will end up in conflict and it seems obvious that the way to resolve that conflict is to help them learn about each other’s difference. Organizations are full of people and people have different personalities. The third worst idea in management is personality testing. Performance reviews just don’t provide meaningful performance feedback. And it works even better when feedback sessions become conversations, with the manager getting feedback about her performance as team leader as well. That results in more frequent feedback that is more specific to the individual’s job and his strengths and weaknesses. And that’s why smart leaders have sought to replace the ineffective ritual with training for managers on how to be effective coaches. It’s the lack of specificity and the lag time in providing feedback that are why performance reviews fail so often. And for an unlucky few, the performance review ends with getting labelled and shown how you rank against your peers. For most people, the ritual of the annual review is a stressful time where managers offer vague feedback based on generic categories intended by Human Resources to serve as sufficient for every job in the company regardless of specifics. It’s not that giving feedback on employee performance is a bad idea-it’s that often the systems developed to provide that end up failing. In particular formalized, often annual review programs. The second worst idea in management is performance reviews. And how do you grow stars? You invest in B and C players-you do the opposite of stack ranking. And we know now from research on the portability of talent that hiring star players is expensive and ineffective. The second, and maybe more dangerous, assumption is that C players could be replaced by B or A players. But we now know that labelling isn’t an effective form of performance feedback. The first is that people respond well to being labelled-especially when they’re being labelled or ranked lower than previous years. If you get rid of the worst employees every year, you’ll eventually have a company full of stars.īut stack ranking rests on two dangerous assumptions. Welch’s idea caught fire among business leaders because it seems simple and compelling. The A player’s got promotions, bonuses, and the favor of the organization. In perhaps the most famous example-Jack Welch and General Electric-stack ranking worked by ranking members as A, B, or C players. Stack ranking happens after the performance review (and we’ll cover those soon) and involves managers assigning labels or rankings to their team members. The first worst idea in management is stack ranking. In this article, we’ll cover perhaps the five worst times that’s occurred-the five worst ideas in management in no particular order-in the hopes of correcting some errors and keeping the same error from happening again. Sometimes bad ideas get momentum-either because they sound compelling on the surface or because they seem to have led to a result that turns out to be coincidental.Īnd sometimes, it takes a long time to discover those “best practices” are actually bad ideas. Ideally, the end result of all this experimentation is that best practices rise to the surface and, as a whole, leaders move closer to an ideal organization.īut sometimes, bad ideas rise to the surface too. Some work to create value and some don’t. Lots of policies and procedures are experiments. No two organizations are exactly alike, and each organization is an experiment in organizational design. (And that’s not including the Segway scooter or ).
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