191–200 of 342 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more common case is 5 managers coming to you to pitch their managees for promotion. You can’t just promote everyone the same, and hopefully the managers are pretty happy with their managees. That’s where paper trail, or anything mildly objective is precious to adjust what needs to be done.
> You can’t just promote everyone the same Why?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more common case is 5 managers coming to you to pitch their managees for promotion. You can’t just promote everyone the same, and hopefully the managers are pretty happy with their managees. That’s where paper trail, or anything mildly objective is precious to adjust what needs to be done.
> You can’t just promote everyone the same Why?
A reason which is valid on the surface but difficult to implement properly is "it's bad for morale if deadweight employees get promoted just the same as people who contribute."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seriously don't understand that sometimes people are promoted for being good at their job, and sometimes people are fired for being bad at their job?
I understand either of those, but not the case where an exec picks out some employee they don't know anything about and insists that they be either fired or promoted right just now.
The manager wants to promote the employee, but she needs permission from the VP. So the manager asks the VP to promote the employee.
I think I wish most performance reviews were: Here's why you are not being promoted this year... Here's what you need to do to be promoted next year... Here's why you only got X increase in salary... Here's what you can do to get a bigger increase next year... If you are satisfied at your current level, here's what you should keep doing to stay in it...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more common case is 5 managers coming to you to pitch their managees for promotion. You can’t just promote everyone the same, and hopefully the managers are pretty happy with their managees. That’s where paper trail, or anything mildly objective is precious to adjust what needs to be done.
> You can’t just promote everyone the same Why?
You can't have 5 people all leading a team. A good manager will give employees who want to lead an opportunity to do so in smaller ways, and when it comes time to figure out who gets promoted into a leadership role, being able to compare notes of how well each candidate went is essential.
Even for non-managerial roles, there may not be budget to promote everyone. Especially at larger companies where a promotion can be an extra 50k+ per year per employee, promoting all 5 people means there isn't budget to hire someone new, and those employees aren't suddenly working 20% more efficient thanks to a new title.
Besides purposes related to either helping employees grow or covering the company's backside if they need to fire someone, reviews serve another important purpose: they're a way to factor out biases in the award of raises, promotions, and equity. If you don't have performance reviews, these things are guaranteed to be a matter of the managers' subjectivity and bias. If you do have performance reviews, they can be compared to one another both within and across teams to ensure that the results don't favor anyone on the basis of anything except measured merit. That's absolutely essential in any workplace that we could consider modern.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand either of those, but not the case where an exec picks out some employee they don't know anything about and insists that they be either fired or promoted right just now.
You misread. You're being asked to imagine yourself as the executive - you're the person with firing authority. A manager who works for you asks you to fire someone on their team. There are a hundred people on various teams in your group, you don't have first-hand knowledge of all of their performance. You want to have a system in place for making sure this is a fair request, vs "we argued a few times the last week"…
a higher-level manager somewhat arbitrarily comes out of the blue and wants to fire one of your team. You have no paperwork to back the idea that the request is misplaced/misguided.
When I went from a small company to a much much larger one I was amazed at the amount of time that was wasted on the performance review cycle every year. They spend SO MUCH time on it, for a thing that is mostly irrelevant to how things seem to operate. It’s not like drastic changes are being made to peoples’ salaries or hours off it. Or job titles.
Imagine if company fired someone. They can sue the company. And what if there is no evidence of degrading performance against this employee?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Anyone with your profile should run their own business. It's unrealistic to expect somebody to work long hours, over-deliver for "maybe someday"-promises. People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it.
"People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it." Those of us that are trying to build high-performing organizations will still avoid and remove those types of people. And we will continue to reward and not take advantage of our people to fill our end of the bargain. Further, those of us that are also highly self-motivated will continue to leave bad situations,…
The moment somebody gets a whiff you didn't reward one of your employees for their work is the time your organization starts its decline (people talk). Frankly, I don't think you can avoid it as nobody can be really objective and tunnel vision is real. I just take it as a "nature's" way to move forward - blindspots of one company become strengths of another one, and due to past history, people would really compete against each other because of past perceived wrongdoings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You misread. You're being asked to imagine yourself as the executive - you're the person with firing authority. A manager who works for you asks you to fire someone on their team. There are a hundred people on various teams in your group, you don't have first-hand knowledge of all of their performance. You want to have a system in place for making sure this is a fair request, vs "we argued a few times the last week"…
I honestly think you're misreading. My reading (consistent with the one you replied to) is: a higher-level manager somewhat arbitrarily comes out of the blue and wants to fire one of your team. You have no paperwork to back the idea that the request is misplaced/misguided.
"If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?"
So 'someone' isn't defined, but from context, my assumption is that 'someone' is their direct manager (who works for you), since it's mentioned that 'manager's recommendation' is all that's known.
A situation where, say, the CTO is asking a VP to fire someone three or four levels below would be much stranger than a lower-level manager asking a VP to fire one of their reports, so between these two things I think it makes much more sense to resolve the ambiguity in that way.
This reading also has the benefit of suddenly making perfect sense and fitting the rest of the context of the original comment, which was about >100 employee organizations needing a paper trail.