Performance reviews or appraisals are stressful, uncomfortable but inevitable. A necessary evil.
It is difficult to “see-through” the evaluation process. It cannot be completely mathematical, neither should be fully emotional. It must be in between the two ends of the spectrum. And it creates only two groups of workers – satisfied and unsatisfied. I can almost guarantee that the unsatisfied ones will consider the results to be unfair.
It is impossible for an appraisal to be fair (to everyone). Because not only the definition of “fair” is completely solipsistic but it is actually a great news that life is not fair. Let me explain.
If life had been fair, everyone would have performed equally with equal help, direction and opportunities from others. There would be no differentiators. But that is not the case. We all know life is not fair. So we have a chance to prove ourselves different. It really does not matter if you raise the bar yourselves and improve your work or stay in status quo, the bar is getting raised anyways and as we speak. It is a choice we all have to make.
If you say that in your working career you haven’t felt “once” that your work feels boring, then I would say you are unique. We all “feel” at some point of our life that the work we are doing sucks (at that instant). This is normal and can be attributed to the fact that the work we are doing is below our expectation level at that point. Maybe the same work was a challenge a year ago and you enjoyed doing it, but now it’s just a routine drudgery.
As a manager, you may face this critical moment in your team members. In such a situation, an action is necessary on the manager’s part since ignoring it will only “infect” other people on your team. Because for knowledge workers like us, doing a “satisfactory” job is very subjective.
There can be two solutions to bring up the morale of the team in case you find lack of motivation or energy
1. Move the worker to a different job role to meet their expectation
2. Lower their expectation to meet their current job role
Or take a middle ground – create a new “sub” job role that will give a false solace and make them feel like it’s a more challenging and apt role for him/her.
The first method has serious downfalls. First of all, the manager is creating a “methodology” that can be cited as example by other people in the organization and demand “similar” treatment (i.e. changes). This can lead to abuse of this method by the workers. Secondly you never know what your next expectation would be. And in most cases we don’t know what we want, we just know what we don’t want. Soon the new job role might become “boring” to the worker and since the expectation is already set, it becomes difficult for the manager to deviate later without a lot of hullabaloo. Thus a manager will soon run out of “challenging” and “interesting” job roles in the organization.
The second method works best with new joinees and freshers. Here the managers give examples of worst possible roles and situations so that their current job profiles look bright and promising. The managers challenge their expectations after acknowledging their misery. This is a classic (and most used) technique which is effective and works best in terms of organization and the manager’s situation. The managers brainwash the workers by telling them “trying to find something in the work for doing that work is absolutely meaningless and nuisance. Work is meant to repetitive and difficult. That’s why there’s a paycheck”. Maybe motivate them by telling completely made up stories about hardships to make them feel superior and fortunate.
The final method is a necessity for already experienced workers who have gone through the second method once in their career in the same organization. The manager has to “create” a sub job role and give it a fancy name with few more responsibilities to make it look more challenging. It’s like more work without the actual raise. But this needs to be done very deviously and skillfully. Of course the manager doing this has been through this cycle before and already knows the “right” ways from experience.
An organization (specially a large one) is a sure way to limit your ability to think outside of what you are fed for 10-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week and most of your lifetime.
Muhammad Ali use altered state during fighting. No one can perform such “insensitivity” to pain without being in altered state.
Richard Petty drove nascar in altered state. No one in “normal” state can slowdown time enough to be able to drive that fast and be in control.
Magicians and psychotherapists are well known to induce hypnosis among people and masses and take them to their altered state of consciousness. But when we carefully notice our day to day lives, we are hypnotized all the time. When we watch “breaking news”, when we commute to work and even when we watch a movie… we shift our brain functioning to “suit” the environment and the pace of the activity we are involved in.
Anything can happen in altered states. Beliefs can be molded or broken, awareness can be heightened or subdued. This is a temporary state which if practiced in the right way can produce amazing results which you can (literally) dream about. Techniques include the use of sound & music beats to match the internal body rhythms, meditation or even self-hypnosis. Use the The Trance Workbook
As long as the worker is not the owner of the means of production, there will always be an inherent imbalance and unfair transactions between the corporate and workers. There will always be a US and THEM. While the manager assumes that the monthly or bi-weekly paychecks should be sufficient motivation for a worker to do their job, a worker no longer is satisfied with ever diminishing paychecks only and seeks emotional engagement of their hearts and minds. Today’s manager must understand both the corporate values and human values and bridge the gap as much as possible.
Today both the corporate and managers must figure out who are in the bottom of the food chain and realize their importance, give them the whole picture down to the granularity of everything. Only then they can demand “more than what is expected” out of powerful masses by connecting them to the vision with least resistance. A sense of accomplishment, personal connection and visualization of goal outweigh the motivation from paychecks.
“Organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans don’t accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don’t much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved.” – Collin Powell
In Greek mythology, the gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, from where the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. And this is quite true in our day to day life also. But until we are AWARE.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious.
Imagine when Sisyphus rolls the stone with great strength and labor to the top of the mountain and then releases it and watches it go down. This instant is interesting. What would happen if at every step the false solace of succeeding upheld him? A today’s worker toils everyday in his life at the same tasks from morning till night, and his fate is no less dreadful but it is tragic only at the rare moments when he becomes conscious.
We are so used to drudgery that we don’t even notice it. Awareness is a double edged sword. It will increase the sense futility of anything that you do but at the same time will open new windows to a better and unconventional world worth living in or worth dying for.
“Get busy living, or get busy dying.” – Andy Dufresne (From the movie The Shawshank Redemption)
