Where is the PMS?
1. It’s a performance management system. Not a compensation management system. Managing your compensation smartly was never the objective. Helping teams to improve their performance was the objective.
2. Assessment of performance was supposed to be 10% of the job. The remaining 90% was aligning teams, making sure that we chase the right stuff, coaching for high performance and simply being in touch to listen help and support.
3. The fixed rating system is the devil in the pack. This is the reason why managers hate the system & avoid conversation. This is the red herring which diverts the attention of teams and people managers from the task at hand and pushes the whole process into an unpleasant year end exercise.
4. There is no reliable method of arriving at a rating, which can substitute the intuitive wisdom of the people manager. Force fitting this intuitive judgment into a discrete rating scale creates the ill of gaming and charges of “subjectivity”. The longer the rating scale, the bigger this problem.
5. There is nothing wrong with “subjectivity” which represents the wisdom of the people manager based on knowledge and observation. The organisation is strengthened by this wisdom and weakened by artificial methods of substituting this wisdom.
6. The way of scaling up the organisation is to scale up leadership. Technology and process are a poor substitute.
Deepak Dhawan, CEO & Founder, Talentonic HR Solutions.