The Man in the Middle - Page 1

Technology is often a game of numbers. From providing greater services with less expensive hardware and applications, to managing costs and ROI at a detailed level, tracking each minute and dollar spent on a project. Despite this numerical savvy, IT misses the boat when letting employees know exactly where they stand.

A wise CIO once told me that there is only one person in the middle of any bell curve. Every other person on the curve falls either ahead or behind that one person in the middle. This axiom seems painfully obvious, yet if you look at the employee evaluations completed by most corporations, and within IT in particular, they seem to follow an 80/20 rule: 80% of the employees are in the middle!

In most IT organizations that attempt to isolate themselves from the rest of the corporation, building walls between IT and “the business”, this presents a particularly acute quandary for employees. Advancement potential suddenly becomes amazingly narrow: you’re either a line employee, middle manager or the CIO (or one of his or her lieutenants). Narrow advancement opportunities sap morale in the ongoing battle for talent, with the traditional evaluation process serving as a knockout blow, turning low morale into a case of acute productivity loss.

It may be human nature not to want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Or tell a mediocre employee that they are mediocre, rather than showering them with empty platitudes so the evaluator and the evaluated can both remain comfortable and avoid criticism or acknowledging failing. This contributes to the urge to rank whole swaths of people as “good enough” in some notion of playground-style fairness, yet in the zeal to be fair you damage the employees you should be most interested in retaining and developing.

Ask most CIOs what kind of employees they want, and you will hear words like entrepreneurial, competitive, self-starter, independent, etc. If you are lucky enough to land someone with all these attributes, the absolute worst thing you can do is put them into an environment where “everyone’s a winner”, which directly translates to “management does not respect you enough to acknowledge your superior effort.”

Make no mistake that the veneer of fairness will instantly be seen through by a high-performer, and interpreted as a slight; damping future efforts by the high-performer. So how can you inspire and retain these high performers? Evaluate fairly and provide opportunity.

Truly Fair Evaluations

An evaluation that is truly fair accomplishes several things: