Where do you fit on the chart below?
Naturally the answer depends on what aspect of your life you are measuring. So let’s give it a context. Where do you fit when it comes to your performance at work? Is that even a fair question?
If the answer makes you feel uncomfortable you should certainly be asking yourself how others feel and whether it is something you want to apply universally across your organisation.
The “bell curve” or “normal distribution curve” is a useful statistical tool for classifying results. People, however, are not statistics and do not appreciate being classified, especially if they fall into the less ‘positive’ side of the curve. Thus the bell curve’s place in an organisation looking to develop its people is questionable. After all, if you are looking to develop your organisation, you simply have to be looking at developing your people. And you know what: no matter how much you time and effort you spend developing your people you would still have a bell curve afterwards.
Hopefully, this will make you stop and think about your HR practices and the way you grade or rate your people. If you are you appear to be joining a trend. According to Ruth Stuart, Learning and Development Research Advisor at the CIPD, “People are beginning to question some of the more traditional talent management practices. Giving people a grade or rating according to their performance can actually be quite damaging. It can instigate a threat response in the brain, switch people off to feedback and create an unwanted competitive edge.” (Source: People Management December 2014.)
It may not be any wonder that only around 15% of employees are fully engaged. These may well be the same people who comprise the top performance sector of the bell chart, and you have to question which is the cause and which the effect. Stop grading your people and you might improve your levels of employee engagement.
If you are one of the people who were – or after reading this – now are questioning your traditional people management practices, you will be happy to learn that the Triple A Employee® methodology gives you the ideal way to restructure the way you do things. It provides a standard for personal reviews that can be applied throughout your organisation and focuses on the person and their personal growth and development. It is totally individual and removes any competitive element that you normally find with conventional performance rating and grading systems.
If you are serious about developing you organisation you need to learn how this can help you. You will, won’t you?
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”