Appraisals: People Aren’t Widgets

What a piece of work is man… [Shakespeare, Hamlet]

I’ve always been a fan of W. Edwards Deming’s (1900-1993), the prophet if not the inventor of statistical quality control. The originator of that idea was Walter A. Shewhart of Bell Labs, but Deming was instrumental in the promotion of that method and its introduction in Japan, with the consequence that he became a kind of Japanese sensei or wise man by adoption. To this day the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) awards an annual Deming Prize. By an interesting twist of fate, U.S. industry began applying this method only in response to Japanese competitive pressures later in the twentieth century—when foreign embrace had made it both respectable and threatening. It is a great technique for increasing the precision of parts and the quality of goods, with all kinds of radiating benefits: easier assembly, lower maintenance, reduction of waste, indeed higher morale. And the method is ideally suited to all kinds of widgets.

A testimony to human folly is the ever-recurring tendency to apply a good technique that works well in one field to another where it is entirely out of place. Thus statistical quality control applied to people is stunningly counter-productive. I was reminded of this the other day when visiting a blog I follow and genuinely like. It originates in India. There I saw that the author, Aahang, had recently posted a piece on Appraisals (here). He begins by saying: “Going through the humiliation of the Appraisal Process one wonders why [people] need to be subjected to this barbarous act with tyrannical overtones in which personal dynamics or organizational realities are charaded as performance measurement.”

Alas, people aren’t widgets. Indeed, in a poetic view, man is indeed a “piece of work,” but to see what Shakespeare meant, one has to read the whole quote. And when that is understood, it becomes immediately obvious why it is that humans invariably, instinctively, and unanimously reject being treated as things. To be sure, all of us both need and like appropriate feedback, but the manner in which it is administered under the soul-less bureaucratic rules of modern management, the process becomes humiliating, the period of appraisals enrages everyone—those who must perform it as much as those on whom it is performed. What ails this process is precisely that which is supposed to make it useful: the quantitative and mechanical aspects of it.

We are a spontaneous, inspired, fluid, creative reality—not things stamped out like bolts by a machine. In the words of the incomparable McGarrigle sisters (in the album Matapedia):

We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die?

Quantitative objectives? As in how many deals you’ll close, how many deadlines you meet, how close you’ll get to an ROI figure you can’t really control? Absolute nonsense.

My personal take on such massive human folly has always been to ignore it, with a wink, in a sovereign manner. I treat collective madness as I treat the weather. I might not be able to avoid it, but I can’t take it personally. Those who must appraise me are themselves but puppets on a string. They must dance as the strings are pulled. The Russians under communism had a nice phrase that applies here: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” The formula for building a community? No. But the pretense is wise. After we’ve danced our silly appraisal dance, it’s back to work. I ignored the bureaucracy but I always tried, despite the folly, to do a good job.