Category: Happy At Work

A while back I wrote a post about killing off job titles. I think they’re a waste of time and contribute nothing to our productivity, creativity or happiness at work. In fact, job titles can be the source of a lot of disputes and bickering in the workplace.

Matt Cardwell of Quicken Loans (a home loan lender based in the US) read this and liked it so much that he decided to issue a fatwa on job titles in his department. Here he explains why:

We never used to have titles on the Marketing Team at Quicken Loans because we always prided ourselves as having a marked anti-corporate and non-hierarchical culture. Actually, we did have titles, but everyone was called a “Marketing Manager.” So it was kind of a forced equality and no one EVER even talked about titles. But as the team grew from a few dozen people to over fifty, HR decided we needed some “consistency”, especially for purposes of external salary comping. So against our better judgment we relented and started creating a bunch of silly titles like: Marketing Coordinator, Marketing Program Manager, Project Manager, Jr. Project Manager, Sr. Project Manager, etc.

Well, it only took about 12 months for our brilliant decision to come back and bite us in the ass. Needless to say, it created all kinds of unnecessary noise within the team as people started to grumble about why a person who had only been here for 12 months just got promoted to Sr. Project Manager when another person who had been here for three years was still a Project Manager. I got so fed up with the divisiveness of it all that I just decided to banish titles altogether yesterday morning. So I went looking for some inspiration and Googled “job titles” or something to that effect and found your blog post from December. It was EXACTLY what I was looking for. So I dropped it into an email, added my two cents and started a revolt. Initially it was just within my 20 person eCommerce Marketing team, but it snowballed over the course of the afternoon to include most of the broader marketing team.

That is music to my ears and in response to Matt’s challenge, people got very creative. Here are some of the new titles:

• Royal Storyteller & Propaganda Minister
• Supreme Challenger of the Status Quo & Wicked Web Site Innovator
• Mastermind of Possibilities, Visual Linguist, and Czar of the High Fiber Revolution
• Flasher
• Conceptologist
• Pixelardo da Vinci

You can see more titles in my previous post on this.

How did Matt inspire people to do this? Here’s the email he sent out:

Okay, team, so I want each one of you to take 15 minutes today to really think hard about what YOU DO and what MAKES YOU HAPPY at work and create a title for yourself that expresses who you are and your impact on the business and your team mates. Forget about what Salary.com or some HR person said your title is or should be. Forget about what you get paid, how many years of experience you have, or what other people’s “titles” are in comparison to you. Tell us WHAT YOU DO and make that your new “title”.

As of this morning, traditional titles on the Website Marketing Team are DEAD. D-E-A-D. Somehow over the past year people have become WAY too caught up in who has what title. So we’re going to end the madness today.

If this scares you, makes you feel like we’ve taken something away or makes you wonder how your resume will look without that title-that-really- never-does-justice-to-you-and-your-talents-anyway, ask yourself when was the last time someone called you by your title? When was the last time Todd Lunsford or Bill Emerson or Dan Gilbert called you by your title? Worried about how this might impact future compensation? Don’t. Numbers and money follow, they do not lead. Kick ass at whatever you do, and the wealth will eventually flow to you. I’ve seen it happen again and again in my career … and especially here.

If you are concerned about someone not recognizing how important you are because you no longer have a standard title, then here’s your chance to create a title for yourself that will convey exactly how important you are. And because you are creating it, it will be all yours. No one else will have that title. Think of the conversations your new title will start with complete strangers. Think of the opportunities it can create for you in terms of expressing who you are, not what someone CALLS you.

“But what if I don’t like my description in three months …” you ask? What if what I do CHANGES? Well, then you can change your description. It’s that simple. No one ever stays the same … we are all growing … so let your “title” do the same when it’s time.

Here’s your chance. You have until the end of the day to let us all know who you are. Have fun, be creative, be humorous, but above all, be real and true. Remember, this will be on your e-mail signature, so please be aware of that.

I can’t wait to see what all of you come up with.

DEATH TO TITLES!

Matt

Matt Cardwell
Idea Salesman, Energy Focuser and People Unleasher
eCommerce Marketing Team
Quicken Loans
My title challenges your title to a duel. I predict a draw. – Me

I had to know more, so I emailed Matt with a few follow-up questions, and here’s an update from him on the fatwa on job titles:

You had a couple of questions around the titles Fatwa from your previous e-mail. One question was about whether we had abolished titles company-wide. So far only the Web Marketing Team and the Idea Lab (our creative team – basically an in-house agency for our advertising production) took up my challenge. Not surprisingly, the team that actually got the title “promotions” that started this whole thing opted not to join us in our little revolution. I threw the challenge out to them, but I haven’t really seen anyone take up the torch.

I do know that our CMO, Todd Lunsford was extremely supportive of the no-title revolution. As I mentioned, we really only started using titles recently for comping purposes. But even there, they are generally not very useful for the more specialized people on my team (usability pros, search engine optimizers, etc), because until very recently, Salary.com didn’t make distinctions between interactive marketers (which are in high demand) and traditional marketers. As an organization, we’ve been pretty ambivalent about titles. Most of our Sr. Leadership Team and many of our team members simply have no title on their email signature, or just identify themselves with their team. For example: Joe Smith, Web Marketing Team

So I think this will still spread … we won a couple battles, but we still have a war going on. It will come. And I’ll keep preaching.

This is fantastic! I’m adding Quicken Loans to my list of “Companies that get it.” And I’m not alone – they recently placed second in Fortune Magazine’s Best Company to Work list, one behind Google.

Your take

What’s your take? Is your workplace ready to issue its own fatwa on job titles? Or do you see some value in having a “real” title on your business card? Please write a comment, I’d really like to know.

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Welcome to your annual performance review.

In the next 90 minutes we will:

• Review your performance over the last 12 months
• Follow up on the goals from last year’s review
• Set new goals for your professional development and career
• Handle any problems you might have had in the last year
• Fill out this 8-page form required by HR
• Coach you to better performance
• Get your totally open and honest feedback to my leadership

And of course, we will both pretend that the results of this little chat will not in any way influence the salary adjustments coming up in two months.

Now… any questions?

It seems that no one likes performance reviews. Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software certainly doesn’t:

At two of the companies I’ve worked for, the most stressful time of year was the twice-yearly performance review period.

For some reason, the Juno HR department and the Microsoft HR department must have copied their performance review system out of the same Dilbertesque management book, because both programs worked exactly the same way.

First, you gave “anonymous” upward reviews for your direct manager (as if that could be done in an honest way). Then, you filled out optional “self-evaluation” forms, which your manager “took into account” in preparing your performance review.

Finally, you got a numerical score, in lots of non-scalar categories like “works well with others”, from 1-5, where the only possible scores were actually 3 or 4.

Managers submitted bonus recommendations upwards, which were completely ignored and everybody received bonuses that were almost completely random.

The system never took into account the fact that people have different and unique talents, all of which are needed for a team to work well.
(source)

Almost every medium-sized or large company does performance reviews. Everybody does it – and I think it’s time to stop!

Performance reviews are fundamentally broken. Managers hate them and fear them and resent the drain on their time.

Employees often leave reviews demotivated, cynical and with no clear idea of how well they’re doing and how to improve:

Research into British workers found a quarter of respondents thought managers simply regarded the reviews as a “tick-box” exercise, while one in five accused their bosses of not even thinking about the appraisal until they were in the room.

Almost half (44 per cent) did not think their boss was honest during the process, 29 per cent thought they were pointless, and a fifth felt they had had an unfair appraisal, according to the YouGov poll of 3000 workers.

Only a fifth believed their manager would always act on what came up during the review and 20 per cent said their boss never bothered to follow up any concerns raised.
(source)

There is a lot of advice out there on how to fix performance reviews but in my opinion, performance reviews would still be worse than uselss, even if we could fix everything that is currently wrong about them and the very fact that companies fell the need to have them, shows that something is seriously broken in our workplaces.

Here’s why performance reviews and appraisals are such a waste of time and why our workplaces would be better off without them.

1: Everybody hates them

Managers actually cite performance appraisals or annual reviews as one of their most disliked tasks (source) and as we saw above, employees dislike and distrust the process too.

Performance reviews are supposed to be about giving people feedback on their past performance and setting goals for the future. This is impossible in a format that people dislike this intensely.

Studies show that if you’re in a bad mood (and lots of people are during their review meetings), you’re not open to criticism and suggestions. You’re also almost certainly not in the mood to make big plans for your future growth and development

2: They try to do too much

Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins in their 2000 book called “Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What to Do Instead” argue that employee reviews take on too many tasks at once. They’re about communications, feedback, coaching, promotion, compensation and legal documentation. Good luck doing all of that in an hour or two!

3: They become an excuse for not talking for the rest of the year

“Yeah, I know that Johnson in accounting is lagging a little and seems dissatisfied, but his performance review is coming up in 4 months – we’ll handle it then.”

No. No, no, no!

In fact, If you have good, open, honest communication between managers and employees, if people constantly know what they do well end where they can improve then you have no need for a formal review process.

4: They are too structured and formal

Many companies have noticed that formal reviews are not working and the response, overwhelmingly, has been to formalize them more. There are now more questionnaires to fill out before, during and after for both employees and managers. More boxes to tick. More ratings on a 1-5 scale More time spent preparing.

But here’s the thing: This actually detracts from the value of the conversation you will have. The more you structure the conversation, the less likelihood that you will actually get to talk about what’s important.

The more boxes to tick, the more likely it is that it will get treated as an exercise in “filling in the blanks.”

5: They focus too much on the quantifiable

Joel Spolsky has another good example:

…one friend of mine was a cheerful catalyst, a bouncy cruise director who motivated everyone else when the going got tough. He was the glue that held his team together. But he tended to get negative reviews, because his manager didn’t understand his contribution.

Many of the most valuable and important things we contribute to the workplace do not fit into those little check boxes. If a manager doesn’t understand this during the year, he will most certainly not get it in the performance review.

6: They may not be formally connected with promotions and salary negotiations – in reality everyone knows they are

A lot of companies have noticed that performance reviews go even worse when they also double as negotiations about salaries and promotions.

Consequently they have separated these two processes and will first have appraisals and then later on salary negotiations.

Riiiiiight. Does anyone expect this to work? Will managers forget everything they said in the appraisal when setting salaries later on? Will employees fall for this and be more honest, rather than try to make themselves look good?

Of course not. But trying to pretend that’s the way it works just adds another layer of deception to the whole sorry mess.

7: No one says what they really think

Managers can hold back from offering negative feedback because they fear conflict.

Employees often don’t offer honest criticism of managers and workplaces out of a fear of offending and the knowledge that, regardless of formal policies, the content of this talk will affect your salary.

In short, everyone is on the defensive from the beginning.

8: They take a LOT of time

Everybody’s busy these days, and on top of your regular tasks, once a year you have to find time to prepare for, execute and follow up on the performance reviews. To make matters worse, very few companies factor in this time in peoples’ schedules and give them a lighter workload during those weeks.

This means that rather than doing it right, many people focus on doing it fast and just getting it over with, making the whole process worse than useless.

9: They become a crutch for bad managers

If you’re not capable of giving your employees regular, specific, timely and relevant feedback (good and bad) – you should not be a manager at all.

And formal performance reviews are not the solution! The managers who actually do manage to give worthwhile performance reviews are invariably also those who don’t need to have them because they already excel at providing regular, constructive feedback.

What to do instead

A 2006 Harvard Business Review article talks about how to fix employee reviews by doing things like:

• Have them more often than annually
• Make their purpose clear
• Give continuous feedback
• Add forced ranking of employees (worst idea ever!)

But I think the solution is a lot simpler: lose’em. Stop having formal employee reviews, whether annual, semi-annual or quarterly. They’re not only a waste of time, they’re actively harmful to motivation and happiness at work.

As Peter Block says in the foreword to the Abolishing Performance Appraisals book mentioned above:

“If the appraisal process is so useful, we should consider using it in our personal lives. Would we say to our spouse, significant other or intimate friend, ‘Dear, it is time for your annual performance appraisal. For the sake of our relationship and the well-being of the family unit, I want you to prepare for a discussion of your strengths and weaknesses and the ways you have fallen short of your goals for the year.

” ‘Also, honey, I would like for you to define some stretch goals for the coming year.’
(source)

Good luck with that :o)

Your take

What do you think? Do you know of companies that have abolished performance reviews? Do you know of any that have them and do them well? What happened at your last performance review? Please write a comment, I’d really like to know.

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