Rod and Karen respond to listener feedback.
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Just wanted to say I’ve been loving the banter segments lately. I’ve always liked them but this past week the banter has had me cackling.
Finally coming down from the Euphoria of the live show, to reach out and just say thank you for the amazing show. I love fan girling out with the crowd. I can’t wait for the next one, in person or virtual I will be there. Ok, back to my self evaluation for the month with my exceeds expectations reflection.
I am a man joining the eval topic. I hate doing the self evals. I am also in management. One of the commenters last week noted that ratings often follow a bell curve of sorts. I’ll go further and add that many companies have started funding the bonus pool at a rate based on the average staff “meeting expectations” but they require differentiation of the bonus percentage based on exceeds getting more. Anybody good with math can see that if your department is overall pretty good, then in order to fund the exceeds, you are expected to pull it from your “needs improvement” group.
But if your department is generally a settled team that functions well, you may not have many, or any, “needs”. Compound that with the many rounds of layoffs and offshorings, and you probably already lost all of your “needs” and your “meets” are doing more work than they used to. If you don’t have any “needs”, then you have to pull the differential from your “meets.” And that sucks. I called that out in our HR training session the first time we went to that model. The people managers understand this, so it’s not as bad in our annual conversation, but it goes over like a lead balloon when talking to the staff about it. HR gives them a training on the process, but no one wants to hear that.
[I’m sure you get it, but for the listeners that don’t work for companies that have gone to the model, it’s essentially like this: you have a team with all 3 categories then bonus can look like this:
Exceeds 1.25 x target rate
Meets 1.00 x target rate
Needs 0.75 x target rate
But if you only have Meets and Exceeds
Exceeds 1.10 x target rate
Meets 0.90 x target rate
Unless they really push you to make bigger differentiation. They really like to see Exceeds in that 1.10-1.25 range to really set them apart.]
Then, when you finish getting all your feedback in, the team leader(s) probably sits down with HR and goes over where the group landed. They push back on your Exceeds, so you have to hold your ground on those, and they challenge your distribution. So the examples have to be really strong. And the rubric that they measure Exceeds against starts to talk about elevated impacts or sustainable business impacts. It’s mostly going to go to the high performers that will get on the leadership radar.
So the tool ends up becoming a way to hold the budget and to really reward a limited number high achievers. And the whole process sucks. And you have some people that greatly inflate what they’ve done, and that sucks too. But I don’t generally have a higher inflation from the men doing that, and you have a feel for who on the team is likely to do it. The teams that I have worked on for the past decade have been more women than men, but all of them hate the process and usually even my high achievers haven’t always spoken up on their own, man or woman.
I’ve had a mix of Meets and Exceeds years. This last one was a Meets. This one is off to a Meets, but if I can bring in a couple bigger innovations, then I may start trending towards Exceeds. But it’s harder for me, because of what management is expected to deliver through others. I can deliver a lot personally on top of my team’s performance and still be a Meets. It’s a cold game.
I want to apologize if it seemed like I was suggesting equivalent levels of danger from ICE. I was not. I was just noting that nobody is safe. There have already been citizens illegally detained by ICE and possibly deported. It is impossible to know because they are preventing due process and the only large-scale data we have is released by the criminal organization known as ICE which is about as reliable as using a sieve as a condom.
They continue to use illegal and unethical racial profiling methods for most of their abductions, and those officers who use said methods should be thrown under the jail.
I am chuckling at my desk because Roderick called me out for mentioning Vanessa Kay Pergolizzi Trump 🙂 Love you both.
The president of Mauritius would like to have with a word with Rod for the massive butchering of his country’s name.
As a kind loving intergalactic humble security consultant that I am. I offered his excellency 3 months free security protection from my Orcas. You good Rod, have a great week!
After freshly coming off the mourning of the Great Day joke, demanding a great week is kinda cold, even for you RoninRaphael…
Correction sir, I wished my brother Rod (& Karen too) a great week not demanded. A humble Ronin NEVER demands. Nein, nein, nein. In this cold spring too, naaaah. Top of the hat and a splendid week to you Sean.
Now my last post waits for moderation. Do you know why Rod?
Is it the topic?
About trans issues. I’m always sad when they are used in a political context ( almost exclusively by conservatives) because in real life it’s hardly ever a provlem or anyone. I am a woman of the world, I come around. Absolutely never was I in a situation with a trans person where i needed political intervention. Also, when parents have a kid that shows signs of being trans, politics isn’t what they need. They need some medical specialist to talk to them about it and other parents in the same situation. The decision what to do, if starting with some medication is the right thing to do is individual and hard anyway without the heated political climate.