Personnel Assessment Quotes

Goddammit, he looks like a loser to me …. When I had an officer like that in World War II, I relieved him.

The toughest thing about managing is knowing your personnel and what it can give you under all conditions.

The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. ... The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.

Good leaders must know how to reward those who succeed and know when to retrain, move, or fire ineffective staff.

Sales and production work is amenable to merit pay. Try it with white collar knowledge workers, teachers, government officials, computer programmers and writers and you have a disaster after your first assessments. Merit pay requires performance measurement, and that means ranking staff. The half that come out below average are immediately angry at the system that labels them as below average. The second quartile looks at the first quartile and finds colleagues who to them are little or no better than they, and a few who don’t work as hard. Some of the people who are at the top and get bonuses like the system that is so perspicacious as to reward them. However, most in the top quartile because they don’t agree that the ones who rank higher than they are really any better become negative. So over 75 percent of the workforce is unhappy and thinks the system is invalid or the raters are biased or just arbitrary. Before you ever consider installing merit pay, find an organization like yours that has it and talk to the workers—not the executives—those who have been assessed for their merit.

External scouting is of limited value if it's not teamed with rigorous self- examination. Successful coaches or managers have learned the value of utilizing an outside opinion to give them a fresh look at their personnel. This unbiased view provides an even greater insight, which in turn helps the coach develop flexibility within the team.

Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

The president of a TV network generously agreed to take his company's aptitude test, a test required of all the personnel. He did badly. As a result he was in a sullen mood for the rest of the day. When he got home that night, his wife asked why he looked so grouchy. I took the company's aptitude test this morning. What did it show? asked the wife. It showed, boomed the executive, that such tests are idiotic. That's what it showed.