According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, American business is taking a new approach to its employees: Show them appreciation, support, and encouragement. The title of the article is: “You’re Awesome: Firms Scrap Negative Feedback.”
Stack-ranking of employees from best to worst is out. Punitive evaluations are so yesterday. People do their best when they are appreciated.
So this is what American business is doing! Would someone please tell Arne Duncan, Andrew Cuomo, Rick Scott, Scott Walker, Mike Pence, and members of Congress?
The article, written by Rachel Feintszeig, begins this way:
If you don’t have anything nice to say, management has a tip: Try harder.
Fearing they’ll crush employees’ confidence and erode performance, employers are asking managers to ease up on harsh feedback. “Accentuate the positive” has become a new mantra at workplaces like VMware Inc., Wayfair Inc., and the Boston Consulting Group Inc., where bosses now dole out frequent praise, urge employees to celebrate small victories and focus performance reviews around a particular worker’s strengths—instead of dwelling on why he flubbed a client presentation.
The shift may annoy leaders who rose in a tough-love era in business, but executives say hard-edge tactics simply do more harm than good these days.
When employees’ flaws are laid bare, “there’s that mental ‘ugh’ and shrug of, ‘This is who I am,’ ” says Michelle Russell, a partner at BCG.
Bit by bit, the consulting firm has changed the way managers evaluate employee performance. For years, those discussions focused largely on employee missteps and where they needed to improve.
“We would bring them in and beat them down a bit,” says Ms. Russell. After the reviews, she observed some employees left the company as their confidence and performance slipped; others seemed rattled days or weeks later.
Now, managers are expected to extol staffers’ strengths during reviews and check-ins, explaining how the person can use his or her talents to tackle aspects of the job that come less naturally.
Bosses are advised to mention no more than one or two areas that require development, Ms. Russell adds…..
The rising popularity of tools like Gallup’s StrengthsFinder, which is designed to measure a person’s talents in any of 34 areas, suggests how many more companies are taking a positive tack. About 600,000 people used the tool each year from 2001 through 2012, says Leticia McCadden, a spokeswoman for Gallup.
Since 2012, the number of users has jumped to 1.6 million a year. As of last year, StrengthsFinder was used by 467 members of the Fortune 500.
Facebook, one of the best-known users of StrengthsFinder, has crafted a new management style attuned to the needs of 20- and 30-somethings that comprise most of its staff….
VMware has borrowed techniques from marriage counselors, such as increasing the ratio of positive to negative comments in the workplace and encouraging employees to celebrate their wins.
“You’re really trying to get them in the moment where they’re reliving the joy they felt,” says Jessica Amortegui, a former VMware talent development executive.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Public education, teachers’ unions and teachers are exempt when it comes to showing appreciate and support. The only option for teachers is to use tests to rank and punish.
There is something that hits me wrong about The Wall Street Journal having to tell their audience not to beat on their employees if they want them to perform well. Do we really need to pay the Boston Consulting Group big bucks for what should be common sense? Pretty soon we’ll see the articles telling us to temper over the top praise with a little reality.
Gosh, sure would like to know what companies the WSJ researched for that article. Doesn’t sound like the experience of anyone I know. Most of us are still living in fear and we’ve learned to walk around in a hunched over position lest the axe take us out next.
This is not a new development. The idea of having a better work environment leading to better productivity has been known for decades. In fact Dr. W. Edwards Deming brought the idea to Japan following WW2. “Called Kaizen (good change) it refers to activities that continually improve all functions and involve ALL employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It is also a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace and eliminates overly hard work.”
In all, the process suggests a humanized approach to workers and to increasing productivity: “The idea is to nurture the company’s people as much as it is to praise and encourage participation in kaizen activities.” Successful implementation requires “the participation of workers in the improvement.”
The successful use of kaizen by Toyota as it grew to overpower American auto manufacturers eventually allowed for its return to the US in many automobile factories post 1986. For the first time assembly line workers had a say in the control of their own line. They could stop it if they feel something was wrong. They could suggest improvements to the process. They became part of the “team”.
Now look at American education today. What lessons heave we learned from success?
David Greene: I was going to write about the above posting and relate it to the work of W. Edwards Deming but you did a better job that I could have.
Thank you for your comments.
Another example—as if we needed one—that the heavy hitters of the self-styled “education reform” movement rely on and mandate proven worst management practices rather than taking even a hint from proven best management practices.
Don’t be surprised to find a few of the “thought leaders” of the “new civil rights movement of our time” superficially implementing best practices while continuing to run things, in practice, just as they always have—
Label, sort and stack rank so as to make it appear that by some “objective” numerical standard the few deserve small rewards and the vast majority deserve big punishments.
Deming called it “management by fear” (see Dienne’s comments above).
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“Egads…just the term “thought leaders” GAG me. Guess the rest if us are not thoughtful.
Or as the primary teachers call it, three stars and a wish. This is how you critique your fellow students work. Find three things they do very well, and one wish on how they could have improved it. Gets amazing results,and steady improvement, and no one is traumatized. Both parties get to reflect on what works, and what doesn’t. But where is the fun in that for the know it all education reformers who believe in stack rankings,and black and white “meets standards” rubrics?
To employees,
You guys are so awesome at the way you work hard to promote stack ranking, union busting, and insulting and demoralizing teachers!!! Way to go! What a work ethic! No negativity here!
Sincerely,
Boston Consulting
Is this a joke? My employer fired 7 ladies last year, with a stack ranking formula, taking cues from corporate practices, and the stack ranking was a joke. Thereafter, 4 more, and just last week fired 3 more so the partners could “show more profit” on the balance sheet – well it won’t be “profit” so much as cutting “expenses” (jobs) so each equity partner can get a couple more thousand dollars at fiscal year end while they continue to tell us leftovers how lucky we are to even HAVE jobs, and how generous they are to the underlings while they cut our salaries (via lower raises), cut bonuses (tied to lower raises) and require higher contributions to health care. Its hard to believe the BS when your bonus is $1,200 and theirs is $700,000. At review, the conversation is barely existent except to tell you your raw “score,” what your raise is, and whether or not you’ll receive that $1,200 bonus or not. No feedback. No “you done good.” Only—be happy you’re still employed, and watch your butt in the future since they are not done using the axe.
In sluggish economic times, the first to go are the most competent because that is a way that the ones immediately above them protect themselves (so, ironically, it is actually a badge of honor to be fired)
Also, in an environment of “control fraud” (see William Black) the ethical folks are the very first to go.
So in many cases (particularly on Wall Street) what you end up with is a combination of the most incompetent and most unethical.
And this is what is known as the “Ameritocracy”.
Therlo & SomeDAM Poet: exactly!
No need to guess what the self-selected “we don’t need to be stack ranked” owners and leaders say when things go belly up.
“Things wouldn’t have gone to hell in a hand basket if our employees had just remembered what happened before [not possible since the people that were fired were the ‘expensive’ ones with institutional memory] and if they had showed more loyalty [getting rid of the competent employees and keeping the tuchus kissers that had no loyalty but to themselves was a predictable disaster] and if people had shown the moral character and courage to warn us what was happening but instead kept all the bad news to themselves until it was too late [no surprise that inducing servility and silent obedience in the work force was catastrophically wrong].”
I don’t need a crystal ball to know what they do and say because we have the richest mensch in the history of humankind to serve as an exemplar: when labeling, sorting and stack ranking people doesn’t work in Microsoft try try again in the public school system and see if it works there—give yourself ten years before you decide whether or not it is capable of producing any good results. And when it doesn’t come out all smelling like a rose…
Then blame the “little people” for not implementing your ideas correctly. It’s always “somebody else’s fault.” *Principle of $tudent $ucce$$: Self-correction and thoughtfulness are not in the dictionary. Those words are just self-serving inventions of people that oppose “choice” and the “new civil rights movement of our time.”*
So there you have it. It’s not that the policies and practices are proven failures; it’s just that folks like you and me and the vast majority are just too dense to understand and execute the brilliant aspirational genius of Bill Gates and the rest of that select band of self-proclaimed cage busters aka the leaders and beneficiaries of the “education reform”
movement.
A last reminder. It’s not just that the rheephormistas reject their “shrill” and “strident” opponents like that fire-breathing radical Diane Ravitch. They can’t even get on board with knuckleheads like, say, a Republican like former President Dwight D. Eisenhower [by rheephormish metrics, what did the man ever do that deserves to be remembered?].
“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.”
“The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it’s usually lousy.”
“You don’t lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.”
And I won’t even get started again with W. Edwards Deming.
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P.S. For the shillish- and trollish-minded, my remarks above re the owner of this blog and President Eisenhower were meant in a ironic sense.
¿? As in “using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.”
Sheesh! You’d think after all that CCSS ‘closet’ reading they’d know how to read closely in a closet.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower [by rheephormish metrics, what did the man ever do that deserves to be remembered?].
What did you do to be remembered, you ask. :o)
Eisenhower warned the country about the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex and then he implemented it before he left office.
Business schools don’t even teach this rubbish anymore. They focus on Kaizen, collaboration and reject command and control as counterproductive.
Someone needs to inform the WSJ that this is Valentine’s say, not April Fool’s day.
Grass is always greener on the side of the WS fence or an iron wall that gives them an immunity from public scrutiny.
Here in the schools, we’re caught between Scylla and Charybdis, the devil and the deep blue sea, between a rock and a hard place…
I’ve exhausted my stock of metaphors for the situation we are in, but I and others like me are ourselves exhausted and demoralized by what has been put in place by those on high (with our union’s acquiescence) — the new teacher evaluation system, which, to slip back into those metaphors, lowers teachers into even lower and hotter depths of the inferno – the hell — they were in before.
We have now, in New York City, on the one hand, the tests, whose original purposes have now been totally subverted. New York State governor Cuomo wants these to count even more, NY City Schools Chancellor Farina, picked by our new, somewhat more enlightened mayor, De Blasio, counsels against that.
And on the other hand, we have something that is, in my opinion, even worse, the Danielsson framework for teacher evaluation, accomplished here in New York City mainly via unannounced 15-minute speed-observations (now reduced to four per year), in which we are rated on a 4 point scale on a number of things. I don’t think Farina has any problem with these that she has expressed. Indeed, she was all into “professional development” to improve the teachers and has been pressing principals to fie more teachers.
So we have two sides of the same sh*t, to borrow a phrase from my native language.
Those of us who are sincere teachers in the traditional mold, taking seriously both the “in loco parentis” duty and the responsibility of cultural transmission, and so being focused on both the welfare of our students and the integrity of the subjects we teach, find that we can either do what conscience tells us to do or play the game — teaching to the test and dancing the Daniellson dance. We aren’t clever enough to do both.
So this article is a welcome one. We should all forward it to our “supervisors”. I am doing so, no matter that the result may not be the best. I’m tired of taking this without being able to fight back for what’s just and right. We have no support from our union. They’re even all for the highly flawed (at least in implementation) Common Core, which has thrown the math teachers in our school, many highly qualified, into disarray.
Well…Duncan and his gang are just mean frauds. Have to be when one knows nada and pretends to know…and, of course American GREED and the ridiculous celebrity mentality are killing this nation.
I laughed out loud. This is Diane at her best!
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.