Start putting it together
Despite your best intentions, a major change is going to generate resistance. This is especially true when your company doesn’t have any glaring weaknesses or obvious reasons to shake things up.
It was no different for DeVito at Baldwin & Lyons with his plans for consistent performance evaluations.
“There’s a minority of folks that are concerned about the evaluation in general, from a number of different perspectives,” DeVito says. “‘Will it be fair?’ ‘My job can’t be evaluated.’ ‘My contributions go beyond what you can identify.’ Those types of things.”
It’s a battle you have to fight over and over again when you’re making a change that isn’t obvious to everyone. You need to convince people that while it may be easier or more comfortable to maintain the status quo, the effort to make a change will be worth it.
DeVito tried to conquer this resistance by reiterating to his leaders that he didn’t want the new evaluation system to be dictated from his office. He wanted input from all levels, including the employees who would be evaluated.
“You allow folks to have input at every level with their own supervisor, their own manager and with their department vice president and with me,” DeVito says.
To help drive home his message about the importance of consistent individual measurement for everyone, DeVito presented a scenario to all his employees at a company meeting in which he was the manager of a baseball team.
“I have two of you that are both competing for the second base position, and I am telling you we’re going to keep score of the game, but we’re not going to keep track of any of your individual statistics,” DeVito says. “I’m not going to tell you what your home runs are, how many errors you’ve made or how many walks you have. You’re just going to have to trust me that I’m smart enough to evaluate and make the right choice. Would you agree that’s appropriate?”
The employees DeVito met with responded that this would not be appropriate and that they would want their individual statistics to be recorded.
“So now we agree that we have to measure at the individual level,” DeVito says. “Now that we agree we have to measure at the company level and the individual level, most of the battle has been won. Now let’s work together to create some objective measurements. Let’s start by having you tell me which measures I should use to evaluate you.”
At that point, the dialogue began between employee and direct report throughout the organization as to what were appropriate metrics to be measured by.
“It’s really not that tough when you start to boil it down to day-to-day operations,” DeVito says. “The biggest task is to have people actually sit down and list their responsibilities. You could probably do it in your job as to what you think are the most important aspects of your job and what you do and how you do it. That process takes place. Then it’s just a matter of monitoring and understanding that the organization is changing and making sure that there are changes in the evaluation process.”
To further emphasize his hands-off approach to evaluations, DeVito didn’t put restrictions on the number of metrics employees and supervisors had to come up with.
“That’s where you can get yourself in trouble is by putting limitations on what is the appropriate measurement,” DeVito says. “In sales, you may decide you are measuring a salesperson on one thing and one thing only. How much did you increase sales? What was the total dollar amount in revenue that you generated? From a programmer’s standpoint in IT, you may have to develop a very complex matrix in which there are 20 or 25 measurements that all relate to how well they are doing their jobs.”
By being clear with the foundation, that he wanted everyone to have a set of metrics they had to follow, things began to take shape at the company.
“Through an awful lot of communication and some confrontation, we were able to develop a series of protocols and objective measurements that everyone agreed to,” DeVito says.