Lots of complaints on here about supervisors. Have you ever considered the problem is your KO feedback? Are your KOs giving the surprise message that blindsided you? Are your KOs thinking they are doing you a favor by not giving any real improvement feedback or bs feedback such as he needs that next great assignment to grow leaving it to your supervisor to come up with something to tell you? Having read thousands of KOs over the years I can tell you it is very rare to receive any meaningful KO feedback as a supervisor from the KOs employees select. Many don’t even take the time to respond and provide anything. I often have to pester people to tell me something, anything and when I push for something that actually makes sense to tell my employees they are incapable of doing it. I personally think feedback shouldn’t be anonymous.
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I have always wondered why we even have KOs. If you name someone who is in direct competition with you, you run the risk they’ll downplay your contributions. This doesn’t always happen, but I’ve seen it happen often enough in much less stressful times. Right now it probably happens a lot more often.
@llc+1icTqhbB telling someone their improvement opportunity is to get a new assignment which they can’t do unless they quit doesn’t help someone improve. If you’re trying to send a message to their supervisor fine but people on this board complain they aren’t getting meaningful feedback and the group consensus based on posts seems to be to not provide any. So do you want your supervisors to be your only source of feedback? People are complaining about that too.
As a supervisor, I wish EM would get rid of KOs. Many of the KOs are "buddies", "pals", "friends", or on some committee (like BEST, GOAL, WIN, etc) with the person. A positive set of KOs may just mean that you picked a bunch of friends and your supervisor didnt catch on, or it can also be that you did some good work; it could be that you are so vanilla thay no one has any improvement ideas because you are "just there." A lot of the feedback is so poorly written and poorly thought out that it is garbage. So, stop putting a lot of faith that KO should be the reason you move up.
Supervisors who work with their people know what they can work on and do not need KO to help their people improve. Overall, the whole assessment system is silly as he!! and KOs are the part of the whole mess.
Yes, there are many supervisors who do not get to know their people or their work. That's where we need change. Slower moves through all jobs helps everyone. Also, if you are someone that wants to move every 18-24 months, you are part of the problem why many supervisors don't trust KOs. You have not been around enough to trust that the KOs have any validity.
The majority of KO feedback is a joke at best. I’ve seen supervisors contradict KO if it’s too positive just to ensure the ranking narrative fits. On the flip side, during the sessions opposing supervisors will demand to see the KO looking for any hint to drive down a persons rank while preserving their chosen ones.
Your supervisor knows well before the sessions who they will try and fight for…it’s an ugly process.
Me, personally, doing about 10 KOs a year follow this policy:
Make sure your KO makes a deep dig at the individual's supervisor and manager.
"Skills are unrecognized and under-utilized"."
"Superordination concerns have constrained the entire business area below expectations".
"This person is not a toady, but a highly professional and technically astute individual."
But a caution: If this KO person is actually on your own team or same business area, you need to simply cut their throat. Just as subtly.
KO is never the problem. KO simply provides fodder for whatever position management wants to take. The spin doctors can extract what they want and exaggerate it either way. It's all a charade.
EMs forced ranking (or whatever word we want to call it now), which forces identification of employees as needing improvement… even when managers and supervisors disagree, is routinely identified as archaic when reading any organizational philosophy text.
If our management is too stupid to be able to think of a better one… like almost every other Fortune 500 company has, it probably means we have the wrong management .
If only we could offshore their jobs, like they are ours!
A few issues with KO feedback. One, many times KO feedback participants are usually selected by employees and those participants are ones that the employee feels they have a great working relationship with. Two, even though anonymous, most people can figure out who provided the feedback by what is written. Three, oftentimes, the KO comes from people in the same CL assessment group, people whom they are competing against. KO feedback is part of the problem with the whole PA system.
“He needs that next great assignment to grow” is code for he has outgrown his current position and is at risk of resigning if you don’t do more for him. Come on! It’s not bs. It’s me telling you that you have something to manage, unless you want your employee to start looking elsewhere.
Why would a K.O. provide any critical feedback, knowing that the assessment system can take any small thing and turn it into ranking fodder?
If I like the person, I am unlikely to point out small things. “Can sometimes get a little bit off topic” can seem like a minor point to the writer, and then it gets snowballed into ‘ineffective communicator’….with broader and more serious implications. No thank you!
If I think the person has a minor improvement item, my job is to be an adult and provide them the feedback privately…..Not rat them out in ranking.
So OP, you sound like a supervisor. You should know this already. Self-respecting people don’t provide fodder to a broken system.
Curious what you would replace it with? Should everyone be paid the same or receive the same raise each year?
No - I’m pretty sure the fact that we have a system that demotivates most of the corp is the problem… and that we tie pay and promotions to it.