If a manager’s performance evaluation is based primarily on their reports’ evaluations, then there’s a conflict of interest: The manager is incentivized to inflate their reports’ evaluations because doing so directly improves their own evaluation.
> A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly).
Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad. Which it is, because you're compounding errors in individual evaluations. These are hard to do, because you're trying to distribute team's achievements between contributions from particular people. I say that `evaluate(sum(impact for each IC))` is easy and robust. In fact simpler than an evaluation for a single IC, because you don't have to distribute anything and a lot of things that are external distractions for ICs fall into responsibility of managers.
No, I’m not. I’m arguing that it’s unwise to trust someone to do an evaluation who has a personal stake in the result of that evaluation.
Looking at how well a team works together to advance company goals is an important factor in any evaluation system, but using that as the only factor in a manager’s evaluation is as shortsighted as evaluating a software engineer solely on how many LOC they produced.
In practice, overall team performance should be a factor in IC evaluations as it’s reflective of various hard-to-quantify contributions of the team members. It should also be a somewhat larger factor in a manager’s evaluation, with the weight between IC and team performance shifting from mostly-IC at the bottom of the hierarchy to mostly-team at the C-suite level.
My concern with this is: How do you correct for luck/easy tasks?
It’s hard to compare the performance of departments unless you have been inside and seen the challenges they’ve been facing.