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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

I spent 5 years as a full time consultant building 'Human Capital Management' software for enterprise companies. I learned many things about enterprise dynamics in those 5 years, but my biggest takeaway analytically is that performance management is backwards. The people actually doing the work are graded by their managers, and in very few cases are managers formally reviewed by their employees. I can't speak for small companies, but enterprises would do much better if the employees had a formal process to get a manager on some sort of performance track - without the fear of going above their head in an informal process.

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I think regularly scheduled (annual? bi-annual?) skip-level meetings would be a good approach to this. A skip-level meeting is one where the employee meets with his boss's boss.

BTW, the skip-level concept is something I gleaned from the Manager Tools podcast. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning how to manage better (or even, just, understand organizational behavior).

http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/04/skip-levels

Semco in Brazil does (or used to) performance reviews of management by peers and subordinates. I found the book wrote by the company's "CEO"/owner fascinating: "Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace", not sure why I don't see it mentioned often in HN/startup sites.

I like the concept of putting managers on some sort of performance track. That is an interesting idea. I wonder what organizations would look like if this was allowed to happen.

I imagine that the org structure would flatten out a bit, and the stereotypical 'office space' managers would be shaking in their boots. The employees of these organisations would feel empowered and generally be happier - but I won't speculate on whether that would improve productivity for the company (though I have seen research that says it would).

The reality is that managers are performance managed, just what their teams think isn't normally one of the metrics because many organisations by and large don't care that much.

Speaking as a manager you'd be surprised (actually scrub that, you wouldn't) how often when I raise concerns the team has the instruction comes back "screw what the team thinks or wants, just do X" (where X flies in the face of what the team want and best practice but supports what the screaming customer and short term revenue demands).

Organisations that genuinely care about the staff I don't think would change much, those who don't won't ever do it so it's kind of moot.

>I wonder what organizations would look like if this was allowed to happen.

Probably microscopic shitstorms, not large ones because only a minority is affected. But in the long run it would probably change everything in organizations with management problems. I think hiring policies would also change a lot.

How would you handle employee review in such a case? Managers could no longer review employees, it would cause too much gaming the system in either retaliatory or you scratch my back I'll scratch yours sort of rigging. Not that I disagree with you.

In my opinion the reviewing needs to be led and executed by HR. (Or by a manager that is at least one level higher - but forget that, those folks don't have time anyway)

That HR doesn't understand what you are doing is a bad excuse, depending on the job you might be the only person knowing exactly what you are doing. Anyway, I feel like the manager doing the review is absolutely unfair - at least not in a sufficiently large organization.

>it would cause too much gaming the system in either retaliatory

This is already the case. When your manager does the review, your review is limited by the manager.

I would do periodic organization culture assessments by an outside and professional firm. Things like, who is respected, who is hated, who is consider incapable, who people enjoy working with. etc.

As a consultant I worked for several large IT organizations, and I got to see a lot of very toxic people. Some were really high up, some middle managers. They were assholes with everybody but I bet they were very nice to their own bosses, and worked very hard at masking their incompetence. Those people can really screw the organizational culture.

Are you of the opinion that there is an acceptable level of gaming the system today?

You might be interested in this similar concept:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback

Do note, that most big companies claiming they do 360 degree feedback don't. It is much like a lot of companies claiming they do "agile".

I really like this idea, the peer review system in valve is probably the closest to the best system I have heard of.

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