Evils of Corporate Life

It's time for PMP or Performance Management Process for those who don't work at my company. I'm convinced PMP is something evil thought up by top leadership way back when just to torment the employees. Don't ever let them use the same form twice! "They" said. Make as many pieces of paper as possible to complete! "They" said. Very evil indeed.

In my company we do Mid-Years in June and Year Ends in late October/early November (so predict what you’ll do for the last 1 to 1 ½ months and make sure you do it). The PMP process is: fill out your goals, complete your development plan and then condense it all into the mid-year or year end form so someone can claim to read it all. OK, to be fair, I've had leaders who do read it all. Then leadership has alignment meetings to discuss your rating. To really benefit from the alignment process, all leaders in your organization better at least know your name and/or your leader better be able to market you well After being read and aligned, your leader gives you input and the forms are filed away for eternity or until you quit, whichever comes first.

In a perfect world, each employee is keeping track of their goal accomplishment and leadership examples each month. If the employee is thinking, it’s tracked on the correct forms. This is not a perfect world.

Goals. This form has become so ridiculous it's not even funny anymore. On top of a cumbersome form, the goals are fed down from the very top of senior management with each level of in-between adding their piece. By time it gets to me (you know, the worker bee level) the goals, tasks and measures are so convoluted VP areas must have 4-8 hour meetings to figure them out! Hmmm...sounds productive to me. Each quarter we add our accomplishments to "our" form which is fed back up. Now really, do you think the SVP is going to notice MY project submitted the correct forms????? Last year my VP took the team's goal results and added to his leader's goals. I looked at the final form for Q1 while trying to associate Q2 with my department's accomplishments -- not a SINGLE result from my deparment in Q1 was on the form!! So why are we doing this???

Development Plans. The plan is supposed to be mine. Seems like a reasonable thought. My plan for my career. However, you must have it in a special format (again, one that changes every year or so) which is not the most user friendly. Wouldn't it make more sense for my career development plan to be usable by me in a format understood by me?? Go figure - that would make us happy and productive.

And then there are the dreaded Mid-Year and Year-End forms. Some groups go official and use each while some just use the Year End form (at Year End you just copy & paste from the mid-year anyway). How it's filled out depends on your leader. Some want bullet points, some want small novels. How many read it all? Isn't tempting to add something fun in the middle to see if they really pick up on it? Like all those reports we publish....wait, that's another blog :)

Granted keeping track of your development and your accomplishments and having goals is a good thing. Otherwise you just plod along day after day with no direction. However, does it have to be such a cumbersome process? To truly do justice to your PMP, be sure to slot at LEAST 8 hours to do it or hope you have a leader who likes to the point bullet lists!