If you work in a typical corporate setup, you can’t escape the annual corporate sporting event that you will be dragged into – appraisals. Love it or hate it, participation is mandatory. Suddenly, for a few days, all camaraderie moves to the back burner. You find yourself competing with the same colleagues who helped you achieve all the wonderful things as a team. Now it’s each man for himself, of course in a gender-neutral way.
In several industries, relative (or bell-curve based) performance ratings are common — ‘Exceeds expectation’, ‘Meets expectation’, ‘Personifies the principle of plug-and-pray’. This makes managers responsible for appraisals see it as a statistical exercise. If they dole out the goodies to the best(?) performer in their team, then somebody from within the same team has to end up with the short end of the stick.
Reuters
The pressure to slot employees on a relative scale also creates another challenge — converting a highly subjective evaluation process (an art) into measurable ratings (a science). Your manager, who was meant to be your mentor, is forced to visualise you and all your colleagues somewhere on the bell-curve. The end result is similar to reality shows where the contestants get glowing comments from the judges on their brilliant performance and for pointing their toes during the difficult lifts. But when it comes to actual numbers, the warm smiling folks sitting on the other side of the table, turn extremely conservative.
So what’s the big prize for the winners who go through the rigours? Several things actually, but the two that stand out are – an increment and hopefully a new designation (promotion!).
The increment could still be something of real, tangible and universal value – not just within the company but outside as well. You could tell your colleagues, family or the head-hunter that you get (say) Rs 10 lakh and they’d know exactly what that number means. Well, almost.
But what about your designation? Is it really all that it’s made out to be? Beyond setting an internal pecking order within the organisation, from an employee’s perspective, what is the utility of this tag? Are designations across (or for that matter within) companies truly comparable?
Other than gaining bragging rights in your immediate social circle, there must be a meatier reason why you fought with your boss for that new designation. Like how the new position really changes what you will be doing in the following year, the new skills you would gain to make you grow as a professional, or the influence it might have on your compensation.
Over the years, designations have become more sophisticated, and confusing. Everyone who was anyone wants a CXO designation and CFO does sound so much better than Finance Head. Companies that wanted to project an innovative image came up with creative designations no one had heard about. Does ‘Chief Happiness Officer’ sound familiar?
Bigger companies have another problem — too many layers of hierarchy. So, cryptic codes work in conjunction with familiar English labels to describe designations. So you might be in the ‘management cadre’ at the ‘M2′ level. The pain of cooking up nice sounding designations for every intermediate level isn’t even worth it in bigger companies.
When the consulting division of one of my former companies was acquired by a bigger company, we retained our nice former designations (for cosmetic reasons). But something more interesting (at least for us) happened and I’m not sure if the credit goes to the senior management for their brilliant negotiating skills or the hassled Human Resources teams struggling to align the HR policies, designations and compensation structures. Most guys from the acquired team got one of those cryptic codes (L6, L7, L8), which according to long-timers from the bigger company, were higher than they deserved to be. Beyond the designation, their scope of work, salary structures, LIPID profiles had very little in common.
If I were to introduce a new episode of the popular improv TV show, I might say – “Welcome to Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ the show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. That’s right, the points are just like corporate designations — motivational, costs us nothing and we’ll never run out of supplies.”
What’s your take on this? Does your designation have a ‘universal’ appeal? Do you think it adequately justifies the scope of work you handle? Do you think your salary matches your designation? On second thoughts, skip that last question.
Sameer Kamat is the author of ‘Beyond The MBA Hype’ and the founder of www.mbacrystalball.com. You can connect with him on Twitter @kamatsameer