Thanks for this article. I relate a lot, both with the fact that sometimes people are progressed when they are failing in their current job and also with the fact that finding the right metric system for a team is hard. I am not sure I mailed it in my team yet as the goal from higher management is changing all the time.
That is indeed a sticky problem. One thing I tried very hard to do was to get management to agree to the metrics upfront so that we didn't churn the teams. And if they asked for a change, I documented it and dated it so that we could keep track. The issue here is misaligned incentives for upper management to move the goal posts whenever they want without accountability and that makes the day to day teams frustrated.
Great post! A misaligned incentive I've come across frequently at multiple companies is the conflict between wanting to reward immediate impact in performance reviews but also wanting people to care about long-term impact. It's often the case that people will prioritize a short-term goal (even when it's sometimes harmful to the long-term health of a product/company) because prioritizing long-term impact won't get you the same kudos until it pays off in years rather than weeks/months. Most top-down organizational attempts I've seen to address this conflict (e.g. setting milestone goals, changing company values, adjusting performance review frequencies, etc) haven't really been effective in my opinion.
Thanks for this article. I relate a lot, both with the fact that sometimes people are progressed when they are failing in their current job and also with the fact that finding the right metric system for a team is hard. I am not sure I mailed it in my team yet as the goal from higher management is changing all the time.
That is indeed a sticky problem. One thing I tried very hard to do was to get management to agree to the metrics upfront so that we didn't churn the teams. And if they asked for a change, I documented it and dated it so that we could keep track. The issue here is misaligned incentives for upper management to move the goal posts whenever they want without accountability and that makes the day to day teams frustrated.
Great post! A misaligned incentive I've come across frequently at multiple companies is the conflict between wanting to reward immediate impact in performance reviews but also wanting people to care about long-term impact. It's often the case that people will prioritize a short-term goal (even when it's sometimes harmful to the long-term health of a product/company) because prioritizing long-term impact won't get you the same kudos until it pays off in years rather than weeks/months. Most top-down organizational attempts I've seen to address this conflict (e.g. setting milestone goals, changing company values, adjusting performance review frequencies, etc) haven't really been effective in my opinion.