Chimpanzee or Bonobo
Are we encouraging competition or collaboration in our performance evaluations
I’ve been thinking a lot about performance evaluations recently…
The school year just ended, and my partner, a professor, had students asking for the class to be curved. He had to explain, as he always does, what a curve means. It means that you shift the distribution of grades such that the mean is a C. Therefore, if the distribution is symmetric, approximately half of the individuals will perform better, and the other half will perform worse. Half will fail and half will pass. So, if the average was previously 95%, many who did incredibly well in a class and mastered the material may suddenly be at risk of failing and be interpreted as not having truly grasped the material. Likewise, if the average before curving was 25%, individuals who were failing will now be seen as having mastered the material, when in reality, that may not be the case. Is the goal of giving a grade to rank students against each other, or is it to measure an individual’s understanding of the material? After hearing how this works, most students seem to suddenly lose interest in having the class scores be curved.
It's also performance evaluation season at work, and there has been a public push for us to rank individuals.
And I’ll ask again, is the goal to rank employees - implicitly or explicitly pitting them against each other, or is the goal to celebrate the successes of an individual and help them see where they can grow in their career and abilities? Are we chimpanzees or bonobos?
Jobs, particularly in academia with promotion and tenure, often rely on metrics, and metrics that can be misleading. Those metrics are often very simplified, like the h-index, or the h-alpha index - which is what produced the best title for a paper ever, and an important question that I think is relevant here. Are we trying to instill and promote competition or collaboration within our community?
“If you want to create a culture that will produce breakthrough results, collaboration trumps competition by a long shot.” - Competition Or Collaboration: Which Will Help Your Team Produce The Best Results? by Shawn Kent Hayashi. Forbes Magazine
Healthy competition can be beneficial. Friendly competition can move us forward. Hypercompetition, or competition focused on winning at all costs, can … cost you everything.
Collaboration - well, it’s hard to find anything negative written in the literature or research about cooperation. I suppose some would say that in collaboration, you might not see the drive to push forward. However, that has not been my experience, and that doesn’t seem to actually pan out in the research I could find on the topic.
So, when we try to build innovative teams at work, what does the research show that we need? You need Psychological safety. If you want people to put forward new ideas, ideas that initially might seem out of the ordinary, or to feel safe putting themselves out there. In addition to this, if you are in a competitive environment, you might hold your even solid ideas close to your chest so that no one else will steal them, taking the credit and the top ranking from you. Being in an environment where you feel confident sharing and building upon good or even great ideas, and collaborating, is necessary for innovation.
Okay, so why have I talked about this instead of the performance evaluations? Well, because they go hand in hand. If I want to build a world-class, strong, and innovative team, we need the right incentives, and more importantly, we need to avoid the wrong incentives. And that starts with, in many aspects, performance evaluations.
Performance evaluations are check-ins—times for reflection and to identify any roadblocks and celebrate and remember any successes. And apparently, in some people’s minds, also rank your employees against each other, even if they are working together, or on entirely different projects/missions, which isn’t, say, comparing apples to apples. So, do you curve your performance evaluations? I would argue that it is the wrong question and defeats the purpose of the performance evaluation.
Ranking team members pits them against each other. You start to have internal competition. People stop working together as they need to make sure that they are seen as the “key player” to get that bonus, or in the worst of cases, to keep their job if only the top so many people can continue.
When dealing with highly effective, highly self-motivated world-class individuals, they will push themselves hard without any outside motivators. When you add pressure and ranking, you create an environment that fosters burnout, often in conjunction with a toxic work environment.
I believe that friendly competition can help push us forward; we need to ensure that those stakes aren’t dire, or really, set up to tear a team apart. I don’t want my team working against each other; I want them to be uplifting one another. I want them to celebrate each other’s successes and learn from each other, leveraging each other’s talents.
If, instead, I have to rank a team that has worked hard together, all of whom have scored 100% on the test, and in turn impact their potential career progression and paycheck, that is fundamentally unfair. If there was an MVP, sure, it’s great to celebrate and call out their importance to the work. However, success is not built on individuals. Discoveries and innovations are not done by individuals or lone geniuses, and the sooner we recognise this, the sooner we can focus on building successful teams.
So what is one to do…
This year, we have the freedom to continue the tradition of using our performance evaluations as check-ins. Identify the roadblocks, celebrate successes, and lay out a path to help uplift and support everyone’s individual progress.
Next year…
Well, I’ll be pushing to do what we know is right for maintaining a world-class group of scientists and engineers. I don’t see any other way forward.
The Cosmos and Nature, holding tightly to their secrets of how they work, provide enough of a competitor. My team needs to work together, join forces, and collaborate with those in academia, industry, and government agencies both here and abroad. Only then will we be able to advance our understanding of how we fit into this world and how we can live and work more effectively in this universe. And I won’t use metrics or methods that hinder that progress or hurt my team.
Unfortunate but true !