The Importance of Specific, Quantifiable, Measurable, and Objective Criteria when Creating Performance Models
When using job match assessments to improve the selection and promotion process within an organization, success will depend largely upon how current top performers are identified. Since the process is designed to help an organization select candidates who share the same job-related characteristics of their top performers, misidentification of those critical characteristics by misidentifying members of that group can lead to poor results and the selection of candidates who do not perform well.
Ask any manager who his or her top performers are and you’ll usually get a quick answer. However, ask for the basis of that selection and you may be surprised how fuzzy or imprecise the criteria are upon which they make that determination. It’s not unusual to discover that managers have no measurable, repeatable criteria for identifying this most important group of employees!
In some jobs, specific, quantifiable, measurable, and objective criteria are relatively easy to identify. A salesperson, for example, may be measured on sales production (units, dollars, profit, etc.). Appropriate measures for sales performance may also include calls made per unit of time, customer service measures, or revenue growth. Performance in other jobs may not be as easy to measure. For example, what are the metrics for a top performing social worker? Or, how do we measure performance of a researcher in a pharmaceutical company where 20 years of research by 50 people may go into the development of a single new drug?
Often, when faced with the task of identifying performance measures in a field with soft outputs or very long-term outputs, many managers fall back on personal likes and dislikes, personality conflicts or lack of conflicts, or other measures with little relationship to their company’s goals, profitability, or long-term success.
Recognition of these challenges has resulted in attempts to make evaluation more objective. A favorite tactic in these settings is supervisory rating scales whereby supervisors rate incumbents on one or more dimensions thought critical to performance on a numerical scale that may run from three to 10 points. The outcome of such ratings may look objective as we tend to associate decimal numbers with objectivity; e.g., “She scored a 2.7 of a possible three!” Unfortunately, an analysis of range compression (where everyone scores in a one-point range of a possible three) and interrater reliability raises serious questions about the validity and utility of these procedures.
Bottom line – if the process of selecting criteria is flawed, the outcome will be equally flawed with serious consequences for both the organization and the employees affected. So, what can a manager do to avoid these pitfalls and select top performers on the basis of specific, quantifiable, measurable, and objective criteria? Fortunately, since the issues in selecting top performers for job fit assessment are essentially the same as those surrounding the entire topic of performance appraisal, current literature is rich with sources offering guidance. One resource is Douglas W. Hubbard’s book, How to Measure Anything – Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. Another source would, of course, be Great Lakes Profiles, Inc. since we’ve been helping organizations identify those critical criteria since 1991.