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184 Just Promoted!

nately. Sometimes an individual might provide valuable insight or, at the least,
contrasting ideas that can be helpful for comparisons.
The steering committee should discuss each task force’s report in detail with
the task force chair. If the chair is a member of the steering committee, also
include at least one other member of the task force. To undergird the morale of
the task force, to underscore the value of wide participation, and to ensure that
task force members are heard, they should have an opportunity to appear before
the steering committee and discuss their report whenever possible. Steering
committee members should have read the report and be prepared to discuss it.
Discussion of the report should be the meeting’s focus. The presentation by task
force members should be limited, for example, to a 10- or 15-minute synopsis
of findings, conclusions, and recommendations, followed by a discussion
period. Moreover, as deliberations continue, the steering committee should keep
the task force periodically advised of its thinking and status. It is easy for task
force members to confuse extended deliberations or unforeseen delays with a
lack of interest or rejection of their findings and recommendations.
For one agency, whose work was to evaluate the quality of products to be
sold to the public, product evaluations were conducted by highly educated
reviewers. Their recommendations to approve or disapprove the marketing of
the product passed through three successive levels of management review.
While the overwhelming bulk of the work was done by the first-level review-
ers, who often invested hundreds of hours in their reviews, once the review
was passed on to the next level of management, the original reviewers
remained uninformed about whether their recommendations were supported
or not and which of their analyses were rejected or accepted by the next-level
reviewers. It was as if the product of their hundreds of hours of work disap-
peared into a black hole. It was demoralizing to them, and it contributed to
successively less rigorous reviews. The first-level reviewers would have pre-
ferred rejection to ignorance. Negative feedback was preferable to no feed-
back. For the participatory process to be credible, people must feel that their
input was heard, even if it was ultimately rejected. To feel ignored is worse
than being turned down.

SUMMARY
The nine-target model involves many possible areas of study. Some include
the leadership capabilities of your direct reports and other highly sensitive top-