Page 133 - The Drucker Lectures

114 [ The Drucker Lectures

that’s the only place where we have results. But maybe it would
be a good idea if I at least were forced to think about it. And
when the employee or the employee group comes back to you,
don’t say “yes” immediately, and don’t say “no.” It is your right
and your duty to approve or not to approve the goals, but think
it through.
Let me say that the appraisal needs to start out against preset
targets. Now, nine times out of ten, when 18 months later you sit
down and look at how this person has performed, you will find
that the goals have changed—that three weeks into the year, you
called him in and said, “Joe, we have an urgency,” or “The plan
was based on your obtaining new equipment, and you didn’t get
it.” Still, at least one knows what one deviates from.
The next thing to say is that once the employee has thought
through his or her performance and comes to you for a critique,
focus on achievement and contribution before you focus on non-
performance. The impairments, the bad habits, the areas of ig-
norance, the things where improvement is needed—they will all
come out. You will not have to point them out. You might say,
“You may be a little too harsh on yourself here.” Or: “This is quite
a respectable performance. But in this area, I think you take it a
little bit too easy. This is important, and it’s not good enough just
to get by.” And so put the burden of setting objectives and of ap-
praising against them on the individual or the group.
To be clear: There are some areas where you’ll have to ad-
dress a group. For example, it is almost impossible to evaluate in-
dividuals in a research department because so much of the work
is a team effort. At a pharmaceutical company, the initial stages
of pure research are largely individual. But then you get to the
stage of developing a class of compounds. And there you have
the biochemist and the pharmacologist and the medical people
and so on, and you’re really talking about a team. In that case,
one sits down every three years, perhaps, and says, “What have