Page 179 - The McKinsey Mind

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154 The McKinsey Mind

Some organizations are particularly hard to change because
their employees have developed routines and even entire person-
alities around the formal and informal procedures and incentive
programs in their organization.
Performance assessment should meet three criteria. It should be
objective, be based on expectations that were set in advance, and
account only for events that were within the control of the person
you are mentoring. Objectivity is paramount if the mentoring
process is to be of any benefit to the employee. You won’t neces-
sarily like everyone you mentor, but you musn’t let personal feel-
ings get in the way of doing your job. In addition, if you don’t
communicate your expectations ahead of time, the individual will
be flying blind; you can’t expect him to meet goals under such cir-
cumstances. And don’t blame the person you mentor for things
beyond his control: if the client goes bankrupt or the economy
plunges into recession, that’s unlikely to be his fault.
Finally, think about the frequency and type of feedback in your
organization. Many people automatically assume that develop-
ment comments need to be negative, pointing out what is wrong
and then suggesting ways to change. Positive comments, however,
play a critical role in development as well.
Let’s explore the impact of positive and negative comments on
performance, using a graph to illustrate a hypothesis based on our
own experience. As shown in Figure 6-1, the performance curves
vary based on the nature of the comment. For simplicity, think neg-
ative or positive; a negative comment points out a weakness, and
a positive comment recognizes a strength. By the way, negative
comments that are communicated in a nice tone are not positive
comments.
The messages from this chart and hypothesis are as follows.
First, a few negative comments are important to influence perfor-