Stewardship, 2nd Edition

Confusing Boss Evaluations with Performance

Everyone likes the idea of pay for performance, but most of us have rarely experienced it. We most often get paid on the basis of how our boss evaluates us. This is more accurately called “pay for compliance.” One human being’s evaluation of another is fundamentally subjective. We try to overcome subjectivity by using numbers to rate each other. We try to be objective in what we look at and pick hard-nosed business objectives to evaluate. Still, it is very difficult to directly attribute real organizational outcomes to the actions of a single individual. Even when we think we can measure a job, like with the dollar volume produced by a salesperson, we can see that sales productivity is a much more complicated ...