Reflective Learning and the value of Performance Appraisals

First full evening back at uni - new classroom, new faces, and some new concepts, but mostly building on themes visited in the past. Once all the usual introductions and housekeeping pieces had been dispensed with, it was down to business with reflective thinking, learning styles (Kolb again), their application in the workplace and a brief touch on distributive leadership in groups. The 3* things I took from the evening were:

1. The value of reflection in developing people and ideas

Kolb told me yet again that I'm an Activist (someone who gets stuck into a new project without concerning themselves with the details or potential pitfalls along the way). Reflective behaviours are my weakest learning tools (unusual for a historian?) so I approached this topic warily. However, going through the concepts of Reflexive Thinking - thinking specifically about successes, challenges, objectives and the actions which caused these to come about - and discussing how this could be applied to improve productivity and relationships in the workplace took me back to a thought I'd had the other day about how much of my life at the moment is spent receiving information rather than creating it. It made me think again about how I need to exercise that part of my mind a bit more, and perhaps attempt to sell it a bit more at work. It's certainly something I deploy when trying to get the answer I want from somebody I'm giving advice to.

2. The disputed value of performance appraisals between managers, jobholders, and HR professionals

It popped up as a bit of a salient topic, this, but it is the one that will stay in my mind because of how frequently it crops up at work - from managers, staff and senior managers. When people talk about appraisals, it is almost always shorthand for the document that HR sends out and expects back from each member of staff, rather than what it should be, which is a framework by which managers can measure and shape somebody's performance. One person in the group said that they felt appraisals in their organisation were little more than a paper(less - it was completed online) exercise that bore little relation performance management in the workplace. Another person felt in contrast that their appraisal process was a valuable one, particularly their Personal Development Plan. It was discussed how different staff gained different amounts of good from the process depending upon the attitudes of the manager and the jobholder and how transparently the process tied into reward. It reminded me to make sure I write up the HR Assistant's objectives and achievements for the last quarter, and to check with some other managers, particularly operational managers, at work to see how much they value the appraisal process.

3. The concept of Distributive Leadership

I'm looking into this one as we speak, because it was only mentioned in passing, so I know almost nothing about it. But it sounds from the articles I've picked up that it holds some interesting ideas for organisation development, even if it's contested as to whether it exists, let alone works. The (very) basic thrust appears to be that if you push leadership responsibility down through the organisation, your teams work more effectively together. More on that as I take it in, though.

The only other outcome I feel worth mentioning is the sense of weary deja vu with Harvard referencing (which is coming up in a few weeks). For my undergraduate degree we were allowed to reference in any way we saw fit, as long as it was clear where the source had come from. I feel that the University of Greenwich (and I think it is them this time, rather than the CIPD) places greater emphasis on how the information is presented over and above the merit or use of what is actually said. This disappointed me last year; it disappoints me no less this year. In the University's defence however, there are still people coming into the course who aren't clear on the various academic referencing styles, but again I refer back to my preference at spending time looking at the value of what someone's saying, rather than how they've referenced it.

* I chose 3 points because it focuses my attention on the things that stuck in my mind; each additional point beyond will be harder to follow and less valuable to refer back to.

Hofstede's National Culture Research and Handy's Cultures

We covered organisation culture this evening. How cultures are made, the different types, how culture can (or can't) be changed, the kind of cultures people prefer and the ones they don't.

Geert Hofstede (I'm going to resist the urge to stick a "van" in there at exam time, it couldn't be more Dutch) conducted research in 1980 in the form of employee surveys across the international divisions of IBM to find out what cultural differences could be identified across the organisation. The four variables were:

Long Power Distance - Short Power Distance (how different are subordinates from their immediate superiors)
Individualism - Collectivism (how likely are employees likely to put collective interests before their own)
High Uncertainty Avoidance - Low Uncertainty Avoidance (how comfortable is a culture with taking on the unknown)
Masculine - Femine (How agressive, target driven and activist is a culture contrasted with its empathetic, responsible and measured characteristics)

Of course this is a hugely Western liberal capitalist classification of culture, and the quantifiable results are only applicable to IBM, not the rest of the world. Also, the world has changed hugely since 1980 (fax, internet, low cost air travel, satellite communication) so you could question whether discriminating culture as "nations" is a valid excercise when an organisation's workforce could be scattered all over the globe and 6 months later have changed completely again. It also ignores resource and political legacies and the different objectives a global organisation might have in different countries. But apparently it's a test that has endured the test of time.

We covered the Pluralist/Elitist/Unitary/Radical/Marxist descriptions of power - it's Mr Gardner's AS Level politics and Sheffield's POL103 all over again!

The other nugget I prised from the seam of this evening's lecture was Handy's four cultural descriptions of organisations, viz:

Role-based: Forms! Tick boxes! Policies! If the idea of any of those gives you a wet dream, that's you.
Power-based: The Cult of Personality (like the song) Charisma and domination prevail in the hands of a few.
People-based: People get together and act out of mutual self interest
Task-based: You get the job done, all else is peripheral.

Open vs closed questioning

One of the skills that I took away with me from my two days of sequential training (it's a CIPD term for a training away day, I don't know why they call them that) was a concious appreciation of open, closed and probing questions. It's not something I think about at all in day to day conversation - fortunately almost all the people I encounter are easy enough to talk to and if they're not, I can make my excuses and take my conversation elsewhere!

But listening this evening to Jeremy Paxman and Jonathan Ross interviewing politicians and celebrities respectively this evening on the television (well, the iPlayer anyway), it made me think about how you can steer conversation the way you would like it to go by framing your questions carefully and having follow up questions primed to ensure that the answers you get are either informative or entertaining, depending on what you're aiming to achieve.

I suppose I'm lucky in never having had to really think much about how to control conversation other than to be aware of when I'm talking too much, when I've interrupted and when I've repeated something I've told someone already - I hope I'm sensitive enough to realise when I should speak, and when I should listen (even if I don't always do as I should ;-) ).

Financial ratios

Mmmmmmmmm! Sounds good doesn't it? This evening was spent partly getting to grips with various profitability, liquidity and investment ratios, partly forgetting what I was talking about half way through a presentation. Repetition, big wavy arm gestures and a moderate amount of verbal incontinence do not great speechmaking make. Still, at least it's out of the way now!

Turns out that accountants have ratios to measure all sorts of things about a business - from how good they are in days at paying debtors and receiving from creditors, to whether a company's swimming up to its eyballs in debt, or shifting stock faster than my brother shifts beer. All this information can be used to compare performance with other companies.

My dad tells me that in a small business he prefers to use common sense to work out if things are going right - a quick look at your balance sheet and P&L is enough to give you a feel for if life is good, or if you're in a bad place. (Couldn't resist)