Dec 5th, 2008
The Juniper Values
How do you find out what are truly valued in an organization? Everyone who has been with the organization knew its values implicitly, but rarely can anyone articulate them.
I decided to stack rank my organization several months ago. I, however, did not know how to. Should I rank them by their IQ, EQ, or the average of them? What about leadership, teamwork, communication, or other soft skills? Does Juniper value engineering prowess above all else? Or, like some companies, verbal eloquence?
I asked a team to decide the categories of evaluating individuals. I also asked them to weigh each category. Four of them worked 2 months on this assignment. They talked to many in my organization and discussed the topic at length.
Drum roll…
35% productivity, 15% creativity, 25% people skills, and 25% dependability.
Ella, the team lead, showed the similarity to the Juniper Way. High-Quality results come from productivity. Agreement is strongly linked to people skills. The dependability is the cornerstone for relationship. In addition, engineers always value creativity.
We then ask every managers to score their employees according to this system. There were intensive discussions on the differences of each other’s scoring style, but almost none on the categories, or the weights.
Now I have a consistent performance model across my entire organization and a common language to communicate. This system will reward people for their productivity, people skills, dependability, and creativities. More importantly, it rewards those who are most balanced across all 4 categories, instead of those who are unproportionally strong in one, but weak in others.
I emphasized that the system is designed to be 85% accurate in assessing employee performance. It is a non-goal to be more accurate; doing so risk replacing judgment with processes. This process met two objectives: I now have a concrete value-system that is consistent with the Juniper Way; I also have a consistent and quick methodology to identify the best talents in my org.
I anticipate this process to evolve as managers work on it. For the 1st time deployment at Juniper, it surpassed my expectation.
Thank you. Ella & team.
I wish that companies would do away with the performance review. I agree with the notion that they promote competition, destroy collaboration, weed out good workers and negatively impact the bottom line. There are alternatives.
For more information on why they are bad and what to do instead:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/performance_review
@Aaron
I did not say perf review “promote competition, destroy collaboration, weed out good workers and negatively impact the bottom line.” Whomever you agreed with, that was not me.
It is interesting indeed that the team came up with the Juniper Way values.
It’s also interesting that you’re rewarding those who are “most balanced across all 4 categories.” That’s certainly the way preformance reviews normally work: here’s n things you’re supposed to be good at, some of them are good, the others are not, let’s work on bringing the weaknesses up to standard.
There’s a body of research that has led to a theory, called “Strengths-Based Management,” that suggests a different approach. To vastly oversimplify, what the data say is that the most effective managers would say, here are the things you’re good at, let’s make them even better, and as for the things you’re not so good at, let’s split the job description in such a way that someone who is good at those things can do those bits.
Of course, there’s more to it than that. They distinguish between talents, which they believe to be essentially unchangeable, and skills which are things someone can learn fairly easily. The division-of-labor approach is recommended for the talents, not for the skills.
Anyway, a different way of thinking about things. Check out Marcus Buckingham’s First, Break All The Rules.
@Spencer
There is a difference between managing individuals and conducting performance evaluation for the mass. To coach an Olympic hopeful, we aim for single even gold medal than decathlon.
For a large enough population that most do not have a remote shot at qualifying Olympics, the goal should be getting them all “healthy” or “fit,” hence a balanced approach.