In a famous 1957 article on

hashtag

HBR

, Douglas McGregor stated his famous “Theory Y” approach to management: most employees want to perform well and will do so if supported properly. Why then we spent time focusing on past performance, instead of

hashtag

peopledevelopment

? Why did we provide personal goals, given the high amount of team-based work most of us are conducting? Assessing people performance is very hard when business cycles are stable enough to establish goals you can measure performance against, as we are all subject to cognitive biases. What about when cycles are not stable and jobs become increasingly complex? Can you really go back and assess whether it was possible to do better given the context where an employee was in six months ago?

The agile manifesto outlined several key values to be more effective on the job: responding to change over following a plan, collaborating, having self-organizing teams, reflecting on how to improve regularly. This beautiful article from HBR summarizes why most innovative companies have dropped appraisal.

hashtag

measurewhatmatters

by

John Doerr

provides two key tools to adopt the agile values and deliver:

hashtag

OKR

to set ambitious goals, get people onboard, align and track how you are progressing towards them

hashtag

CFR

to support continuous improvement