There are many companies that band the word ‘meritocracy’ around, but what does it mean and what is involved?

Meritocracy is a form of leadership where decisions about an employee’s wage, role, bonuses and the like are made on the merits that that employee presents. Skill, performance, punctuality, experience and enthusiasm are all examples that one might use to measure merit – of course that depends on the decision being made.

A meritocracy is heavily dependent on skills. Not just in the shape of employing and promoting those who have skills over those who don’t – regardless of things like gender, sexuality, age, disability, race and allegiance; but also on the part of those making the decisions.

It’s not easy to assess the skills someone has, nor is it easy to assess the skills that someone might need for a particular scenario. Yet, despite its difficulty many feel they are up to the task.

This can be seen in the somewhat whimsical manor that a lot of companies run interviews. It’s assumed that, if someone is in a certain position, then they must have the appropriate skills. A logical decision, granted, that a team leader – whose job it is to assess and maintain the skills of their charge, might be appropriate.

What if, however, it transpires that one of those very team leaders were themselves employed in a floored process? What if, throughout their tenure, no real attempt is made to confirm their skills, let alone those of their teams? Would that not forgo the benefits of afore mentioned assumption?

How do you know?

Can you tell if a team leader is a skilled team leader – by monitoring their team’s performance?

No, you can say that their team is performing well – but that doesn’t prove that their performance is due to the diligence of the leader. There are many teams that functions well, despite having very poor leadership. In fact, a good team doesn’t need a designated leader, as order is distributed automatically.

Most designated team leaders are in fact team managers.

Most real team leaders are actually part of the team – a well organised and motivated individual within its ranks. They are often over looked, don’t realise themselves, and they are often too busy getting on with it. Real team leaders don’t require a pay rise, a pedestal or an inflated sense of self-importance.

Team managers

A team manager is someone responsible for assessing skill levels, constructing feedback and providing a channel of communication for the team. They are, and rarely need to be, the person motivating and driving the team. You can have someone who is a team manager as well as a team leader – but they are few and far between.

It’s the team manager who, if affective, should be getting involved in meritocratic assessments – like those in interviews.

A good thermometer

Measuring the skills of a team manager, or an interviewer is oft over looked. It’s a scientific process, and should never be approached otherwise.

Perhaps, I try to sell to you a thermometer – a very familiar piece of measuring equipment. You, as a diligent science teacher, cook or anyone else interested in such a purchase might say, “How do I know it is a good thermometer?”
“Well,” I proclaim, “I’ll prove it!”
I take said thermometer and place in hot water, the dial, mercury or digits respond and provide a reading.

Does that prove my thermometer is good?

No, it proves that there is an apparent correlation between the temperature and the response of my instrument, but – it does not prove the instrument is correct and accurate.

You may trust me, and buy in good faith. If you were a particle physicist, however, and you were measuring the energy produced as two atoms collided – you’d want some confirmation. You’d want to make a long series of tests to confirm the accuracy of your new instrument’s design and a guarantee of its quality – or at the very least a seal of approval by some government supported body of professors.

Now, let’s get back to your team managers.

Do you trust that they can make accurate assessments of an individual – to such a skill level, as to do it in one or two hours with the aid of only a clipboard or notepad? Do you trust this, based only on fact that they have made assessments of someone before? Or, do you verify their skills of assessment stand up to scrutiny?

So where’s the merit?

What I’ve said above, can be paraphrased into many attempts as assessing and making decisions on merit. A floor in many businesses, is that they assume they are doing things right. They assume that decisions are based on merit.

That’s not to say that they aren’t doing things right. More, if you don’t assess things correctly and you don’t pay attention to the right principles – it’s all the more likely that you won’t be doing it correctly.

If you can’t assess someone’s skill – then how do you develop it, or promote it or reward it? If your assessments of someone’s skills are inaccurate, then how should you view those decisions based on them?

The problem with meritocracy

There is a major fault in a drive for a more meritocratic organisation, in that more people say, “Yes, that’s a brilliant idea – I love that” – yet rarely do you find someone actually making changes to truly satisfy the needs of a meritocracy – that of true assessment.

Many businesses use productivity incentives, but do they actually work?

Well, quite frankly – in a world were skill, experience and motivation are the key actuators in performance, it’s unlikely. Where it does have a benefit, it’s hard to prove and usually isn’t very significant. The ratio of productivity to incentive doesn’t seem to be very much, and the correlation coefficient will be erratic.

Now, give me my money

Bonuses do motivated for a while, but there are many shortcomings. If it’s late, not enough, withdrawn, doesn’t satisfy expectation or is in some way offset by a negative experience unrelated to it – its benefit is destroyed. If you do it once, it’s is expected again and again. Then, when a decision is made to move away from an incentive – those who benefited from it feel neglected, lost, hard done by and more importantly; they feel that they are now supposed to work less.

Those who don’t realise the direct benefits of incentives – ie those not earning through performance; feel left out, downgraded, disrespected and more importantly they feel – “well, I’m not getting paid more so why should I work harder?”

Incentives don’t last

An unobserved fact about incentives is that they don’t last. Let me clarify: even if the incentive is still administered – eventually it’ll be the norm to be paid an extra £100 per month. It’s no longer an incentive – it’s a deterrent. If I don’t work hard enough, the money I get will be taken away. So, the positive nature of an incentive is mutated in to the negative nature of a deterrent.

When they do create an increase in performance, they mask any other facilitators of development. Good coaching, great training and awesome leadership get confused and can’t be pinpointed. When the motivation derived from incentives build skill and experience – you then start paying bonus for no reason – your now highly skilled worker could perform just as well without the bonus; yet you’d never know. Your hands are tied so you can’t take it away, and they’re still stressed under the pressure to keep earning.

Time to normalise

Reciprocal normalisation is the response to an action that reflects the original action’s nature. Whereby, a positive response is elicited by a positive action, and a negative resonance for a negative action. Transferring to a paradigm that takes advantage of reciprocal normalisation reverses causality, also transferring obligations. Instead of the business being obliged to reward productivity, the employee is obliged to be more productive.

Potentiality is the way forward

Although incentive causes problems when attached to productivity, it can be used for other aspects of a working relationship. Instead of incentivising productivity; incentivise potentiality. This means rewarding those that have the potential to be highly productive – leaving the true productivity factors to be address more effectively with coaching, training and relationship building.

Someone who arrives on time, stays at the workstation and doesn’t have days off sick all the time has much more potential to be productive than someone who is never at their desk, wakes up late and who’s grandma dies every two weeks for 3 years.

This frees up your time to really focus on analysing skill sets, the dynamics of workflow management and ergonomics.

Giving bonuses for being on time, being at your workstations or not being absent is great.
Those who don’t receive their bonuses are highlighted and replaced if changes aren’t made – and as an added bonus the bane of management [shrinkage control] takes care of itself.

Happy workforce

Free of worry, about if they can earn their bonus, staff can become much more introspective and managers don’t have to fight a barrier of ‘bonus depression’ every month.
It’s a big change

I know the above recommendations might sounds ridiculous, but change often does. Waves will be caused, risk will rear its ugly head – but once you’re there, you’ll never go back.
Your big earner, change his pay and say, “right, you’re no longer getting a bonus – that extra £100 that you get every month anyway – is now in your wage”. The pressure comes off and now you’re free to work on focusing on skill – not effort.

Be warned though. By making these changes, you’ll expose any floors in coaching, mentoring, training and leadership – and if you don’t fix them, all the changes will have been in vain.

Okay, so… You’ve got the culture; you’ve got the great people, the ideas and the motivation – but wait!

NO time!

The company I work for is a smart, creative and progressive company that copes with the ebbs and flows of creative industries. We have product development meetings and regularly get together to solve problems – or to generally figure out how to do things just that little bit better.

Each of us is an expert of some sort or another; some more-so than others, of course. We’re each open minded, happy with our jobs and get a thrill out of overcoming the challenges we face every other day.

Skills are distributed, the team works together and we get on with our boss’, and their ideas. We’re not restricted in our work – well, other than the client’s brief that is.

So what’s the problem?

What about time, money, workload even?

Sometimes a team can have all the right ingredients, but lack the available resources to move forward. Or, at least at a pace it’s capable of.

We’ve been a little slow recently as far as PD is concerned; luckily we’ve got loads of work coming in.

What’s even better than that is that even though we don’t have the time just now, we’ve not lost sight of our goal – to change for the better.

Sometimes you’ll hear from business leaders – we just don’t have the time or the people to do things differently. Just make sure that’s true, and it’s not an idle excuse.

Not having the time is no excuse to give up, to ignore it or procrastinate; for the truly innovative work to the bone and at least keep ahead of the pack.

Creativity in business – nice or necessity

Being a creative thinker gives a person many advantages over his or her colleagues. Allowing the passing on of that creative thinking to the rest of the business however, creates an advantage over its [the business] competitors – sometimes enough to give it an edge.

The culture within a business concerned with creativity needs to be very open. It is no longer the domain of those upper managers.

To clarify: Empowering your employees by giving them opportunities to be creative, or going further by creating expectations and training on it, does not make them decision makers. You shouldn’t panic as a manager if your workforce is paying attention to things you’re confident wont work. As a manager you’re there to ensure they don’t go off too far.

Someone with the right talents or training will have a valuable set of skills to use when working on an idea.

Give your people the power to negotiate its acceptance, by you the manager and the rest of the workforce.

Inside Out - Motivation the right way round

People are motivated from the inside out; providing external gratification like giving them DVD players etc will help someone that is currently motivated stay that way. But if someone feels undervalued at their core, then no amount of trinkets and prizes will do. Only by helping that person overcome their state can we move on to making them happy. Allowing them the rush of recieving material goods will do now good for them, or your team in the long run.

People are people; they are always people. This is not to say that they are all the same. Just that it doesn’t matter where they are, what they are doing, or how much they are being paid. They are still people, and should be treated that way.

You can have different opinions, you can have different methods, and you can have different priorities. But as long as you all genuinely share the same common and specific goals, you are a team.

People are not mushrooms. Mushrooms grow well if you keep them in the dark and feed them hourse manure, people on the other hand do not.