Career Success

Due to various things at work, I've been thinking a bit in the last week about "performance plans" or what at MPOW is called "Career Success". I've always disliked the whole concept, but could never *quite* articulate the specific thing I disliked about them. I mean, it's often awkward or anxiety inducing as the "worker" in the relationship, and it's often awkward in a different way as the "manager", but neither of those are quite it. It finally dawned on me yesterday what the issue is.

The modern workplace exists to enable social production. This is the kind of thing Marx apparently wrote about at length (full disclosure, I've not actually read "Capital"). But even those of us who only know Marx second hand know that there are very few things in life, and even fewer in the organisations that pay us to produce stuff, that can be done completely as an atomised individual. And that's the issue. Organisations expect workers to produce things together in formal teams and informal groupings - indeed that's the whole reason we have organisations - yet measure the productivity or effectiveness of individuals. It makes no sense at all. And that's why it feels so forced and weird: because it *is* forced.

This is probably the thing I enjoy least out of everything about being in a "people management" position. There are positive aspects to being able to support and coach people along, and be seen as a "legitimate" voice in strategic discussions, (though that sort of stuff can happen without a formal hierarchy). But these horrible processes where workers are scored on an arbitrary scale, based on individual attributes or measurements for group tasks and outcomes, are excrutiating. And they're excrutiating because as a middle manager it's very difficult to fight against or simply reject the process. Of course if we *all* simply refused to do it, that could work. But if an individual manager simply fails to participate, it's the workers reporting to them who suffer. People who have made great contributions fail to be rewarded or recognised. It's shitty.

Anyway, whatever we're building for the future, let's get rid of this shit.