Counterpoint: Arthur Yeung

People & Strategy, Sept, 2008 by Anna Tavis

COUNTERPOINT

Arthur Yeung

Associate Dean and Philips Chair Professor, China Europe International Business School, People's Republic of China

Drawing upon an extensive database of more than 2 million employees from hundreds of companies in more than 20 countries, Marcus Buckingham and his associates at Gallup discovered that the single most powerful question that explains and predicts an employee's performance is: "At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?" It is indeed an interesting and provoking insight as it challenges management scholars and practitioners to rethink and redesign management practices that can capitalize on employee strengths for better performance, instead of wasting unnecessary energy and efforts to fix their weaknesses or work on tasks that underutilize their talent.

Along the same line of thought, Buckingham's practical concern is, then, to address the question: "How can companies build more teams where each person feels that his or her strengths are understood and used every day?" In Buckingham's opinion, the most important lever companies should work on to capitalize on employee strengths is a brand new performance system that is strengths-based, employee-driven, fast and frequent, and community-oriented. The system is designed to place greater responsibility and initiative for performance, learning, and planning with employees (instead of being over-managed by managers) and to enhance employee control (at least, feeling) that their strengths are in play most of the time. If that happens, Buckingham believes that employees can achieve better performance.

Buckingham has indeed clearly laid out his arguments with solid empirical data. He also has attempted to introduce an innovative performance system with interesting promises. To provoke discussion and to think through such an innovative performance system from a variety of perspectives, I would like to highlight some of my concerns and challenges, as follows:

1. While I strongly concur that creating an environment where employees can capitalize on their strengths for better performance is the right approach for companies, I don't think such an end-state can be achieved primarily through employee initiative. I believe managers (not employees) still should be ultimately held accountable for creating such an environment by making sure employees are: a) assigned tasks, projects, and responsibilities that they are good at; b) provided with adequate decision-making authority, IT support, and streamlined processes to capitalize on their strengths; c) encouraged and challenged to accurately understand what their strengths and weaknesses really are rather than basing their understanding on an inflated confidence in their capabilities (as argued by Buckingham, potential problems of Generation Y); and d) stretched to go beyond their comfort zone and what they are currently good at (avoid overcapitalizing on their current strengths). At least in rapidly emerging economies like China, where employee maturity is still lacking (especially in the new generation workforce who are raised as the single child in their families), I believe it will take a lot of time and support before the ideal of such an employee-driven performance system can be realized.

2. A performance system, no matter how great it is, has limited impact unless it is aligned with and supported by other HR systems simultaneously. Given the kind of radically different performance system Buckingham is proposing, companies also need to dramatically realign and redesign other HR systems at the same time to ensure the effectiveness of the new performance system. HR professionals also need to carefully think through other design questions like: How to translate company goals into individual employee goals in a systematic and coherent way if employees are allowed to decide their performance plan? How to determine an employee's salary increase, promotion, and bonus in a fair and consistent manner based on the new performance system?

3. While the proposed performance system that is strengths-based, employee-driven, fast and frequent, and community-oriented appeals greatly to me intuitively (though I somehow feel that it is too good to be true), I wonder how applicable such a performance system is to companies operating in different industries and to employees performing different kinds of tasks? Will such a performance system universally be applicable to all organizations and employees, or only relevant to specific kinds of companies or jobs? My preliminary judgment (without empirical support) is that such a system would work better for knowledge intensive workers who can perform their tasks relatively independently. For manufacturing workers who need to work interdependently in a production line, it seems that such a system would be less relevant. Also, will such a performance system work well in different national cultures? Will it work in countries like Japan or China where paternalistic cultures still prevail? It would be helpful if Buckingham could be more specific in defining in what kinds of industries, jobs, or national cultures such a performance system will be most effective.