Making Assessments: CG4

Two Perspectives & Four Targets

A lot happens in and around any organization that bears on results. Results are so important that they cannot be reduced to a simple statement, not even the bottom-line. Careful assessment is essential to know what is and has been going on, what the outcomes are, and what trends are operative.

Management reporting is work that, to an inveterate pragmatist, often seems to detract from getting on with the job. Yet organizing, compiling and submitting relevant reports is the difficult core work of management.

Any organization needs its management to report on four targets. Self-interest demands that each employee track assessments and reports relating to these four targets: after all, that is how their worth to the organization will be judged.

Four Targets of Management Reporting

■ Activities of individuals, teams, systems, the organization, external factors—handled by monitoring indicators: CG4¹

■ Capability and inter-personal effectiveness of all employees—handled by appraising staff: CG4²

■ Special projects, drives, events and the passage of time—handled by evaluating outcomes: CG4³

■ Rationales for continuing or changing the identity of the organization, its divisions and key projects—handled by reviewing missions: CG4⁴

Note that each of these four targets contains «setting directions-CL4»—although at a different internal position in each case. As organizations are defined by goals (their mission) and driven by goals (strategic objectives), this should not be surprising.

Assessments Require Cooperation

Making assessments of people and situations that are inherently complex and ever-changing is not easy from a purely practical perspective. Assessments are also socio-emotional events. Because judgments and actions may follow any report, they are always sensitive and often political.

So the process requires active cooperation of those involved. Many staff make definitive judgements; most produce reports on at least some matters; and almost all must be prepared to keep or assist with records and join in inquiries. The collaborative quality is provided by adding a fourth level of expectation to create four tetradic targets for management reporting.

Making assessments involves facts and values, and putting both into context. Discernment is difficult, and dispassionate application of values is even more difficult. So management often finds that it needs to back up its primary mechanism of assessing with a secondary mechanism.

Getting Proper Reporting

Both regular reviews and special inquiries are often avoided due to time and resource pressures. But the quality of reporting is weak when it is ad hoc and emergency-driven. So higher management must be precise and unequivocal in specifying policies and rules for appraisals, analyses and reviews of all sorts. Bureaucratic reporting may also be weak: if forms over-simplify and completion means mindless box ticking. The structuralist ethos (PH'1C-φ2) is needed to ensure a basic standard of systematic, disciplined and comprehensive reporting.

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Continue for more about:

► the 4 targets for reporting and arrangements for assessing
► how employees should assess on their own behalf
► the implications of having «men of action» pursue inquiries.

Originally posted: 20-Oct-2011