President's Message: Is Too Much Beer or Chocolate a Bad Thing?

Kris Smith

I've always thought of myself as a systems thinker. Maybe its just a polite way of saying that I need things broken down into smaller pieces in order to understand them, but I prefer to think that it is more than that. Rather, I like to think of such an approach as trying to look at the bigger picture and understand the interactions between variables within complex systems (sounds a lot better doesn't it?).

Personnel assessment work offers the opportunity to create better organizations in a fair and responsible way. Yet, occasionally even our best intentions not only fail to produce the outcome we hope for, but may even be detrimental. This often occurs when we attempt to take a systems viewpoint and break something into its component parts to address an important concern, but then fail to put things back together to assess the system-wide impact when we are finished.

One particularly striking example (at least one that hits a nerve for me) is the emphasis on the speed of service delivery. I am one of the first to proclaim that the speed of service delivery is essential for meeting the needs of our clients and for providing relevant services to our organizations. However, I often sense that there has been such an emphasis on the speed of service delivery that the quality of the service is lost. I have seen too many presentations, articles and e-mail discussions where the solution to meeting clients needs is to eliminate tests or switch to paper evaluations - things that we know are less effective. It reminds me of an old television commercial where people argued about the merits of peanut butter and chocolate with the end result being that they go even better when put together. Similarly, we should be able to produce effective and efficient processes.

Speed is a fine and admirable objective, but overemphasis on this one facet of service value perpetuates some of the worst stereotypes of our profession. I recall listening once to an audio tape by Tom Peters that suggested that if personnel staff needed more than one file cabinet, they should be fired. This apparently reflected the perception of personnel professionals as nothing more than paper pushers and if this required more than one file cabinet, it meant we weren't even good at that. The same is true when speed is overemphasized as a quality indicator - we create the impression that all we are doing is processing paper, so why not do it faster? Little consideration is given to the costs associated with the trade offs - what happens when an effective assessment tool is replaced with a resume evaluation to speed things up? (less qualified employees?, higher turnover?, more employee grievances/disciplinary actions, higher training costs?..the list goes on an on). Have you ever quickly hired a mediocre employee thinking that they would be "good enough" only to regret it later? When is mediocre good enough and when is it appropriate to offer mediocrity as the best we can do for our customers? To be fair, I re-emphasize that the point is in finding the balance. It is equally inappropriate to focus so much on the quality of a product that no product ever actually gets produced - thus creating the ivory tower stereotype.

So how do we find the balance? How do we become the true business partner that we strive to be (see the IPMA competency model)? It seems that we must start by first looking at ourselves and then reaching out to those that we serve. We need to utilize our own assessment and organizational development tools to determine how we can use our talents and skills to contribute to and enhance the business objectives of our organizations. I am reminded of an another old television commercial where people who all liked a certain beer were arguing. Half liked it because it was less filling and the other half liked it because it tasted great. The point is that it was both - just as we can excel at more than one service aspect So while too much of any one thing, whether it be speed of service delivery, chocolate or beer may not be good, finding the right balance can make for a pretty enjoyable experience. We are fortunate to be a part of a unique and wonderful profession that provides us with the tools to find that balance. We can blend the contributions of practitioners and academicians and utilize our knowledge of organizations, assessment expertise and ongoing research to pursue many facets of service delivery. With this in mind, IPMAAC as an organization strives to provide a forum for ideas, sources of information, and the support of colleagues who believe in the incredible potential of assessment to assist us with this effort. As members of this organization and our profession, I hope that you will join us by taking advantage of the many opportunities to participate in IPMAAC activities.