We are OBSESSED with assessment

I am sure in many years to come, this period of time that we are in will become known as the “pigeon-hole” era.  It is ingrained into every aspect of our society.  Tom Ingram (Owner of BIG TOM Driving School) writes……

Employment, education, welfare and benefits, health – we can barely get through a day without being assessed in some manner.  New and existing employers are assessing our suitability for new careers or promotion.  There is hardly a job that can be thought of where a continual assessment is not being conducted on the “effectiveness” of a person doing their job.  Motivation, passion, job satisfaction, pride, inner belief, forget them all, they are not enough in this world we live in; no matter how intensely you personally feel these values as you do your job, you clearly cannot be trusted.  It does not discriminate on income, no matter what your personal income is, you are not to be left alone, you must be put into a pigeon-hole…… it just MUST be done.

In fact, so extreme is this situation that we find ourselves, that the weight of the assessment itself, is actually becoming the motivator…. the reward.  It seems the more passionate you feel about assessment, the more you are ideally suited for upward progression.  Leaders in organisations tend to be fixated with assessment criteria, assessment grading, assessment of assessors etc.

Does this matter?

It most certainly does.  Whilst the motivation levels of individuals will vary, what is now happening is that everyone, regardless of their “effectiveness” if left to fend for themselves, is being instructed to conform to what is being expected.  There are negative consequences to this approach.  By no means all, but many people, will naturally aspire to improve.  They wont just want to be seen to be developing, they will actually be internally driven to improve – it requires no intervention or external motivation, there will simply be an inner desire to do what they do to the best of their ability, and always willing to be self-aware of where their ability is, and how they would like to improve.  You don’t find many employees turning down training opportunities from the employer do you?  The employee may be nervous and might feel anxiety as they choose to leave their comfort zone, but they inwardly know that what is happening is a good thing, they WILL benefit from learning new things.

However, due to the fact that not everyone feels this way – some people for quite specific reasons, do not have this inner drive.  As such, stand clear, make way please for the “system of assessment”.  

This magical tool brought down to us from our great leaders in society, this one size fits all method of improving efficiency.  Let’s continually assess our school children throughout their school years, let’s make sure that we repeatedly assess each and every single member of staff in our organisation, let’s group society into categories, so that we can clearly and unequivocally project on to every single person our understanding that we “see” them, and that we want to see more “out” of them.  It matters not where they are on the spectrum of self-improvement because quite frankly, wherever any one is at, we want to see more out of them in any case.

 

The consequence of this approach?

We have thousands upon thousands, in fact millions of highly paid individuals who no longer live and breathe this passion that they had, no, what they now spend an inordinate amount of their working day doing, is behaving in a manner which ticks assessment boxes.  They are finding themselves involved in activity such as filling out forms either hand written or on computers, asking questions of people, making statements, meeting other individuals in the knowledge that this activity has absolutely nothing to do with the passion for which they have.  Smart, wise, effective professionals are leaving their specialism in droves due to this obsession with assessment.

       

By nature, most people want to feel of worth, they want to feel responsible for “adding value” in their working life.  It is what makes us tick.  It brings meaning to our lives.  But this fixation with assessment, and how it impacts the working day, means that a great many people are finding that they are doing “work” which is quite illogical, adds no value, and certainly is not effective in any way.  And it saddens me to say, that a great many people are able to see that these activities are actually damaging for the outcomes that they like to see – so in effect, this is depriving them of the very values that they hold dear to their heart.  For careers that involve other humans, where these activities are affecting the outcomes for other humans, this will intensely hurt some people as it robs them of the very thing that they actually do care about, namely their effect on other humans.  We don’t naturally like to harm or impact negatively on any other human being, it is not in our instinct to wish to deliberately affect others in this way.  As a society, we do care for the health of our elderly and young, we do desire to give our young adults the best start in life, we do want to see our colleagues develop, progress and achieve.  Anything and everything that we do in our working life which adds no value, no matter how small amount of time it takes to complete, erodes our sense of purpose, it betrays the inner feeling of worth that we like to feel, we NEED to feel.  If enough of that happens, we will quite instinctively remove ourselves from that situation.  This is happening in many industries across the UK, including my own of driving training.  This conditioning of continued assessment is being systematically in-bred into our youngsters, so when they come out of the educational system, they will not even recognise how much they have been dehumanised.  Monty Neill, Executive Director of FairTest writes in the book "Creative Schools" by Ken Robinson: "Tests don't measure very much of what's important and they measure in a very narrow way.  How the subject is tested becomes a model for how to teach the subject".  And this is what has been happening for years in the driving training world; customers have become conditioned to this way of thinking about tests being the ultimate goal, and driving instructors are busying themselves servicing the desires of their customers.  It is severely limiting the scope of the learning.

This is a problem of lazy leadership.  Rather than being selective as to where to concentrate efforts, this broad-brush approach adversely affects good people.  It may be effective in demonstrating non-discrimination, but the effect of demotivating all at the expense of identifying who to motivate is very harmful, and just not smart.  Depriving individuals of their passion in life and enforcing a policy of standardized conformity will only attract “average” performance.  This is a systematic method of discouraging the very thing that makes all of us individuals where the potential for greatness exists; in its place are outcomes that deprive us of human virtues such as compassion, forgiveness, aspiration, self-belief, belonging and satisfaction. 

BIG TOM Driving School  Driving Training in Peterborough, Spalding, Stamford, Grantham, Lincoln, Boston and Sleaford Telephone: 0800 689 4174