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
