Have you ever felt that even though you are the smartest one in the room, you are not given the appropriate acknowledgement at the name of you having high potential and too much to offer. I believe the reason for this lies at the core of any organisation’s way of evaluation which is qualitative.

 Up until our college, we sure were pressurised and stressed about the grading and marks but we never said that the quantitative assessment was partial or unfair. During our examination there was a level playing ground and benchmarking for everyone was same. When you add individuals to this quantitative equation, benchmarking becomes blur as everyone has their own way of evaluating and judging the other person’s performance. This is what we typically see in the corporate and that’s the pivotal reason why people are not satisfied with their evaluation as the benchmarking is dependent on a variable factor which is “human judgement”. As a result quantitive assessment becomes qualitative which is highly perspective driven. 

Humans use different scales when they measure another individual’s performance, someone’s 100% might be another person’s 80%. Is there really a way to standardise this ? One way could be to make bots our managers and they’ll do the magic but whom am I kidding, that’s never going to happen. So, how do we make the existing system work for us ?!

One solution that has worked for me is to have tangible outcomes during your performance cycles and discuss it upfront with your managers stating what are the expectations from you and what all potentially could be your stretch goals. This helps to establish an alignment as to what are the commitments that an individual is willing to make. 

No solution is fool proof and there is no substitute for hard work. But it’s important to create your own brand and market yourself every now and then instead of waiting for people to notice the work that you have been putting in. So, don’t wait for others and be your own cheerleader and it’s going to take you a long way !