Check out Performance Improvement

[James Robert Crow <jr1crow@mindspring.com>]

Hello Group:

Beliefs do need to be changed, but the beliefs that need to be changed are
those of top management.

This past Thursday I attended the monthly meeting of the Industrail
Relations Research Association, because the new Executive Vice President of
Human Resources was the speaker.  I was not impressed.  He came across as
rather shallow.  "I have been given this speech to deliver, and here I am
to do just that."

This fellow came from GE, so he has come from an environment of manageing
by the numbers, and forced distributions.  At one point is his talk he said
that he has been asked if he regrets leaving GE.  He response was, "No, the
environment at GE was 'What have you done for me since lunch, and by the
way why did you take a lunch?"  He should be asking himself what were the
systems in place at GE that drove that kind of behavior, but instead he is
busy installing those systems at Delta.

He has had meetings with Delta employees and out of that has come a demand
for differential pay.  I asked him to clarify this, and he said that in the
past Delta had spread pay increases evenly over the total company.  There's
no motivation in that.  We will come up with an evaluation procedure which
probably had four catagories.  People at the top will be given double
didgit increases, those at the bottom nothing and those in the middle
something in between.

Systems drive behavior.  With this kind of system who are these people
going to be working for?  Themselves!  If everyone is working for
themselves, who will be working for the company?  No one!

It is to me rather rediculous to say that we must change the beliefs of our
people when they are being impacted by the system in which they operate.
Herrington is selling something.  He will probably be successful, but it is
a far cry from SoPK.

RC
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