Who is the better driver - Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel or Fernando Alonso? Or, on ranking indiv
Yes, I am a fan of F1 but, I guess, for all the unusual reasons. I like the excitement, the adrenalin, the win, the exhilaration and ... the learnings. I like to watch the drivers’ reactions and learning about the sport taught me a thing or two about running a business, leadership, measuring performance. Given that the annual performance rating season is fast approaching, here are few thoughts on F1 and performance measurement and ranking.
Being a sport, I thought that measuring and ranking individual performance was clear cut: there is a race, there is a winner, so everyone’s performance is clear. But hey, 2014 F1 season made me think whether the link is so clear cut. Sebastian Vettel is a four-time world champion - four consecutive times, and yet when he had a poor season last year, all the pundits started attributing his success in the past to the superiority of his Red Bull car. Lewis Hamilton won his third championship and he is hailed as one of the great drivers. Yet, Lewis currently has the best car for second season in a row. Sebastian has the second best car this year and he is second in the Championship standings. Fernando Alonso, also considered as one of the best, is in a crappy car and at the bottom of the league table. The car plays a big role. Nobody has won a championship in a bad car. So, who is the top performer? The winner of the championship? What if, you are given a bad car and took the maximum out of it?
If Lewis, Sebastian and Fernando were the heads of three divisions in an organisation with Lewis being in the strongest performing division, who would their manager rank as the top performer? How do you rank individual performance in the light of various variables?
For me, the answer lies in finding ways to ensure that the performance measurements reflect the delta, the actual change / contribution brought by the individual rather than allowing one to fly or sink depending on the cards they have been dealt. After all, the objectives of the business often come down to making a positive change - grow faster, turn around an underperforming unit, etc. and the performance management system needs to support and enable these objectives.
And does the business need performance rankings at all? Are they distracting us from what really matters? Organisations need to have ways to drive the overall performance up, identify their best performers and ensure that poor performance is managed. The question is how. Perhaps, as a recent Deloitte article in HBR said, the intent for certain future actions (i.e. promote now, work again with them, etc.) with regards to the individual is more indicative of who the best performers are.