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Fast Track Career Plan and Career Management

On the surface, it might seem that a major electronics company and a publishing firm have little in common. Yet, Motorola, manufacturer of electronic components and radio equipment, and McGraw-Hill, producer of trade magazines and newsletters, have much in common when it comes to training.

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First, both companies have drawn training directors from line management, choosing company generalists rather than career training and development professionals. Second, both have an active and effective performance appraisal system, using both supervisory judgment and other tools to select high-potential employees. Third, both companies are committed to a philosophy that makes employee education and training important ingredients for success. Continue reading →

Evaluating the Performance of Sales People and Sales Managers

In most cases, evaluating the performance of salespeople is pat. They either make their numbers or they don’t. Perhaps an oversimplification, but not a monumental one. Evaluating the performance of the safes manager, though, has traditionally been more art than science.

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“At State Farm,” says Donald W. Frischmann, agency division vice president, “we felt that it was both im¬possible and unrealistic to attempt to evaluate the performance of agency managers (sales managers) until we developed a realistic data-supported basis for evaluation. From a research standpoint, we needed to capture and verify the key dimensions of the sales manager’s job. From a corporate standpoint, we knew we would have to use this information to define the role we expected sales managers to fill, communicate those expectations, and help current sales management see how those key performance dimen¬sions were, in fact, the essence of good sales management.” Continue reading →

The Quality of Work Life Movement

In 1973, the United Automobile Workers sent a letter to its members at a Harman International auto parts plant in Bolivar, TN, describing the simple, but perhaps revolutionary, idea behind an experiment being conducted there. The letter stated: “We are at that point in time where workers should have more to say about their job and how it should be run. They should participate in a meaningful way in making decisions about the job and the work place— decisions which in the past were made pretty much exclusively by management.”

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When the workers in the Harman experiment were, in fact, given more of a say, they began to fashion new ways of doing things at the plant. They formed cooperative work teams, assigned responsibilities and controlled their own time and scheduling. As ob¬servers described it, people became more involved and interested in their jobs. Continue reading →

Innovation and Productivity : Lessons from Texas Instruments

No U.S. company is working harder than Texas Instruments, Inc., to foster innovation and to boost productivity, a crucial factor in an era of seemingly endemic inflation. And they’re pretty successful at it. Some observers point to TI as the prototype of what a U.S. company must be to compete in the surging, worldwide electronics market of the 1980s. Others suggest that only TI—of the major U.S. consumer electronics corporations— can compete effectively with the Japanese. How successful is TI? Continue reading →

HR Management and Employee Productivity

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Productivity is today’s latest and greatest “we-view-with-alarm” editorial topic. Reading the acres of recent editorial comments, expert testimony, congressional statements, and man-on-the-street opinions leads us to a pair of disquieting conclusions. First, no one really knows what productivity is, at least not in any technical, measurable sense. Second, regardless of what it is, everyone with a cause to champion or a course of action to sell believes that he or she knows the cure for the American economy’s abysmal productivity growth. Continue reading →

Performance Management in 3M

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Performance Management (PM) is the 3M Company’s name for its highly successful program of positive reinforcement to achieve specific, measurable gains in job performance. At 3M Company in Canada alone, it produced savings “in excess of $2.56 million” from January to September 1978. Furthermore, says Henry J. Marsh, personnel develop¬ment coordinator of 3M Canada, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a total of $4.3 million by the end of the year, including savings of $1.835 million in 1977.

Marsh began the program in 1976, a year after it was introduced by the 3M parent company in St. Paul, MN. (See “How Behavior Modification Improves Productivity at 3M,” TRAINING, October 1976.) Performance Management was developed by 3M’s Education and Training Department to help first-line supervisors increase their effective¬ness through measured results, in¬creased productivity, employee satis¬faction and personal growth. Continue reading →