Its come to the end of the year, which in my company means that it is time for PBC assessment.
PBC stands for Personal Business Commitment. When I started working here, four years ago, I thought that this would be an interesting and valuable tool to allow me to see how my contribution -- granted, a pittance -- affected the profit and survivability of the organization as a massive whole. I have always had a serious problem with the concept of Me as a significant affector of corporate success, both because I have found it very hard to believe that what I do in any way affects the organization, good or bad, and because I could not for the life of me think of a way in which it possibly could. Show up, handle problems, install software, keep your head down, and don't leave too early seemed to be the order of the day, and that was what I would do. Now, at last, I would have a criteria that I could use to see how I really did affect the organization. I didn't expect to find that I had much impact, but I was looking forward to finding out.
As it turned out, PBCs were a pipe dream.
They consisted of overblown statements issued from managers four and five organizational levels away from me, and supplemented by the managers between me and them -- statements like 'Contribute to the overall profitability of your business unit by reducing costs by ten percent while increasing market share and customer satisfaction'. All very noble, but how? Where? With what? I am sure that my group's manager would not agree, but my thought was that, basically, they wanted lip service -- they would certainly have liked more, but the truth was that for most people, the regimen I mentioned a few sentences ago was all they could do. They certainly could not reduce overall costs, and as for market share, they hadn't the slightest idea what our market share was, let alone how it might be affected. That was, and is, Other People's Job.
It saddens me to come to this conclusion, and I would very much like to be proven wrong. I am willing to admit that there is at least a chance that so long as I believe I can't affect the organization as a whole, I won't. I settle for doing what I can, where I can, and hope that that's enough.
Insofar as salary and pay in general is partially affected by this, though, there is a certain anxiety regarding whether what I wrote as my 'achievements', though true, will be found up to the mark. I guess I'll find out this month.
2 comments:
I wonder if you can get PBCs for poets? Maybe PPCs.
Personal Poetry Commitment.
But you can affect what happens in a company. The PBC sounds like the game that everyone plays, though, to prove that the company is real and that the organisation is not just an illusion.
I suppose that if the quality of poetry declines, one could say that no, it wasn't a decline: the poet was simply meeting his or her Poetical Bathos Commitment.
I suspect that PBCs started as an honest effort to energize and empower people. Empowerment is a slippery organizational concept, so of course, the great philosopher Dilbert spoke of it:
D: At this company, we're dedicated to the principle of employee empowerment, Jennifer.
J: The "Principle of Employee Empowerment"?
D: Uh-oh.
J Why would you have a special phrase for something like that? If you could really make decisions on your own, it would never occur to you to invent a phrase for it...."
I think that for the people in an organization who do have the ability to control their environment, it does not occur to them that there are those who do not -- and when they became aware of it, I think they said Well, the way to fix this is to establish a formal linkage between what they do and how the organization performs and grows. By seeing this linkage, they will become empowered, and will understand the value of what they do.
I really want to believe this. Of course, I also want to believe that the ache I’ve been feeling in my right shoulder isn’t a symptom of advancing age, and that the intermittent throbbing in my upper right jaw does not suggest an upcoming, expensive, and angst-ridden session with the dental profession.
Certainly, each of us in an organization can affect the organization, but only within our own orbit. I can work to get answers to questions quickly, and thus help others do their jobs faster. That’s the extent of my influence on the organization, and I think that’s all that can be reasonably expected. If more is possible, I’m going to need some examples, preferably with pictures, charts, and applicable real-world illustrations.
In my family, we have a saying: they put things in newspapers because they’re unusual. That works for business concepts, too. Fast Company talks about energized organizations because it isn’t common. That’s why they came up with the special phrase. As always, Dilbert is right on the mark.
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Incidentally, I picked up a copy of Excessions and am reading it. To my surprise, I find that I had read it some time in the past. As I don’t recall how it ends -- or even if I got to the end -- its good reading.
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