Under the new DoD personnel system–as at DHS–there will be a
significant responsibility for managers to set performance
expectations for employees, to communicate them and to
accurately rate employees according to them. Managers
themselves will be evaluated on how well they perform in
that process.
Said Navy Secretary Gordon England, who is the top Pentagon
official in charge of the program, “It is a bigger job for
managers. But frankly, that’s what managers are supposed to
do. They’re supposed to manage the human capital resources
. . . it takes management time and attention, and we will
evaluate our managers. That’s part of their job task and
responsibility, and we will evaluate them to that basis.
“I would say today that managers probably are skewed to
spending their time with the poorer-performing employees,
rather than the very good-performing employees. What you
want to do is spend time certainly with your good employees
and with all your, you know, average-performing at least as
much as you with those that aren’t performing well. So this
system is designed to work with all of our employees. And
again, that is a manager’s job and our expectation for that
manager,” England said.
“This system requires interaction between the management
staff and all the employees at every single level of the
organization. It requires a dialogue, and on a continuing
basis. I mean, if a person’s having trouble, then how do we
help them? Do they need training? Do they need education? I
mean, this is not just a question of lay out objectives and
check at the end of the year. This is a continuing process
to make sure that we get very excellent performance,”
he said.