I could not agree more. It is hard to escape the bad economic news all around us, so let’s not give it any more air time that it is already getting.

Kim

“Second Place is the first loser”.

Nobody wants to settle for silver. But don’t worry – it looks like teh US Gymnasts picked themselves up nicely in the individual events. Maybe they just don’t value teamwork?

Learn from the past
Enjoy the present
Build for the future

Leopold O. Walder

The purpose of any performance management system should be to guide the individual employee and groups toward desired outcomes, provide reinforcement and supply corrective feedback for making adjustments.

The 360-degree feedback report gives participants a fair and well-rounded impression of how others view their work. When the person who is rated agrees to share the results of this multi-rater assessment with management, the supervisor gets an overall perspective about the individual’s skills/abilities in order to facilitate process improvement, remove barriers to success and acquire needed resources. Feedback is provided from multiple sources (raters) including self, boss, peers, direct reports, and, in some cases, customers and suppliers.

Why use Multi-Rater assessments in Executive Coaching?

Allows the person being coached to gain perspectives from others in an objective, non-threatening, confidential manner.
Provides the individual with data for self-reflection and self-awareness.
Assists in identifying individual development needs and action items.
Helps surface patterns of behavior, especially when used in conjunction with other assessment tools during the coaching process.
Provides a platform for dialogue between the outside coach and the executive.

With many tests, including those this company does, you need to test thousands, even tens of thousands, to prevent one case of advanced desease. Tests are not perfect. Tests have false positives. After many years of yearly testing, the probability of at least one false positive is very high. Many tests have an issue with “overdiagnosis” i.e. they find early desease which may just never cause any problem if remains undetected. But often, it is not possible to say if the desease will progress, so everyone is treated. Not only can treatment cause serious side-effects, all these screening, false positive evaluation and treatment is expensive.

Take for example the blood tests this company does. Aside from an obvious question “do you really want your employer to know about your health risks, even genetic problems?” let’s say the blood will show that some slim, active woman (I choose a woman on purpose) has high LDL. The woman is already active, already eats right and exercises, but because of her bad genes – and most cases of high cholesterol are indeed genetic – there is no way she can get the cholesterol down without drugs. But her employer wants her to get her cholesterol down. Since she is in her 40s, slim and healthy, her absolute risk of having a heart attack in 10 years is under 1%. Now, there really is very little if any evidence that statins do any good for primary prevention in women, but for argument say let’s assume that it would reduce her risk of a heart attack by 30%. Sounds impressive right? But then her absolute risk of heart attack is only 1%, so reducing this risk by 30% means reducing it from 1% to .7%. Less impressive than 30% reduction, right? How many people like this woman do you need to treat for 10 years to prevent one heart attack? I’ll let you figure it out. Do you think it’ll save money?

Prevention saves money? Really? BTW – New England Journal of Medicine reviewed available studies and concluded that it is not the case. Of course, if the company starts laying off people with risk factors, they’ll save money. Is that what you want your employer to do? Or do you want your employer and not your doctor to tell you when to take prescription drugs?