The Comp Doctor
Thought Leader Interview: By Ann Bares, Compensation Force Compensation Force: What led you to choose (or land in) a career featuring the field of employee rewards? Dick Grote: Receiving my very first performance appraisal. I received my first performance appraisal six months after I started as a management trainee at General Electric. It was brutally frank (and spot-on accurate) in pointing out the fact that I wasn’t doing a very good job. It provided the young kid I was then with a needed wake-up call, telling me that my school days were over and that tough, rigorous performance expectations were now in place. My boss’s straight-between-the-eyes candid feedback was the jolt I needed to get me to move out of the world of school and into the world of work. Later I became an HR manager with United Airlines and then with Frito-Lay where I continued to receive performance appraisals every year from managers who took the process seriously and put a lot of effort into making those appraisals comprehensive and valuable. Finally, as a consultant specializing exclusively in performance management over the past thirty years, I have worked with hundreds of companies, helping them create good performance appraisal systems and helping their managers use them well. A few years ago I started a speech at a large HR conference with the words, “I have devoted my life to performance appraisal.” A man in the audience stage-whispered to the woman next to him loudly enough for me to hear: “There is a wasted life.” Perhaps, but I couldn’t be happier with having wasted my life in this field. Compensation Force: What person and their ideas/teaching/writing has had a significant influence on your thinking and your work? Dick Grote: Initially it was B. F. Skinner and his concept of behavior modification. What an elegantly simple idea: Those things that you reward, you get more of; those things that you punish you get less of. What a blinding flash of the obvious.... |
 Ann Bares Compensation consultant Ann Bares is the Managing Partner of Altura Consulting Group. Ann has more than 20 years of experience consulting with organizations in the areas of compensation and performance management. Compensation Force provides practical news, information, tips, and musings about employee performance and compensation. Visit Compensation Force to subscribe to Ann's articles.
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