Rating of Everybody and Everything – The Outlook for the Future
During my certification as Marshall Goldsmith’s Stakeholder Leadership Trainer, I had the honour of participating in a small circle of Q&A session with him.
During this session, Dr. Goldsmith was asked about the new challenges leaders will face in the future.
He highlighted RATING as a determining new feature of – not only leaders’ – but all of ours lives.
Current Practices of Rating
We are slowly, but surely entering a world, where everybody rates everyone else. It’s not only we, who rate the Uber driver, in the US the Uber driver rates the passengers. If you don’t behave, or don’t tip high enough, you will have a hard time getting a drive in rush hours.
We are all accustomed to rate on-line stores, books that we read, hotels, restaurants, etc.
The issue with many of these ratings is that – hands on the heart – we are all jumping to rating sites when we had a bad experience. If we aim for a nice romantic dinner, and the food is uneatable, the waiter is impolite, we are fast to jump to the relevant website to express our frustration in rating, communicating with the whole world that this is the worst restaurant that everybody should avoid.
There are, of course a lot of highly praising evaluations, mostly in such cases, when a service provider exceeds our expectations. It’s only that our anger and frustration is a stronger drive to express them immediately and publicly than our customer satisfaction is. Truly, how many of us starts to publicly rate a service that you expect to deliver high, and they “just” meet your expectations – however high these expectations are.
Once you Rate, Do it Properly
I do not mean here that we should not put down the fair evaluation of a service provider, if they do not provide the service that’s expected from them.
As we are here to make a positive difference and not to criticise, I would recommend that you write your negative comments, and let them relax a little while in your drafts before posting. In the meantime, consciously search for positive things, services on your way. Find excellence around you, in another, better restaurant, in a good book or in a shop. Then post these high ratings first.
This search will have 3 benefits as a minimum.
- You will recognise that the world is not all bad, when you are searching for the good.
- When you find the things, people, services that you really like, it will bright your day up.
- And once you post your positive, praising evaluations, you will help those, who deserve it, to be more visible and become even better.
When you have posted at least two such praising evaluations, revisit your original negative rating, read it again, make sure that you have used the correct wording, and then make it visible to the rest of the world.
The Past and Future of Rating in Classical Organizations
While we are well-experienced in the rating of services, this is slowly (or rather fast) expending into humans rating each other on certain aspects.
For centuries, teachers have been rating their students. Today, students also rate teachers. Marshall Goldsmith draws attention to an inherent danger of the process, which may result in grade-inflation. Student rating and input is truly helpful as long as the communication is between the student and the teacher. When the communication is between the dean and the student, it carries the danger of becoming a reciprocal, eye-for-eye process: ‘you flunk me – I flunk you’ and a vicious circle may start.
Similarly, the corporate world is well familiar with the practice of employee evaluation. Most organizations have been practicing evaluations for the past couple of decades already, relentlessly searching the way to maximise employee performance.
For companies, stake-holder rating is the future. Customers already rate the service providers and suppliers. Uplines rate their direct reports.
It is not yet widely spread, but – in numerous companies – peers give feedback to each other and employees already rate their managers.
Rating Might Be Good or Bad – it is the Future
The future is that we rate each other. There is a TV show: Black Mirror, 3rd season, “Nosedive” – this is a dystopian view of the future, which is approaching with high speed in reality.
In a new society, where everybody rates everybody, leaders should be prepared to be rated by their team members and by all other stake-holders.
It is always helpful and efficient when you receive supportive feedback. When this rating mechanism ends with the HR department, the process will basically change its meaning and effect.
The Good and the Bad
Just like everything else, constant, omni-present rating has a good side and a bad side too.
The good side is, you will play your A game all the time. In the workplace, people will be more sensitive, respectful, there will be less mobbing, bullying, less racism, less sexism.
The bad news is, you will play your A game all the time. You will always be careful what you can say and what you cannot, you are going to hide behind the mask of an ideal leader painted by the owners of your company. You will not have much sincere life left.
It’s a lot of work, it’s tiring. You might think, when you are sitting in an Uber, you can relax, you don’t need to impress the driver. Welcome to the new world.
It doesn’t matter, if it’s good or bad, it is coming.
As a leader, you have one goal: make it work in the best way you can.