I’ve just been asked to write a report on the work of a committee I chair. They want me to provide three (not two, not four, but three) objectives for next year. Well I’m not going to, so there. In fact I’m getting a bit sick of this universal assumption that everyone needs to have objectives, over and above just continuing to do their job. Doesn’t matter what this particular committee does, just take my word for it that it has been fulfilling its purpose in a perfectly adequate fashion.
It’s the same with personal development plans (sorry, PD-bloody-Ps). Everyone has to have one of these, even the porters for all I know. It just makes no sense. Take me - I don’t need one. Not because, like Mary Poppins, I’m practically perfect in every way (although I’d be prepared to argue the case) but because I’m near the end of my career, and all the trust needs me to do is to carry on with my moderately lifelike impression of a competent radiologist, shifting the reporting without making too many actionable errors.
The same is true of many other members of staff, not just the old-timers like me. If it was really the case that everyone had an urgent and annually-recurring need to develop, it would mean that they had appointed a bunch of wasters who weren’t up to the job. If everyone has to have a PDP, it means that no-one is performing adequately. It’s just crap.
Of course, there are times in your career where you are actively learning and building up your practice, developing your service. But it’s not like that all the time, thank God, and for a large part of a career what you need to do is consolidate. There’s a lot to be said for plodding. And what’s the result of all this pressure to come up with ‘aims’ and ‘objectives’? I’ll tell you - the outcome is that everyone dreams up an aspirational and largely irrelevant wishlist, and then makes everyone else’s life a misery by trying to sign them up to providing ‘multi-source feedback’ to pad out their appraisal folders. Everyone is spending so much time examining their own and other people’s navels that nobody can find time to just do their bloody job.
So I’m going to give them just one objective for my committee - to carry on carrying on. And if they don’t like it, they can look for a more compliant chairman. They’ll have to soon, anyway, I’ll be in the garden, or fishing.
As Jerry Nelson would no doubt say (and probably has): continuous improvement, my arse!
Tags: appraisal
Quite agree Bob. But I am a little puzzled as to why you “thank God” for something! Again I fully agree with the sentiment but I thought you were a humanist?
Yes I am sono - a proselytising, born-again atheist - the very worst sort.
I suppose it’s just an expression - old habits die hard. And I always use a capital G, because it’s a proper noun.
I bet you’re going to miss revalidation’s beefed up appraisal, when it comes in, and all that multi-source feedback.
Still, I’m not so far off retirement myself, and despite the bureaucracy have a feeling I’ll still be working on in some capacity.
Fish just aren’t that interesting.
The good thing is though, that since nobody actually reads them, I find that printing out last year’s again but changing the date works fine.
I do quite enjoy that moment of power when I fill in someone else’s 360 thing
Milly, i just tried to do that, but I only saved it as a pdf so I had to re-type the whole thing. Grrrrrr.
I think my colleague is the ‘bees knees’ but on 360 I scored him average-otherwise you have to write an SA on why he/she is the bees knees. He is quite happy with this..but doesnt talk to me anymore!