I think that this precept may be part of the issues that businesses may be having today. I am not a total altruist. I keep a close eye on people who claim to be altruists, and make sure that I know where my wallet is any time I find myself around them. But when the focus on self takes on a bigger and bigger role when trying to quantify performance we have a tendency to lose track of the bigger picture of business success.

Please do not get me wrong. I am a believer in individual accountability and measurement. What I am looking at here is that we seem to have lost sight of the fact that one of the best ways to look good, is to make other people look good. We seem to be inundated with images of the sports figures “beating their chests” after an acrobatic basket, or performing various “dances in the end zone” after a touchdown. I thought these were team sports, but they seem to have evolved to more of a “look at me, I am an individual” mentality. Even individuals on teams that are losing by lopsided scores seem to be behaving this way.

What I am getting at here is that several other individuals on those various teams had to perform their assigned tasks well in order to enable that specific individual to perform their assigned task, which was to score.

I am not going to go into the idea of the coaches who drew up the plays, or the team mates who executed the blocks, or threw the passes, or whatever else. I went here to illustrate the point. Individuals who are part of an organization (or a team) do not need to jump up and down, or beat their chests to get attention for doing their job. If the job got done (the basket made or touchdown scored….to carry the allegory on out), chances are that more than a few people noticed.

It is the start of a new year and we all know what that means: Annual Reviews. I have to conduct them. I have them conducted on me. As leaders we have our teams, and on the bigger scale are usually parts of bigger teams. No one can achieve their objectives by themselves. When I review my team members I usually look at and ask how they worked with other team members, as well as members of other teams to achieve their goals. When I am reviewed I try focus on the work that the team has done to help my bosses achieve their goals. I do not need to take a bow.  I need to focus on how well my team performed, because it was primarily my responsibility to get them to perform. If we scored, they should take the bow.

I think that the approach should be to look for those that give the most, and get the most out of others. If they can do that well, you can be pretty sure that they are also getting the most out of themselves. That invariably translates to and can be seen through the attainment of objectives, both individual and team oriented.

Individuals that have not been able to demonstrate their success as part of and in terms of the team’s success may not have actually or ultimately attained all of their goals. (If the team failed to achieve its goals, it may be difficult to position or defend any individual in positive, quantitative way. An exception to this could perhaps be in the sales realm where quota attainment or lack thereof is measured quantitatively on an individual basis.) In this way as a leader you can look at both the individual and the team, but more importantly how that individual performed with respect to the overall performance of the team.

So, yes there will be individual measurement. It is a business, not a socialistic environment where only the collective is measured. But it should not be just about the individual who made an acrobatic basket and then decided to beat their chest. Some individuals should and will be recognized, both positively and negatively, but it should be from within the scope of the overall performance of the team. In this way, everybody who should look good can look good. Not just those that decided to dance in the end zone after they, and everybody else did their jobs.