The good news is that if you are in a junior management position then your pay is likely to be equal to that of your colleagues. However, for more senior roles the CMI found a gap of £10,546 between men and women.
Are men better at these jobs?
Why is this? I can’t believe that men are better at these jobs than women. But what I can believe is that women’s behaviour is often perceived as less authoritative and powerful and then it is assumed that they don’t contribute as much or don’t do such a good job.
How do you feel when you discover that seriously incompetent people are paid far more than skilled people who are doing a better job?
It doesn’t matter if they are male or female. We have all known people who are very skilled, who achieve excellent results but who are not recognised.
This is a key aspect of performance management.
Better measures
What we need is to have fair and open ways of measuring performance. This means what people have achieved, how they have done it and the value that has been added by an individual (or, on the other side, the cost that must be paid as the result of their actions).
Unless you do this, it’s very hard to take any action to improve performance. Getting this right is one of the foundations of performance management.
These measurements also need to be linked to pay. It’s far too easy to judge people by all kinds of criteria that are completely irrelevant. It’s also very hard for anyone to be completely objective when it comes to this which is why we need open systems that make it clear what is valued and why.
Of course it helps if you have clear objectives in the first place and set up measures right at the beginning.
An easy performance management mistake
When I had a large production department many years ago, I checked the output and quality of the work the individuals in my team did over a year. To my horror I discovered that Margit, the person who had produced the most (by far) and with no quality problems at all, was paid almost the least in the whole department.
The woman who was paid the most was an attractive, young, chatty individual who excelled at letting senior managers know how hard she worked and how skilled she was. Her output was average as was her quality.
Margit was not pretty, she was overweight and her English could best be described as basic. But these things should not have had any impact on how we measured her performance.
You should not be swayed by people whose main skill is telling you how great they are.
What criteria do you use when assessing performance?
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