Week 12: Now you're the manager

Backward design and constructive alignment moved into a review system, the rater problem, procedural justice, and naming who pays under your own design.

25 May 2027

Why it worksA review is a design; it has to remove what each trick stands on, replace what calibration was for, and be fair enough in procedure that people accept the result.

Wiggins and McTighe’s advice to teachers is to design backwards: decide what you want students to understand, decide what evidence would show it, and only then design the activities. Biggs calls the same idea constructive alignment. Neither was written about performance reviews, and both apply directly, because a review system is a course with a rubric and a calibration meeting at the end.

Start from what you want to be true of the team whose packets you argued from. Then ask what evidence would show it, and who could gather that evidence without the person being rated writing it themselves. Then ask, for each trick in this course, where it stands. Splitting tickets needs a ticket count. The launch email needs a reader who does not check. The chosen reviewer needs a nomination form. The green dot needs a manager who reads status. Remove the thing each trick stands on and the trick falls over.

Two things you cannot remove. The first is the rater. Week 1 said that more than half of a rating is whoever gives it, and calibration was the company’s answer to that. If your design has no calibration meeting, it needs another answer, and “trust the manager” is the one the research already rejected. Deloitte’s answer was to ask the team leader four questions about what they would do with the person, rather than what the person was like. You may do better, but you must do something.

The second is the people being rated, who have to accept the result. Colquitt’s work on organisational justice splits fairness into parts, and the part that best predicts whether people accept an outcome they dislike is procedural: could they speak, was the process the same for everyone, could a mistake be corrected. A design with no way to contest a rating is a design people will game harder, because gaming is the only voice it left them.

What you cannot remove at all is the trade-off. Every place you close costs something, and week by week this course has said who pays. Your justification says who pays under your design. A design that claims nobody does is the one the class will beat on Thursday.

Outline#

• backward design and constructive alignment, transplanted
• every trick from weeks 1 to 11, and what each one stands on
• the rater problem, and what replaces calibration if you remove it
• procedural justice: voice, consistency, correction
• naming who pays under your design, as the last skill in the course

Sources

• Wiggins and McTighe, Understanding by Design
• Biggs, Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment (Higher Education, 1996)
• Colquitt, On the dimensionality of organizational justice (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2001)
• Buckingham and Goodall, Reinventing performance management (Harvard Business Review, 2015)
• Don't rate your employees on a curve (Harvard Business Review, 2013)