People and Metrics
While watching an episode of Suits (a TV series), I came to realize (or deepen my realization on) a matter of human nature.
In case you do not watch the show yourself, Suits is a series about the law profession, albeit not a very good depiction of the real thing, from what I heard. Two law firms were merging, and the lowest performing associates were to be let go. Katrina, one of the partners, ran all the names through a computer system that was supposed to track employee performances and came up with a “fire” list.
Brian was on that list.
He was also the dad of a new born, which explained his performance drop.
To the untrained eyes of the partner, it was justified to fire Brian because his stats does not stack up against his peer. However, as Donna, the EQ-genius (if that’s even a thing) COO, pointed out, Brian’s performance was not just about the computer generated numbers. She...