Meritocracy

A little false praise can be helpful. Too much false praise is worse than no praise at all.

To have a true meritocracy, a society must promote true merit. A society based on a currency of false merit simply becomes an immense kindergarten, filled with narcissistic (childish) adults. We cannot all be brain surgeons or astronauts. We cannot all be leaders and innovators. If society encourages true merit on all levels, we can all feel valued and potentially excellent in whatever we can do with education and experience.

Our current, politically correct culture in the U.S. has blurred the line between true merit and false merit. In an admirable attempt to overcome prejudice and encourage equality in our educational systems, the value of honest and critical assessment of performance has been demonized in many circles. The furor over national achievement testing in public schools is an example.

Critique of performance is absolutely necessary in a progressive society. Honest critique of the society's performance in the U.S. has fallen prey to rabid nationalism after 911. Critique of police and fire departments has fallen prey to the sentimentality toward the first responders at 911 to the point that government officials find it hard to require basic competence testing and drug screening in their public safety departments. I could go on.

Many people in supervisory authority seem to have lost the ability to make basic, ongoing performance assessments of their employees. Incompetence in all segments of our service economy is becoming commonplace and somewhat accepted. The result is a deteriorating quality of life, relevant to the expense of daily living. For an applicable test of this observation, call your local cable provider or your local neighborhood health center.

My humanist practice is based, in part, in maintaining truthful relationships in my daily life. If I am consuming a service, I feel it is my responsibility to do what I can to ensure the efficiency and merit of that service. I participate honestly in customer surveys. I utilize and contribute to Web-based review sites. When I was an employer in the field of health services, I felt I had been entrusted with a responsibility to perform daily assessments of the work of my employees for their patients. That was fifteen years ago, when the current trend against truthful assessments was just beginning. I do not envy those in comparable positions today.

Performance assessment should begin in the home, but it is apparently seen now as punitive or even abusive. Performance assessment in relationships of all kinds should be mutual, but the current defensiveness around honest criticism makes this extremely challenging. How do we get back to an honest meritocracy?

Well, on a personal level, I would say there are several possible ways to deal with performance assessment. Poor performance can be observed in silence and noted. A supervisor, family member or teacher can then make the commitment to personally mentor the poor performer without first heaping on false praise for mediocre or poor performance. If the poor performer receives any false praise, this only makes teaching that poor performer more difficult in the future. Another behavioral approach to poor performance is to critique it unemotionally and precisely in the moment. This is a moment-by-moment approach which can be effective over time, especially with a poor performer with attention or memory issues. This method tends to keep assessment focused purely on behavior in the moment, thereby avoiding personalizing the criticism. This method requires vigilance and consistency. It is best used in a work or learning culture where everyone, including supervisors/parents/teachers, subscribe to the method for critiques of their performance as well. There are book shelves packed with other, more elaborate methodologies, but they all have in common a belief that honest assessment is the basis for encouraging merit, learning and peak performance.

Truthful praise is a powerful tool for helping family, friends, students or employees to excel and achieve happiness with their places in our lives and in society. False praise can be truly destructive and undermining to ourselves and to society. Happiness based in an illusion is not self-sustaining. To achieve happiness with yourself, it is important to have a realistic assessment of yourself, aided by those with whom you live and interact. Seeking this, as well as offering it to others, is a worthwhile daily practice.