When PMS killed Engagement

Puneet works as a Project Manager in ITECH Corporation, a 150 year old technology company. The company offers various technology based solutions in a broad-range of areas to a wide-array of industries including telecommunications, banking, retail, automobile, logistics, aerospace, media and advertising etc. Puneet works in ITECH’s Hyderabad-based facility in India.


Puneet a computer engineer from one of the premier engineering colleges of the country has been working in ITECH for the last 1.5 years. His total work-life of 11 years is filled with rich experiences. He brings all that into his work coupled with his dedication and ingenuity. He reports to the global Delivery head Mr. Nataraj Srinivasan. 19 other project Managers like Puneet also report to Mr. Srinivasan.

Puneet has been a high-performer through-out and has been trusted by his seniors for challenging responsibilities. One year back he was assigned to his current project. At a time when he took over there were lots of issues in the project. The client was high on discontent and the project contract to be renewed this year was wide-open to competition. At such a juncture last year, Punnet was asked to take over the reins of the project. He had dual challenges: one to sort-out the issues in the project and second and more difficult one, to retain the project. Punnet’s whole-hearted devotion, his excellent leadership qualities and his strong technical understanding had his team rallying behind him and in a year he was able to bring the project on track.

The annual appraisal interview had just concluded and Puneet was crestfallen. The ratings by his supervisor Mr. Srinivasan had left him with a huge sense of discontent and displeasure. Actually ITECH had a 65% weightage on the KRAs or the core job responsibilities and 35% weightage on the ICAs or the individual contribution areas other than the core job. Punnet’s focus on reviving the troubled project saw him scoring very high on the KRAs, however that left him hardly with any time to focus on contributing other than his core job responsibilities. Hence his overall rating had taken a hit. He tried to rationalize this with his supervisor. However Srnivasan expressed his helplessness as he had to operate within the ‘system’ ITECH also had a policy of comparative rating and forced distribution. This meant that supposedly 10 team members were reporting to a person X, then X would have to rate some 20% of the team members with A- rating, some 50% of the members with B-rating, 10% as C-rating and the rest 10% as D-rating, where A was the highest and D would mean PIP (Performance Improvement Program). Puneet’s overall rating among 20 project managers was C and he was distraught at the logic and felt cheated. He rued the fact that he took up the challenging troubled project on insistence of the management.

His hopes of 360-degree feedback system that the company had, were also dashed on a comparative note. ITECH had a system whereby the appraise could choose his/her 360-degree ratees. Puneet had made honest choices and had got a reasonably good feedback. However he later came to know that some his fellow PMs had hand-picked the 360-degree ratees and had received ‘fixed’ feedback.

Punnet could not see any motivation to continue in his current project and even in his current organization.

All characters and affiliations in this story are fictitious except the story itself. So many times organization's forget while designing their PMS that the only objective of having a PMS is developmental and everything has to be done keeping that in mind. Managing and appraising performance is a double-edged sword. It can 'thrill' but can also 'kill'. In Puneet's case it 'killed' motivation, drive and engagement.