I used to troll the Dilbert Web site frequently and remember a comment a reader made about why employee-recognition awards don’t always work. Evidently this person’s place of employment gave out a monthly award for the best employee that included a name on a large plaque (“Jane Doe, June,” etc.) and the use of a reserved parking space near the front door. The rules stated, however, that no one could receive the award more than once per year. Because of constant turnover it seemed that near the end of the year either the recipient was someone who had been hired only the previous month (or week!) or the award went unassigned, which meant that everyone had to walk past the empty parking space every morning for a month. The commenter said that just killed morale.
I talked about the comment with a faculty colleague who said with a chuckle, “The celebration of mere competence is the surest sign that incompetence is the rule of the land.” Put another way, left to its own devices, the tendency of any organization is toward mediocrity.
Excellence is, to some extent, unnatural. Our cultural tendency to use awards to shore up self-esteem seems to end up celebrating mere competence as a kind of excellence. Does your campus have ways to celebrate mediocrity?
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20 Responses to When Competence Is Heralded as Excellence
laur2582 - August 9, 2010 at 4:37 pm
They call this the Peter Principle.
mmccllln - August 9, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Yes. It’s called tenure.
akeller - August 9, 2010 at 6:09 pm
One of my sons got a job recently just because he said he showed up for work everyday in his interview. I always thought that was a minimal requirement, but it seems the norm now is that young people only work when they feel like it.
mrutter - August 9, 2010 at 6:20 pm
I think there may be a slightly different way of looking at what Fant dubs celebrating mere competence. The aim of meaningful recognition programs should, in part, be to highlight work that students and faculty (and sometimes even administrators) may not fully understand or appreciate.Research/scholarship in particular has its own private stock of celebratory mechanisms — major prizes, publications, and, of course, tenure. The same goes for student achievements (grades, scholarships, and eventually, a prestigious job or acceptance to a professional school).Let’s pause here and ask: Should we divert into a conversation about celebrating the glories of grade inflation or tenure?That said, the staff often enable academic success. Granted, staff exist because of the faculty and students. Most are not seeking awards, banners, or parking spaces (with the exception, perhaps, of those working in the Harvard square area where rates go for as much as $30 a day or $500-$1000 a month).Most staff simply want to be understood — that the work they do (managing grants, dealing with the media, producing a website, taking care of student housing, etc.) is worthwhile, often complex, and is, well, important.Other than an inbred society award for staff achievements (which I would absolutely deem the path towards mediocrity) very few opportunities exist for recognition or awareness.Ultimately, celebrating work that goes above and beyond as a way to educate the community about what it takes to be successful as an institution is worthwhile. I don’t see anything medicore about that. If you treat the day-to-day work that keeps the academic wheels turning as background noise, you will soon be whistful for mere competence.
dboyles - August 9, 2010 at 6:26 pm
“Core competencies,” and even “outcomes” (which are as soon as stated, minimal outcomes)…all this comes about with the assessment movement trying to “institutionalize” and “commodify” the value-added function that only a professor alone with his/her ethical principles has the ability to catalyze. To formalize a complex process in terms of finite “outcomes” does more to degrade the subtle and multifarious possibilities that might result than it does to actualize them.
ksledge - August 9, 2010 at 6:35 pm
We have this end of semester or end of year party in our division, and the chair insists on announcing everyone’s awards/accomplishments, no matter how small. It’s very sweet of him, but it seems like almost every faculty member and grad student has won some award or research grant over the course of the semester or year…especially when people include the papers they’ve published! I sort of feel like only major awards or promotions (i.e. tenure) should get announced, but I guess it’s hard to draw the line.
rtally - August 9, 2010 at 9:35 pm
I’m not sure I understand the complaint here, unless Professor Fant is opposed to awards/recognitions entirely. Awards are given out in almost every field, and although a “Best in Show” award is the same year-to-year, the quality of the entrants cannot always be. Should we do away with the Oscar for Best Actor just because this year’s winners aren’t as good as another’s? Must every employee-of-the-month be as “excellent” as ever other?In 1941, Ted Williams hit .406 (the last .400+ hitter ever, of course) AND led the league in home runs (as well as walks, slugging percentage, and runs scored), but he did not win the American League’s MVP award, which went to some guy named DiMaggio (who had a pretty good year too, despite hitting only .357 [ha!]). Williams, believed by many to be the greatest hitter ever later won two MVPs (the same as early-80s Braves slugger Dale Murphy). I do not dispute Murphy’s qualifications for winning these awards, but I think all baseball fans will agree that Ted Williams, even in years he did not win awards, was better. Should I say that Murphy lowered the bar for “excellence”?
d_and_der - August 9, 2010 at 11:05 pm
@#3: I once insisted a staff member be fired. The response was “she shows up everyday.” Perhaps recognition plaques have outlived their usefullness in a society that fails to strive for excellence.
frotgers - August 10, 2010 at 6:41 am
This process of rewarding competence as though it was excellence is pervasive in our society. My wife worked for years in various customer service positions in retail. I once told her about an experience I had trying to return a piece of merchandise in which the representative was courteous, accommodating and efficient. I said to my wife, “that was outstanding customer service.” To which she replied, “no, that’s customer service.” We are so used to mediocrity that basic competence seems to us excellent!
cwinton - August 10, 2010 at 10:04 am
Basically, we have evolved a culture that seeks to avoid slighting in any way those with thin skins. Psuedo-awards are simply a means for stroking the egos of people who are so insecure they need markers that somehow make them feel better about themselves, particularly in comparison to their colleagues. As a chair I experienced faculty who expected annual evaluations to only include positive comments and have criteria so weak that they could be rated as outstanding (and knew of one department that actually sought to institutionalize such a practice – how nice, everyone in our department is outstanding). When my son was in the Scouts I was struck by the proliferation of merit badges that had taken place since my day, the majority of which were of the feel good variety, requiring little, if any, meritorious effort. And so on and so forth. What we have accomplished in this grand effort to avoid bruising the feelings of others is to cheapen recognition for a job well done, so yes, we have lost the distinction between the ordinary and the meritorious.
11301218 - August 10, 2010 at 10:15 am
Competence vs. excellence: At my institution, the university’spromotion and tenure policies were rewritten, and all of thedepartments’ criteria had to be rewritten and subjected tomultiple level approval by the dean, the provost, andthe university’s lawyer. I was dismayed to find a stampedeto the bottom in requirements. Of course, I (as a dean)approved none of them and wrote explicit critiques. Now,I am no longer dean. Looks like you can get tenured andpromoted merely by showing up and getting good studentratings according to the higher pay grades.
11261897 - August 10, 2010 at 10:25 am
“When every one is somebody, / Then no one’s anybody!”– W.S. Gilbert
slomo87 - August 10, 2010 at 10:44 am
So, what can be done to correct this problem? It is truly rampant and needs to be ceased!
optimysticynic - August 11, 2010 at 1:54 pm
In addition to rewarding mere competence, there is the issue of transparency and fairness. In my arena, the makeup of the committee that determines the awards is not public, it is picked at the discretion of the division head and packed with her choices to ensure that no one who has ever displeased her can win. The criteria are structurally biased in favor of some units over others and the outcome is awards that revolve among a small number of in-groupers. Outcome: not ony NOT raised morale, but lowered morale. Some of us have declined to be nominated any more. The conspicuous non-winners after 5-10 years of annual nomination: those who advocate change in our procedures to improve service at the cost of…no longer tolerating mere competence.
honore - August 12, 2010 at 8:33 am
And the “Excellence in Mediocrity Award” goes to…University of Wisconsin-Madison, where student service “professionals” who regularly give each other “awards” for preciously inane distinctions such as:”Made Most Difference In Life of Students”"Made Most Difference in Her/His Unit’s Leadership”"Made Most Difference on Campus”"Best…(fill-in-the-blank)”"Most Creative” (no metric applied, other than drone popularity)”Most Resourceful” (ditto)”Most Respected” (ditto)”Most Cutting Edge” (ditto)”Most Likely To Employ Best Practices” (ditto)”Most LGBTQ-Friendly” (ditto)”Most Multi-Cultural-Friendly (ditto) These meaningless, absurd insider “awards” are given out yearly to the SAME dozen or so student service lifers who haven’t had a creative idea in years or since the last “dish-to-pass” non-secular, non-Christmas party, non-sexist, non-racist, non-blah,blah tax-payer billed party.Not rain, nor sleet, nor snow prevent any of these “professionals” from attending the annual award ceremony to pick up their worthless plaques. You can usually find them just outside the awards banquet room, where they practice facial expressions of shock, surprise and awe in the hall mirror.They THEN publish a newsletter to let the campus community know who the “leaders” and “award” winners were.These awards make for very plump résumé filler and seem to impress search committee bobble-heads consistently.
osholes - August 12, 2010 at 12:02 pm
I really don’t care if awards go the mediocre (after all, as they say on Car Talk, only the mediocre can always be at their best), but I have a big problem when exceptional individuals are ignored. The latter occurs when the awards are given BY the mediocre TO the mediocre but NOT to the deserving.
michaelharrawood - August 12, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Why does this colloquy bother me? Thanks to mrutter for the intelligence and restraint of his comment. I can’t hear the word “excellence” without hearing also Bill Readings’ brilliant critique of this empty cliche in The University in Ruins. A recent recruitment drive at my institution was named “A Night of Excellence!”; and Readings recounts an award to the Cornell Campus Police for “Excellence in Parking,” which of course meant writing lots of parking tickets. I’ve challenged my faculty colleagues here to abandon the word altogether, along with other academic pieties like “critical thinking,” which are now so broadly overused they mean nothing at all, and can actully do harm when we fall back on them as universals. I feel the same dread when I hear an administrator call his faculty and staff a “family.” I understand the achievement-vs-self-esteem problem, which is being talked about in many professions besides ours. (Check out Jean Twenge’s Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before. It’s a Generation of Vipers for our time.) What I don’t get is the reiterated sense of surprise and indignation I witness when my colleagues talk about this issue. As murutter suggests, the purpose of these awards is to keep the institution functioning smoothly. I know they can be absurd and even stupid, but I also agree that we have no interest in running this into a rant about grade inflation and tenure. I suppose that, as faculty we are not wrong to think of ourselves as the excellence police, and I suppose we do get to bust on “mediocrity” wherever we find it (except in ourselves). But I wonder at times whether reflections like these do more harm than good. The ground may be moving beneath our feet, but that doesn’t mean the sky is falling. There have been ideological shifts (which, btw, we’re not in charge of) and budget shifts that are in turn changing up the game for teachers and academics. It may just mean we have to shift our game as well.Michael HarrawoodFlorida Atlantic University
gplm2000 - August 12, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Excellence is no longer wanted on campus because it may be that one is politically incorrect, thus an oxymoron is created. For example, one leadership school gave its annual award to a woman(thats OK), who started and leads a family values website with great success. But the University President reemed out the Dean for making the award (with faculty approval) because the website is not politically correct. It is anti-homosexual on marriage. The Dean was forced into a letter of apology to the World for daring to make a merit award.
alan_kors - August 12, 2010 at 4:58 pm
I nominate this article for the “Best Article in August” award.
ardvaark - August 13, 2010 at 8:27 am
Part of our problem in rewarding mediocrity in teaching is that there is often only modest understanding of what good teaching is; further, we are often more interested in popularity, reputation, and economic success more than we are invested in the effectiveness of our instruction.I also think that there is a culture that is uneasy with criticism to the extent that concerns with fairness or reasonableness trump realistic appraisals of performance.