President's Message

Jeff Feuquay

As someone who has been personnel assessing for a long time (pundits and co-workers would allege "too long"), I often interpret world events in light of their potential impact on our field. Even if the impact is not readily apparent, I often glean a greater appreciation for the subtleties inherent in establishing selection and performance standards.

As a lead-in and far from the world stage, my wife and I raised two very different sons - one would argue interminably with every directive, then do exactly as bidden. The other would pleasantly agree with what he was told to do, then proceed as though no direction whatsoever had been given. Our daughter took the middle road, both in taking and following directions. Had the three been employees, which, if any, was a keeper? (We did keep them all.)

My point, I think, is that we spend an inordinate amount of our time on developing predictors and not ensuring the criteria we are trying to predict are the criteria-in-fact. In content terms, for how many of us really have time, money and sample sizes to do a lot of criterion work, we may be far too accepting of our purported experts ability to define the domains we are to measure . . .this is regardless of whether our job is to facilitate selection of the best candidate or measure the performance of incumbents.

I am beginning to wonder if refinement of performance domains and standards doesn't require experts who are in serious and genuine disagreement with each other. In what is by now a threadbare example: what we should measure in selecting an American President depends entirely on our ability to determine what it means for a President to do his or her job well. Until the current President (as of the time of writing) provided the opportunities for serious debate, I thought I could answer the question. The complexity of the job and the complexity of the question and its possible answers was far less apparent (as was, for that matter, what it takes to be a good White House intern).

It's tempting to believe that performance standards for "simple" jobs, like file clerk, are more easily discerned. But I'm not sure. Three faction (of many) might say: filing and all that entails is most important; diversity and reflecting the customer base is most important; or both filing and a representative workforce are equally important. Until there is (1) strong disagreement among the constituency or (2) an employee on the verge of being fired, I'm from certain the true competencies become apparent, even to the experts upon whom we rely.

This difficulty is mirrored in our ongoing efforts to complete the puzzle, to keep plugging holes in our picture of good performance. We talk in terms of incremental validity & shared variance, we mean, IF I know the components of a job, how many of those components can I measure and predict, and what tools should I use in what order. We need also have a clearer vision of the end product - a person in a job doing work that needs to be done in a way it needs to be done.

I'm really not sure what help we can provide our experts, certainly I'm aware there are many tools and processes designed to aid them in defining jobs and performance. It may be that we need to give our experts a lot more outrageous hypothetically, to introduce strong disagreement in search of a more complete understanding of what we must predict. Until recently, who would have dreamed that being an Intern (or President) required a quasi-Freudian appreciation of a good cigar.

On the organizational front, I've been President of IPMAAC for awhile not (pundits, board members, and others would allege "too long") and my final Board meeting in that capacity will have occurred before this is distributed. Thank you for allowing me this experience. Please, please send ideas to me and the other Board members on things we can do to make IPMAAC more valuable to make IPMAAC more valuable to you. And, volunteer. We're in this together to improve our profession and, God willing, our world.

Thank you.

Jeff Feuquay