Knowledge that Transforms

The specimen check‐list represents a breakthrough in appraisal because its format minimizes appraiser‐errors common in rating, ranking, and essay appraisal methods. The specimen check‐list requires the appraiser to diagnostically report behavioral incidents observed, based upon prompted recall.

What will come of the unique situation in public employment to test, develop, refine, and advocate new dimensions in all employer‐employee relations? Experimentation is proceeding in several states with several different approaches. The most successful mechanisms may be combined into a total program and advocated—not only to other public employers—but to the private sector as well. The employee‐council approach, discussed here, may be the most productive of the possibilities.

The supermobile whose expectations are so gross that he cannot endure the hardship of staying long enough on a job to become competent represents the defect inherent in a mobile society. Whether he stays or leaves, he will make problems for himself and for others.

Fast track programs frequently follow “no track” programs and are started when management suddenly realizes that it cannot fill its need for promotable talent. This is not the best motive for such a program, but because there is often inadequate or ineffective planning in normal manpower development, career guidance, and manpower planning, a fast track program can serve as a step towards broader‐based, more inclusive manpower planning and development activities.

To develop the institutions and social processes through which many can attain the self‐actualization that only a few have up to now been able to seize, must be regarded as enormously difficult under the necessary constraint that we continue the adequate production of steel and houses and potatoes. Any moral evaluation of an organization in terms of its contribution to personal self‐actualization becomes footless if the only means of increasing that contribution involves an increase in hunger or a decrease in personal security, for these are preconditions to self‐actualization.

How many personnel managers start with a will to manage and unremittingly stay with it? How many give up, and retreat to the personnel technology of recordkeeping and filling out forms? Advances in the behavioral sciences and new conceptions of the personnel manager's role allow us to redefine the personnel job–all we need is more of the will to manage.

This is a helpful list, whether the goal setting process is new in your organization or has been working reasonably well for some time.

This nationwide survey of managerial transfer practices in 250 large manufacturing firms studies the patterns of transfer, the departments most commonly providing personnel for subsequent assignment to other functional areas, various organizational variables which affect the frequency and pattern of managerial transfers, and the implications for career planning.

The successful installation of MBO requires the development of results‐oriented, responsibility‐sharing, and non‐zero‐sum attitudes in all managers. And the creation of those attitudes may require a mini‐cultural revolution.

How often should a man be inducted, socialized, trained, developed, and then promoted or transferred from one department to another? The answer should depend to some extent on the average learning time for the manager's new job, and the company's feeling about a “break‐even” or “pay‐back” period when the employee works to “pay back” the organization for providing him with the job learning opportunity.