Using the Drucker Ratio in the Evaluation

When we institute a practice evaluation into our self motivation system, we need to keep in mind its purpose. What purpose does evaluation have on our motivation, and how can we use an evaluation to positively impact our motivation. The most obvious reason is to improve our system of self motivation, and so we set up an evaluation that will be effective in doing that.

But the evaluation should also be structured to enhance your motivation; that is, it becomes a factor in how motivated you are as you do the evaluation and afterwards. We do this by making the the evaluation enhance our successability, our confidence in our competence.

One of the ways we ensure that the evaluation will enhance our successability is by making sure we use what I call the Drucker ratio. Peter Drucker was one of the foremost thinkers and writers about people as they interact with the places they work. One thing he wrote about was how managers treat their workers. He posited that the average worker does good work about 90% of the time and inadequate work about 10% of the time. (I think he got the numbers pretty accurately about me!) Consequently, he argued, when a manager is talking to a worker about the worker’s performance, 90% of what he says should be positive. The ratio of the positive feedback to negative feedback, he argues, should be the same as the ratio of good work to inadequate work. How many of us have worked for managers who followed the Drucker ratio? Bosses like that are not real common.

But luckily for us, we control the type of manager we are to ourselves. We control the type of evaluation we give ourselves, when they are positive and when they are negative. We want to maintain the Drucker ratio when we do self evaluations of our movement toward our vision. We want to encourage ourselves and foster high successability, confidence in our competence. It is a simple concept, but so many of us are quick to dump on ourselves when we mess up.

We certainly do need to be honest with ourselves, and call attention when we are not moving forward, so we can make corrections, but we also need to celebrate the good things we are doing.

By maintaining the Drucker ratio in our evaluations, we increase our motivation and keep moving forward toward our vision.