You Can't Coach That

Do a bad job - get $50,000

Allow me to set the scene. You have been doing a job for many years. You therefore have a wealth of experience which should be tapped into and utilised for the benefit of your employer and those that your employer serves. You have however become disillusioned with your profession and therefore your performance has diminished over time.

This may seem familiar to many people. You may have found yourself in this position or you may recognise this in people that you work with. I know I do.

The solution would appear to be self-evident. Such an employee would either leave their current employment voluntarily and move into an area where they are more suited, or their diminished performance would allow their employer to terminate their employment.

Enter the Queensland Education department. It has been announced today that they will repeat a 2002 program whereby a $50,000 grant will be made available to “under-performing” teachers to encourage them to leave the profession and move into different careers.  Surely any employee that is “under-performing” should be told in no uncertain terms that their performance must improve or their employment will be terminated. Terminated, as in gone, fired, don’t let the door hit you in the bum on the way out. Not “we know you haven’t been doing your job for the last 5 years so here’s 50 grand for doing such a poor job”.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, after all our politicians receive multi-million dollar superannuation payouts if they are in office for any significant length of time regardless of the level of their performance. There is a whole other story in that one - another day perhaps, one rant at a time.

Let me know what you think, am I being too harsh here?

I have previously written about teacher pay related matters:
Performance pay for teachers and
Teacher Salaries

“You can’t coach that”

No Coach...You are right on the money here. People that under-preform should be shown the door.  Perhaps you need to teach the higher-ups how to document poor performance so they can be terminated.  It isn’t very difficult.  Do you have a powerful union?  That’s another issue, but still can be dealt with.  Wow, what a fiasco this is…

Hey Coach…

This is quite a ridiculous phenomenon, but not surprising.  Consider this:  my wife & I just moved a few weeks ago.  Prior to moving we lived next to a 45 year old heroin addict, no we didn’t live in an inner-city, we lived in small-town-USA, and in a rural area at that.

Anyway...this woman had her 4 children taken away by the gov’t, she wasn’t allowed to have pets because of her extreme neglect of previous pets, and she is a heroin addict that doesn’t work.  In spite of all of these things, she owns her own home!  Now tell me if you think that is fair!  In other words, my tax dollars are paying for her “welfare”, and her home, and her heroin addict, as she is still using the drug!

Well, we have since moved & don’t have to deal with her anymore, but such a gross mismanagement of our tax dollars is a shining example of the corruption of our existing systems!

Yeah, it’s hard to say.  Here in the States they do the opposite—giving a bonus to those teachers whose students do exceptionally well on the mandadory national tests.  That has the unfortunate side-effect of motivating teachers to tailor the teaching to only those things that will be on the test, and in some extreme cases, actually helping the kids cheat or cheating on their behalf.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but neither paying them to succeed or paying them when they fail seems like it would work.

Comedy+ - our union is probably one of the weaker ones in the industrial relations scene here. our federal government has also reduced their powers somewhat in recent times. It is getting harder and harder to fire people with the increase in civil action for wrongful dismissal - another issue I could go on about.

Matthew - We all need a better system to make those in power more directly accountable for our tax dollars, not sure how to do it though.

Jer - you’re right on the money about paying bonuses for high achievement. It means teachers in schools with low outcomes are disadvantaged and that system is open to abuse. Difficult things to solve here although no-one seems to listen to those actually doing the teaching.

Thanks for the comments

I see this in the corporate world all the time.  The incompetent people are promote just to get them out of a certain division.

Also, I’ve seen many great performing people get passed up for promotion because their boss “Can’t afford to let them go.”