In Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You, an OpEd for the NY Times takes on the idea that unions discourage exceptional workers. It strikes a few chords with me:

In the raging battle over union rights in Wisconsin, those seeking to curtail collective bargaining for state employees have advanced an argument that seems hard to resist: It will make it easier to reward those workers who perform the best. What could be fairer than that?

If only that were true. As anybody who has ever worked in any institution — private or public — knows, one of the primary ways employee effectiveness is judged is the performance review. And nothing could be less fair than that.

I've had performance reviews, when the bosses remembered to ask for them. My last one was very good (yaay), but I recall one back in the early 1990's that was particularly pointless. The review was by my immediate superior - another licensed architect in a firm with few architects and lots of draughtsmen from technical schools. He was upset with me because one day I had nothing to do and went to the production department head (layer after layer of middle management) and said, "I need something to do."  So when it came time for my review, he focused on some small detail I had done differently than office standard, and that was essentially my entire review.

I lobbied incessantly for more communication between workers. The company procedure was that all communication should be taken to your department head, who would ask their department head. Production guy wasn't even supposed to talk to Designer guy or Field guy. So if I wanted to know how our stair rails actually got built in the field, I had to ask the Production head to ask the Field head to ask a field guy.

I came from a much more collaborative background, and probably would have been canned at the next slowdown, but fortunately I was the only one in the office not afraid of computers - I even brought mine in to write reports. When they finally jumped on the CAD bandwagon, I was given a lofty title and put in charge of our IT department. And the pace of electronic work pushed the firm into greater collaboration anyway.

Under such a system, in which one’s livelihood can be destroyed by a self-serving boss trying to meet a budget or please the higher-ups, what employee would ever speak his mind? What employee would ever say that the boss is wrong, and offer an idea on how something might get done better?

Only an employee looking for trouble.

I'm always looking for trouble.

At another firm, we had an Advance. It was actually a retreat, but the bosses thought advance sounded better. We all went to a rented room. They brought in management consultants and we all took a test to see what sort of worker we were. Kind of like Myers-Briggs, but something else. We broke into small teams and asked each other questions. We had lunch. Being from a small satellite office, it was fun to mingle with folk from the main office. But after lunch the trouble started.

The goal was how to make the company better, so in a free and open exchange of ideas, we were all supposed to write down suggestions on slips of paper, and they'd pin them up, and vote on them and move them around into categories. Then discuss them.

The problem is that making the company better easily leads to criticizing those who are already running the company. Every young architect wants to design cool buildings. Period. No one comes in wanting to draw rote bathroom elevations for a rote building someone else designed. But at almost every firm I've seen, design responsibility is tightly limited to one or two personalities. And there's always a certain amount of bread-and-butter work.

So we got a lot of suggestions that the firm should get better projects to work on, and let people design more. That led to a long and actually very informative speech from the name partner on how hard it was to get those better projects. It also led to some griping from the Marketing department. Our head marketing person came from a construction background, and dropped a real bomb by saying that we were better than a lot of other firms because we didn't waste a lot of time on design, we just gave clients what they wanted.

Someone who should have known better stepped up to try to resolve the two viewpoints. That would be me. It was a bad idea. A week later the name partner came to our office, supposedly for lunch, but as one fellow noted, he was taking names. (He and the marketing director were involved.) They wanted to find out who posted any suggestions criticizing marketing. I'm guessing that even though I hadn't made the criticisms, and even though I got along really well with the marketing folk, in their minds I had defended the people attacking them.

At the next general staff meeting, what had been a really happy group before the advance was frightened and guarded. The assistant marketing person glared and complained about all the unrecognized work they were doing. I was never so glad to drive away from a meeting.

When we hit a slow point, I took vacation rather than sit around. My local boss called me while I was sanding trim boards. He was very apologetic, but said they had to let me go. As is often the case, I found a much better job a few months later.