Why is it impossible to criticise poor performance in the office or elsewhere nowadays?
This article was provoked by England’s performance in the second Test Match against South Africa at Trent Bridge, although Andy Murray, the football team and so many other sporting failures have been there before.
During the commentary on the last afternoon when the lads were at best pathetic, at worst inadequate and certainly in some cases irretrievably disastrous, the language used was less expressive.
In the world of the accountant, to describe something as average suggests that it is somewhere right in the middle of a range between the best and the worst. Surely that is exactly what an average must be, by definition.
In cricket, if something is “very average” (a tautology in itself) it is poor. This does disfavour to our rich language, as well as confusing any “average” viewer or listener.
Similarly, when did the word “ordinary” move from meaning “average” in the traditional sense to substandard?
Many of you will wonder why this could conceivably matter. A practical example from the world of accountancy might (or might not) shed some light on the subject.
In the past, your columnist worked for a firm that used an appraisal system where the main possibilities were “good” and “needs improvement”. This is a very odd scale, since the good people almost certainly need improvement, albeit to a lesser extent than the, dare one say the awful word, bad or underperformers.
One wonders why accountants, cricket commentators and almost everyone else in the contemporary world is not willing to use negative terminology to describe what our dear captain, Joe Root accurately identified as, and bravely called, a poor performance.
Is this a function of political correctness and long-term planning, which needs to ensure that nothing can go wrong when attempting to dismiss an employee?
Surely if you want to get rid of somebody, it must be better to have identified their performance as sub standard over a long period of time in order to justify the dismissal. The alternative is that they have been told that their performance is broadly acceptable, albeit needing improvement, in which case they could justifiably suggest that the dismissal has been unfair since they were not at any point been informed that their work was inadequate.
In any event, one hopes that England’s cricketers will improve by the time that they get to the Oval, although it has to be a possibility that some of those who have been underachieving on a regular basis and show no clear signs of the ability required to survive at this level might not actually be there.
Similarly, perhaps it is time for the accountancy profession to get real and, gently, make it clear to struggling colleagues that their work is not of the required standard. Who knows, this might lead to the necessary changes, which could help the practice in the longer term?