Meritocracy should not be subjective

Sometimes I become confused with the modern day terminology of a simple thing – sincere and efficient employee. We use impressive and mighty words such as meritocracy, talent pool, multi skilled, up skilled, leadership oriented etc to describe or rather differentiate a bright employee from others, the run of the mill types. While it’s alright to differentiate more bright employees from not-so-bright, use more trendy vocabulary to describe them and provide them an accelerated career growth, what astonishes me no end is the element of subjectivity in recognising meritocratic employees. Is a good employee generally good for any organisation or is only subjectively good – only under a particular boss, in a specific role or a department and during a particular tenure? 

I am not questioning any organisation, system or an individual here, but just wondering at the manner of assessing an employee’s capability! In a long career span, my experience as a boss and subordinate has been that a good hand is generally good , barring minor occasional blips, because after all, we are all humans and not machines. But over a medium to long term average, a good employee will largely prove to be good. 

What has provoked me to write this post are certain instances, where employees once considered 24 carat gold with great careers going for them, suddenly fell out of favour and became disposable. While they might not have hit such low levels to be asked by the organisation to leave and go, circumstances became such that they no longer could continue and had to bring their once fledgling careers to a rather premature end. While it’s true that an organisation is much bigger than any individual and organisations survive and thrive, notwithstanding the exit of individuals, it’s unfortunate when a hardworking, sincere, knowledgeable, dependable and someone with a great career ahead has to call it a day for something that was eminently avoidable in first place was at best flimsy! Let’s create more robust platforms for assessing individuals so that there services can be availed of by organisations for long time to their mutual benefit.