It never ceases to amaze that seemingly progressive companies still have, ahem, ‘guidelines’ for how long an individual must be in a particular role prior to being considered for a promotion. Unless you’re running a prison, time should have no bearing on your decision to move someone beyond their existing role. (Though in fairness, it may feel like just that to the people in the organization.)
photo by daniel james
I touched on how ridiculous this practice is by equating to the sports world several months ago, but I wanted to take a deeper look at why this practice is far dumber than it sounds.
- Weeding out your stars. The best people want to be challenged. They want to learn new things and be forced to step up their game in order to succeed. If you’re bright, highly effective at what you do but aren’t challenged and have no prospects of being challenged until you log the requisite service time then you aren’t going to stick around. Good people have options. Bad companies do not.
- Losing your edge. Service time often comes along with a checklist whereby various tasks need to have been completed. All this translates into stocking your company full of passive bureaucrats who accept that ‘that’s the way things are.’ If you’re looking to succeed within your industry you have to constantly be redefining the rules of the game in order to fit your strengths. Success is rarely bred from people who accept the status quo.
- Breeding helplessness. It doesn’t take too many repetitions for one to learn new behavior. If after knocking a couple projects out of the park and wildly succeeding there is no reward then that extra effort will rapidly diminish. Other than personal pride, what’s the point of doing excellent work if it’s not rewarded? Promotions based on service time are an implicit statement to your employees that it doesn’t matter how well they do so long as they do it for a long time. You’ve completely taken an employee’s control over their own destiny out of their hands. That helplessness rarely concocts innovative solutions, creates new ideas or pushes ahead. (See Motor Vehicles, Department of)
- Failing to develop home-grown talent. Why bother coaching your stars if they still have 24-months prior to even being considered for doing more? It provides such a convenient out for managers that they’ll inevitably grab it. Coaching is hard. It isn’t rewarded. And it takes time away from doing the ‘real work.’ In the long run you’ll feel as though you have to keep hiring from outside to fill the gaps in your organization because you didn’t spend the time early on to fill those gaps. You also don’t truly understand what you have in your talent pool because you haven’t pushed it.
Feel free to disagree and tell me how wrong I am, but this is a mindset that I just can’t seem to understand. The more I try, the more frustrated I get. Over to you…
photo by robert francis
An excellent post at PsyBlog on the effects of group dynamics on productivity. Basically, the more people you add to a group the less effective the group becomes when the workload is additive. One interesting study showed that when people were asked to clap or yell as loud as they could their output in a group of six or larger was 1/3rd of what it was on their own.
As the author notes, “… a group problem-solving session relies on the brains of the best people in the group - social loafing wouldn’t necessarily reduce productivity in this group as markedly.” So this doesn’t wholly apply to our knowledge businesses, but I think we can all remember times when we were guilty of this or saw it in others in a group.
The post recommends several ways to minimize the effects of social loafing, including:
- Make it known the task is important
- Foster a group identity / belonging to the group
- Make the contribution of other members well-known so as to decrease the ’sucker effect’
All good, but there are a few worth adding.
- Assign a communicator. Team construction is vital. Having a communicator on the team who’s primary job isn’t necessarily measured in output, but rather whether everyone is aware of what others are doing, is a start. His job is to make sure everyone knows the latest developments and thus implicitly communicates the accomplishments of others on the team so as to minimize the ’sucker effect’ even further.
- Frequent iteration. Apply the Agile method of software development to your team. Break large tasks down into daily or weekly deliverables. Assign the responsibility for the task to the individual. If it requires the team to collaborate it is still that individual’s responsibility to get everyone together to accomplish the assignment. Deliver something every week and iterate as required.
- Show your work. Time should be set aside for each individual to ‘present’ their contribution to the rest of the group. Even if it’s just thought starters, the contribution should be formally recognized so that it is visible to every member.
- Limit group size. Seems obvious, particularly given the graph on the PsyBlog post that shows individual effort halves in groups of 8 or more. Group dynamics expert and HBS luminary, J. Richard Hackman, found that the optimal group size is 4.6. Obviously, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish but err on the side of too small and you’ll force everyone to shoulder more of the load.
- Relinquish ownership. Unless ownership of the project and the subsequent success or failure is fully granted to the group, individual’s will have some cover to hide behind. While the output/goal may be dictated by someone outside the group acknowledge there are many ways to arrive at the same destination. Grant the freedom to determine that path to the group and let it be known that the rewards and recognition are all theirs.
If other solutions have worked for you please leave them in the comments for others to see.
photo by milkaela
Confirmation bias is a powerful thing. Micro-managers have to micro-manage because their employees miss deadlines, deliver half-baked work and are lazy.
While some may see this as a chicken and egg problem, I’m firmly in the chicken camp. Employees don’t start out looking to cut corners and do late, mediocre work. People will usually live up to the expectations you have of them. If your actions make it clear that you expect them to be middling employees they’ll live up to that. If you expect your employees to look for every excuse possible not to work, they’ll live up to that as well.
Mistrusting your team, establishing low expectations and circling over their every move does nothing to engage an intelligent employee. A vicious cycle ensues where the employee resents their boss and thus does not want to do good work for him and the boss therefore feels the need to get even more involved in order to get things accomplished. Nobody is going to win.
Start by thinking what you want to get out of your team, set the expectation with each of them and then act accordingly. When you treat people like smart, responsible adults you’ll get that behavior in return.
photo by sassyart
When have you ever come out of a performance evaluation more energetic and ready to kick some serious ass for your company? Doesn’t matter if it is glowing, that one negative (because there always has to be something) will sit with you and fester.
This has been on my mind for a while. It is, after all, a multi-month process that is only this month coming to a head for many companies. After running across an old post from Bob Sutton, the head of Stanford’s d.school, where he wondered about the usefulness of performance evaluations it was time to chime in.
Performance evaluations, as most are implemented, could not be more detrimental to our organizations. Period.
Showing incredible restraint, I’ll limit my rationale to ten reasons. They,
- create internal competition amongst people who need to work together
- give manager’s an out for not giving consistent on-going feedback
- deliver ‘feedback’ that often comes completely out of the blue
- mandate we stack rank everyone on the team, even high-performing teams
- often use misaligned goals as a yardstick (or defunct goals established 12-months prior)
- are not consistent between groups under different managers
- are useless for promotions since those are often dictated by the manager who fights hardest for their employee
- often measure the interpersonal intangibles for which training and support is rarely offered
- reaffirm an ‘us vs. them’ mentality
- are highly susceptible to the failings and neuroticism of the evaluating manager
- bonus: are incredibly subject to recency biases
Not just useless, but counter-productive.
Try holding a weekly review instead. Set aside 15-minutes at the end of the week for some two-way communication and focus on the individual’s own goals and their effectiveness within the team. I’d suggest knowing and reviewing goals on both sides weekly and then answering questions that will help make your relationship more productive and keep the employee engaged.
Some starters:
- How much progress was made in helping the employee reach their stated goals
- How could you be more effective in helping the employee accomplish, learn, progress
- What opportunities would the employee like to take on
- What did you appreciate
- What went really well
- How effective was the team (team success or lack thereof is also the individual’s)
- What didn’t work for you (keep this short, provide a clear example and demonstrate why it wasn’t the most effective approach)
- What did other team member’s do that helped the employee be better
That said, if you lack sincerity, don’t come prepared to these meetings or are just looking out for number one then these will still be worthless.
Being a coach (translation: manager in today’s archaic vernacular) means prioritizing your employees and helping them reach their goals in the context of the company’s. It’s not easy. You’re serving two masters. But there aren’t too many people who can do it well so it’s a huge opportunity for us to differentiate ourselves and our companies.
Some performance evaluations may work for what they were designed to do. Regardless, I’d still suggest they be done weekly instead of annually.
Part 4 of a mini-series on employee engagement.
- The Case For Engagement
- Hiring for Engagement
- Developing Engaged Players
- Optimizing Teams For Engagement
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As I offered up in ‘The Case for Engagement’ optimizing our relationships is the knowledge economy’s equivalent of the post-industrial revolution’s time-motion studies. If we expect to continue to grow our businesses we need to do more with less and do it better.
photo by tobyadamson.co.uk
The system we’ve set up has created micro-niche specialization. The consequence is that we’ve all become dependencies for others. In order for our system to operate smoothly we all have to communicate and do our part like never before. Therefore, to do more and better we require not just engaged employees but engaged teams.
I’ve just started exploring this concept so please disagree or add your thoughts in the comments.
For my money, the starting points to engage a team are:
- Know the connectors on your team. When on-boarding new team member’s hook them up with a connector. Create a buddy system where the connector realizes the value of her strength and the new employee gets to meet the team and learn how to navigate the system. By accident, I was fortunate to have the greatest connector I’ve ever met as a peer at Yahoo! who did just this. My first three months were vastly more productive than learning the ropes cold and having the super connector as a wingman instantly bought me credibility with the external groups.
- Ask everyone on the team to identify the strengths of the others (both functional skill sets and interpersonal dynamics). While there isn’t yet agreement on how to build hot teams you can begin creating teams that compliment one another. Not just in terms of functional role, but also in terms of the role they play within the team. Some will be natural sales people, others will be problem-solvers, etc. But you’ll be able to avoid pairing people up who can’t use their full skill set because it is duplicated or overridden by another.
- Communicate early, often and universally. This one is obvious, but not done often enough. Making sure everyone knows the same information prevents disagreements caused by information asymmetry. Doing so provides the added benefit of creating norms within the group that selflessness rules and information is not a commodity to be hoarded.
- Cede responsibility. Everyone needs to know the destination but there are always different routes to get there. Give the team the authority to choose the route so they can optimize their strengths.
- Reward selflessness. Overcome your urge to listen to and praise the loud voice or the all-to-confident contributor. Look a layer deeper to see who is clearing the way for the rest of the team to do their piece better.
This is just a start. I hope to return to this topic again soon. I’m convinced we need to pay more attention to optimizing our human relationships. The company’s who get this will have a significant advantage to those who continue to treat their employees like cogs in the wheel.
