Poor Employee Performance: What Exactly is Broken?

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I am a fan of the Sunday New York Times Business Section feature called Corner Office. In fact, I'm enough of a fan that I often forward the short interview-based articles to my own staff, to emphasize particular points about leadership, workplace culture, interviewing job candidates, and just general business sense.

I admit that I often end up with a stack of these things on the corner of my desk. Occasionally I plow through them and drop most into the recycle bin. As I was doing so recently, the article from in December 2014 featuring Robert Reid of Intacct caught my eye once more.

There is one specific paragraph in that article that really struck me. It reads:

"Almost everyone goes to work to do a good job. And if they’re not doing a good job, most organizations step back and say, “I’m not sure they’re going to make it here.” We think the opposite — that we’ve done something to let them down. We either haven’t taken them through the right process, or trained them appropriately. If somebody is not doing something the way you expect or you have a different viewpoint, you need to seek to understand what’s going on and help them."

This perspective is a quite a shift, both in terms of how to view poor employee performance and how to address it.

I'm working to fold this thinking into my management and leadership style - to reframe the issue from "you are not performing, you are bad and you won't get better, go away please" to "this isn't working and we both know it, so let's figure it out together and take the right steps. If we need to make some difficult decisions, then so be it".

I've also been thinking about Carol Dweck's work over the years regarding the concept of the Growth Mindset. There was an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review November 2014 issue, "How Companies Can Profit from a Growth Mindset", in which she explored the concept and then talked about applying them not only to individuals but also to organizations. In terms of individuals:

Perhaps not surprisingly, as Dweck and colleagues turned their attention to organizations, they found that there was strong consensus about the mindset in each company. While they have not yet measured the impact of mindset on business success (e.g., financial returns), they did find that " ... at a minimum, growth-mindset firms have happier employees and a more innovative, risk-taking culture".

How do we apply these findings and Reid's thoughts on employee performance? 

I'd like to explore this question in four parts: leadership, staffing, success and failure.

Leadership: How organizations view leadership & management, depending on mindset

Leaders:	Fixed Mindset	Growth Mindset
Are responsible for	The organization and its systems	People
Need to	Make assignments	Define Purpose
Seek	Compliant subordinates	Followers (a voluntary choice)
Each day	Monitor performance	Share & inspire
Motivate by	Carrot or stick	Enabling & empowering
View staff as	Needing to be controlled (except Stars, who are privileged)	Needing to be trusted and unleashed
Risks	Are to be avoided or minimized	Are a natural part of the process

Staffing: How organizations approach hiring and evaluating employees

	Fixed Mindset	Growth Mindset
Skills	Long list of required skills. Past experience & credentials are most important.	Necessary skills are simply prerequisites, and the list is relatively short
Interviewing	Like a quiz - lots of questions, most have right/wrong answers	Open-ended and conversational, using active listening and curiosity
Interviewers	Supervisor and HR representative	A varied team, including future colleagues
Evaluating job candidates	Checking off the boxes - does this person have the right pedigree?	Seeking aptitude and potential fit with workplace culture, based on consensus across the interview team
Deciding whom to hire	Usually seek outside talent. Hire the most-qualified from pool of  applicants	Often look to promote from within. Seeking someone with potential and a passion for learning
On-boarding	Rules, policies, signatures	Vision, mission, meeting people
Training	Usually not needed, employee was hired with skills in place already	Actively encouraged and supported
Performance reviews	Focus on completion of assignments and adherence to policies	Focus on collaboration, learning, growing and innovation
Staff tend to	Avoid risk, pursue fewer innovative projects, keep secrets, cut corners	Make suggestions, explore new ideas, take calculated risks
Retention	Expected, because skills and talents have been assigned to the right job	Accomplished by providing a great workplace. It's understood & accepted that some will “learn & leave”

Success: What success looks like according to mindset

	Fixed Mindset	Growth Mindset
Management view of themselves	We are skilled at picking the right projects & making sure they get done	We are rewarded when staff succeed; we are becoming better mentors
Management view of staff	We got the right person for the job - that employee  is a star	Capable, dedicated and hard-working - just what we need here
Staff view of management	They are smart and gave me a project well-suited for my talents	I felt empowered to own this project and see it through
Staff view of self	I am smart and talented	I worked really hard on this, and the effort paid off
Conclusions by management	Keep assigning the important projects to our stars	Supporting and empowering our staff leads to results
Conclusions by staff	As long as I succeed, I’m special	This organization believes in me

Failure: What failure or poor performance looks like according to mindset

	Fixed Mindset	Growth Mindset
Management view of themselves	We told them what to do, clearly they did not step up; we need to stay the course	We are partly responsible; we did not set the right vision or provide the necessary resources for success
Management view of staff	We got the wrong person for the job, not smart enough	They needed more from us. How could we have helped them more?
Staff view of management	They gave me an impossible assignment, they set me up to fail	They seem eager to help me, maybe it’s going to be all right
Staff view of self	I can’t do this, I don’t know how, I'm probably not qualified for this job - I wonder if they are going to fire me	I really struggled with this one. But I know what I need to learn in order to succeed next time
Conclusions by management	We need to terminate that person and find someone with more talent	We need to be more helpful; let’s get together and sort this out
Conclusions by staff	I will not be successful here, time to look for another job	Even if things don’t always go well, they’ve got my back here

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All of this makes me wonder: can this explain square pegs in round holes? Why is it that some people just never seem to make it in your organization? Using this framework might help illuminate the root causes. For example: if you run a growth mindset organization, and you tell staff that you embrace iteration and failure - but you have staff who are fixed mindset - expect problems. Fixed mindset staff see failure as a personal defeat and proof that they are unworthy. Your enthusiasm for experimentation will sound to them like a trap that will lead to getting fired. Mismatch!

In addition, I think it's important to note that no workplace will be effective simply by hiring an army of sycophants. It's not about mutual admiration; it's about alignment - not only on strategy (where are we going and why?) but it's also about mindset. When both are clicking, I would wager that success is coming.

I'm also a believer in dissension and differences of opinion. I will never forget the lessons of the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairly tale The Emporer's New Clothes.  It's vitally important that you have people on your team who can call BS when they see BS. Furthermore, I believe in the idea of dynamic tension as a driver. In a functional workplace, there is room and encouragement of strong debate - civil and respectful, of course, but strong.

But in a poorly-functioning workplace, conflict and mismatch don't work. I know that it's true that sometimes poor performers need to shape up or ship out. These are hard conversations to have. It's the responsibility of a leader to step up and have them, on adult terms. The fact is that it is not personal, although boy does it feel that way!

There may be a way to turn such discussion into a win-win, if you search hard enough. And I think that's what Robert Reid was getting at.

Poor performers aren't happy, ever, no matter what they may say. There are some basic choices:
Make it better here or find it better elsewhere. If you:

• Know the workplace culture
• Know the employee
• Measure the match between the two
• Talk honestly and openly about what's happening
• Explore solutions, together
• Make decisions on how to move forward, together

Then it's possible to make it a positive outcome for both sides

Good luck in your leadership role, and in facing poor employee performance with courage, compassion, generosity and optimism.

Leading Change: How to Prioritize

Let's see if this is a familiar scenario:
You've been tasked to lead an organizational change. Maybe you are taking on a new role, or a new career path at a new organization, or maybe it's an internal challenge that's been handed to you. Regardless, you are assigned with changing the course of your business through whatever operational unit is under your leadership. Somewhere deep inside, you whisper, "Oh boy".

Facing Reality
Of course, change is hard! Change is often complex, with so many potential moving parts that it seems impossible to wrap your mind around the whole thing. And upon first blush, any change - no matter how small - seems to have a wide-ranging effect throughout the business unit or even across the enterprise: pull one string, and the proverbial sweater looks like it might unravel.

This makes leading change seem daunting, or even overwhelming. Where do you start?!

I have a suggestion. Like most suggestions, it's going to involve a bit of oversimplification, and few assumptions, any one of which can be questioned. I will argue that you've got to start somewhere, and when it's hard to decide how and where to start I like to rely on a rational rubric or schema. You might even call it a conceptual framework.

This schema is based on four essential pillars that support any successful organization: People, Vision, Focus, and Process.

I will try to put this into a narrative form: in order to be successful, an organization needs to hire excellent employees, provide a meaningful purpose for their work, ensure that the projects they work on are important and in support of the vision, and use methods that are effective and proven/professional. In priority order, you've got to look at Who, Why, What and How.

In the perfect world, all four pillars are operating at 100%. As I think most of us agree, the world is not perfect. 

So back here in reality, we as leaders are likely to inherit operational units that are achieving some level of excellence in each pillar. Let's look at this through a hypothetical situation (note to anyone who has worked with me: this is not a real-life story, I'm making it up to illustrate the approach, there is no reference to any of you in here, honestly).

In this new challenge you've been given, you start by taking a hard, disciplined, as-objective-as-possible look at what you've inherited. In this hypothetical, illustrated above, you've got a decent team, almost half have the potential to be strong contributors. However, and despite the fact they do have at least a few good projects underway, the truth is that there is little unifying vision to speak of, and the approach taken by each team and/or individual looks like it's basically ad hoc. By assessing this as your current state, you can decide where to turn your attention as you implement change as quickly and effectively as you can. You need to attack your areas of weakness, in the right order, but of course you can't do so while ignoring any of the other pillars, because extreme weakness in any of them will put stress on the others.

To be more concrete, even if you go on a super-lucky recruiting binge and bring in a contingent of fantastic new employees, as soon as they learn that there is no real vision and really poor practices, they will under-perform and (worse yet) abandon ship quickly. (I'm exaggerating for effect here; one other possible scenario is that those very same fantastic new employees will demand - and then lead the effort to implement - a clearer vision, better focus, and improved methods. But I digress.)

It starts with people. In the seminal and highly-influential Netflix Culture Deck, slide number 20 sums it up as "Great Workplace is Stunning Colleagues". In fact, when it comes to employee performance, many of us have seen that even one bad apple is capable of spoiling the whole barrel. If you have any weaknesses in your personnel, you've got to start there.

While you are recruiting, you will quickly find it impossible to hire the great ones until you can tell them why your organization exists and where it hopes to go. That requires a vision statement that is true, concise and meaningful (dare I say pithy?). Entire books have been written about crafting vision statements, I won't try to offer step-by-step instructions in this short blog post, I'll just emphasize that it's vital and ranks right up there after people.

Looks like your team(s) have a few good projects going, and that's great because those can be used as examples to inform upcoming project decisions. In other words, once you're moving the talent in the right direction and they are inspired by the vision, make sure that the work they do is right in line. I'd argue for allowing as much self-direction as possible in this effort, but perhaps that's a topic for a later post.

Finally, even when talented & inspired staff have rewarding assignments, if you can't ensure that the tools and methods available to them are at least up to par, the entire effort is bound to fail. Teams should be able to define what they need, but it's also part of your job as a leader to challenge methods and provide ample learning opportunities for your team(s) so that they can enter a cycle of continuous improvement.

The course for your role as a leader of change is now set. You've got to work on people and vision, while keeping an eye on projects and methods - allowing the new blood to contribute to those (and giving them credit along they way).

Now let's jump one year ahead in time and see how you've been doing (remember, this is all hypothetical, so time travel is possible). You've been diligent and focused, working on the pillars in priority order. Time to take another hard, honest look at where you stand, so that you can reset your plans for the coming year. This exercise, done regularly, can help you know where to mete your efforts to help your organization succeed.

Looks like you've made some good hires. More than 50% of your team is seen as talented. And you did the right thing by focusing on the vision, making a great deal of progress in getting alignment and inspiration - although clearly you've got work left to do (and that could be related to the staff, you may have some holdouts who are just plain resisting). You've added a few good projects, and methods are getting better. Nice.

A Couple of Final Thoughts
I prefer to share these types of visualizations with my entire operational unit. I believe in radical transparency, and in being honest. People appreciate honesty, and (sadly) they aren't accustomed to it in their professional careers. By being open about this process and about your perspective on where things stand, you'll help your increasingly-talented staff get on board - and take an active role - with the other changes that are taking place.

Expect some fits and starts. This is not some kind of magical formula that solves all ills. It is also not exactly math or science, it's just one way that I've found to offer an effective guide to making decisions and setting priorities throughout the process of leading change. Onward and upward!