Stop “managing performance”, start managing resources

Here’s a bit of context.

I’m one of those people who became a manager organically in a startup modelled after a, by all accounts, pretty traditional company structure. I built a team and then a department step by step as the need for our outcomes and output arose within the organisation.

I’ve learned a lot in this process. I am blessed with an amazing group of people we call the Research Department today, who were patient and helpful through that process with their first time manager (me). For the most part I’ve had a mental library of examples for how I did not want to manage a team. For some facets, I was lucky enough to have some amazing role models, most of whom encouraged me to be “Human” before being “Manager”.?

(Honestly, the journey has been so interesting and educational, that I’m already drafting another article on it. Suffice it to say, I have a weird taste in my mouth calling myself a manager - but I'm growing fond of the word representative. One day, I'll even live up to it.)

One of the things I had to piece together on my own, is “performance management”. It’s still a work in progress, but here’s my thesis statement:

Lacking employee performance more often than not reflects lacking resources.?

Honestly, I think I may be onto something, and I want to share - maybe it’s of value to others out there. And I don’t just mean managers. If you feel like your performance is judged in weird and unexpected ways, I hope this piece of writing will give you some ideas on how to hold your management accountable to give you reliable and transparent feedback.

Without further ado, I give you all:

My three golden rules of “performance management”

Aka how to figure out how management is blocking an employee from doing the work they can proudly stand behind.

Rule #1: “Performance” feedback should never come as a major surprise

One would think that this one speaks for itself. And we might think this depends on the self-awareness of the employee.?

To which I say, self-awareness is not an innate quality! It's something that is cultivated by the person themselves, in collaboration with their environment. Self-awareness and how it manifests is entirely defined by each specific context we expect it in. For instance, one may be self-aware when it comes to their presentation style during a sales pitch, while being wholly unaware that the types of jokes they make at the coffee machine are kinda inappropriate in a workplace setting.

Self-awareness is an agreement that is built in collaboration by the individual and their environment. Continuous honest feedback is crucial for healthy self-awareness, as is an open receptive mind. Hence, when it comes to “performance”, all parties work together to define beforehand, and update when needed, what is and isn’t seen as “good performance”.

Also, I want to be clear that I don’t just mean negative feedback. Tons of people (mostly people carrying enormous baggage of bad management in the past, *waves shyly at fellow marginalised folks*) have a skewed perception of their own “performance”. A lot of us worry constantly that we are somehow secretly failing at our role, at least partly because we have experienced major negative feedback out of left field before, regardless of whether or not it was justified. Some of us were fired or almost fired as a surprise, our performance cited as a reason without us ever realising that expectations were completely misaligned.?

Am I bringing DEIB into this? You bet.?

Marginalised employees who ask for accommodations, or stand up for their or other people’s rights may be automatically filed away as less productive, with no evidence backing up those claims from management. When the goalposts are constantly kept in movement, anybody can become a “bad performer” at a moment’s notice and at management’s convenience. Many of us carry workplace baggage or even trauma linked to that.?

Objective, transparent standards coupled with regular feedback, both positive and negative, are essential. And just because the feedback shouldn’t come as a surprise, doesn’t mean it has to be unspoken.

Into the trash with moving goalposts, I say.

Rule #2: “Performance management” requires extensive foundations

It follows fairly organically from my previous point, that we can only measure performance by standards that the employee and the manager agreed upon beforehand. This requires a fair amount of preparation on both sides.

First (but not really), we need tangible answers to the question: how can I measure that my work is done well??

For instance, if my work is to ensure the quality of the product on the user end, then I know that ultimately what reflects my job being done well is happier and more trusting users. This can potentially be measured in less bug reports coming in, or maybe less of the same kind. You get the idea.

In order to do that, though, first (for real this time), I have to define what my responsibility here is to begin with. Maybe Quality Assurance is not one of my actual areas of responsibility anymore due to technical changes or restructuring, without anyone explicitly addressing that with me. Maybe my new role is updating our theoretical and research database with relevant knowledge. So then why am I keeping count of these tickets again?

Surprisingly often, people are not clear on what their role actually is. And unclarity in the role itself leads to arbitrary performance measures that may or may not be met. Setting “performance” standards without clarity in the role might lead us to measure the wrong things. It might look like an employee is doing everything right yet things aren’t moving forward in a way expected of the department, or it might look like the employee is not hitting goals while in the big picture everything is going more or less okay.?

These are surefire signs that the performance standards are actually disconnected from the employee’s actual job. That’s because the performance standards need to make sense, or else they’re neither truly objective, nor transparent. Invest time in defining people’s roles together with them, make this a useful document, define performance standards, bam.

At the end of the day, these standards need to be robust enough for anyone to look at them and be able to judge whether the job is being done well.

To define roles, key result areas and performance standards in writing, I lifted the basic idea from this episode of Coaching for Leaders, and made some adjustments to fit our specific context.

Rule #3: Assume that everyone is there to do work they can proudly stand behind

It’s all nice and good to have a list of performance standards - if a person keeps not meeting them, the manager will have a concrete document to point to in support of laying them off. …Right??

Nah.

In my experience, most often what manifests as lack in performance actually reflects something lacking from management. It can happen that employees don’t feel confident or safe enough to voice it. Sometimes a person might not even realise that something is blocking them from doing good work - you don’t know what you don’t know, after all.?

As it stands right now, management gets paid quite a bit more than people on their teams, so in my opinion, it’s on management to do the due diligence and dig to the root cause here.

Some such missing things can be:?

Support

• Did I give someone a task they have never done before? Do they need a bit of extra guidance, advice, tools, training or anything else that would be self-explanatory to me, but not to someone new to the task? Are we scheduling enough status check-ins?

Resources

• Did I tell them that we usually get things like this done with open-source software to save on money? Is there a good open-source tool for this specific task? Do they have access to someone with the technical knowledge to set it up? Do they know how to coordinate that?

Time

• Am I expecting this person to take care of ad-hoc tasks on a daily basis? Is that time accounted for in their workload, or does it suck time away from this project I’m expecting progress on?

Autonomy

• Am I blocking progress on this project by requiring a chance to review before launch? Do I insist on being involved in every decision? Have we agreed on some clear cut-off criteria for when I need to be involved in decision-making??

Trust

• Do I expect them to follow instructions instead of enabling them to focus on the outcome? Am I flexible in my mindset about the fact that they might go about this project differently than I would have? Am I requesting status check-ins too often?

Information?

• Have I made all information and knowledge available to them to be able to complete this project? Have I documented previous similar work processes? Have we agreed on a common understanding of the outcome of the project? Are we on the same page regarding the larger picture this project fits into?

Accessibility

• Do they have a working environment that suits their needs and supports them to comfortably do their work? Do they have to worry about my attitude about sick leaves, home office days? Do they feel safe to address needs to improve their working environment, be it physical or psychological?

I’m sure you can think of more. If you’re a manager, identify the ways you may be blocking people from doing their best work and create an inventory of questions to identify and rectify these areas. Make this resource checklist an essential part of reviewing someone’s “performance”.

In short, manage resources, instead of “managing performance”.

(Imagine me cheekily pointing back to the title of this article.)?

A tangent on “going above and beyond”...

The more I learn and think about equitable workplaces, the more I think that seniority-motivated pay gaps should be significantly reduced, (if not completely eliminated, in some cases). This is a completely different discussion, though. I mention it here anyway, because it might be important context for how I understand “going above and beyond” for a job.

To me it boils down to this:?

People should have the opportunity to grow skills they genuinely want to grow, not the skills they think will get them to financial security

(or a semblance thereof, in our current economic climate).?

For example, employees have been pointing out the unfairness of upward movement in companies being tied to assuming “people management” positions. Not everyone is interested in “managing people”, not everyone is or wants to be good at all that traditionally entails. “People management” is a different skill set, not a superior one.?

I bring this up, because when employees see people management as the only professional growth goal for upward mobility, that is a huge issue. It is an issue, because making a living wage is tied to that same concept of upward mobility. This means that all sorts of people who had no interest or skills in people management end up managing people, to make sure they can pay rent, contributing to the million articles about why middle managers suck.

Logically, this often leads to two things:

• people trying to secure upward mobility to achieve a livable wage will do so through trying to demonstrate people management skills in positions without corresponding authority,
• and people who were given the authority to judge when an employee “goes above and beyond” will sooner recognise people management efforts than any other displayed outstanding quality.

To close this loop, this robs people of the freedom to invest in skills they’re genuinely interested in growing, if those skills have very little to do with people management.?

…and its relevance to the discussion about “performance management”

I think that laying out well-defined and mutually agreed upon “performance standards” will allow both the employees and their managers to have objective arguments for professional growth in skills and responsibilities directly relevant to their positions. This way everyone involved will see when an employee has learned the necessary skills to officially assume more responsibilities. Also known as being promoted.

Even in the most traditional of company structures, “going above and beyond”, in my opinion, should at most influence the speed of a promotion, but not whether or not it happens at all.

“Performance standards” and professional growth plans need to be laid out and integrated as an organic part of the job that will lead to a mutually desired increase in responsibilities in time, even if the employee never works a minute in overtime.?

And in the meanwhile, junior level people need to be making a wage that provides them with reasonable financial comfort in the economic environment they are in. But I think that there’s so much more to unpack in these last few paragraphs, that they deserve their own articles. Other people much smarter than me have likely already written them, too.?

Just thinking about putting that E in DEIB, and all that. Maybe even the fabled J.

I hope this brings some value to some of you, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts!