Comment by flashgordon
5 days ago
This is really nice. I've been doing this for quite a while (and also ping pong ic-em and back). Oh and I've also been "the" poor performer. A couple of observations:
1. Performance management is never easy and I don't think it should be. I don't mean the technique or process of it bit the mental weighing of it. You are affecting a person's livelihood so you don't want to approach it robotically always (despite what the hr training tells you about it not being personal etc)
2. This is a big one. Performance has a huge under rated aspect that is environmental and circumstantial. I've seen really strong performers drop and fail because of personal situations and not being able (or rather not given the space and bandwidth to recover organically). And similarly those with a poor perf in one company go to a supposedly "higher tier" company and really thrive and sky rocket.
Management is really a mixed bag. I loved the coaching, direction setting, strategy, etc but always having to sell opaque higher up decisions as your own and being an inverted $hit umbrella for leadership can be draining. I guess the solution is to just join executive leadership ha.
> I've seen really strong performers drop and fail because of personal situations and not being able (or rather not given the space and bandwidth to recover organically). And similarly those with a poor perf in one company go to a supposedly "higher tier" company and really thrive and sky rocket.
I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers were able to convert a low performer to a star performer. Similarly, when a high performer becomes a low performer we like reading about how management was at fault.
Yet much less is written about the difficult employees who aren’t responsive to management coaching. Most of what is written is about the stories where good managers turned difficult employees around or bad managers failed to help employees, leaving an impression that the manager is solely responsible for the outcome.
In the peer group I mentioned above a common story is for someone to arrive after trying to coach a problem employee for years without progress. When you’ve been led to believe that a failing employee is really a failure of management it’s hard to let go of them, because letting go is admitting failure. It takes a reality check from someone more experienced to realize that not every employee has good intentions. These situations aren’t written about as much because they’re uncomfortable and many don’t like reading about it.
> Yet much less is written about the difficult employees who aren’t responsive to management coaching. Most of what is written is about the stories where good managers turned difficult employees around or bad managers failed to help employees, leaving an impression that the manager is solely responsible for the outcome.
Maybe off-topic: I think a lot of writing comes from a place of control. The writers want to feel like they're in control and the readers want to feel they're in control too. The internet functions as people's outlet and fantasy environ, so scary writing naturally gets filtered out, i.e. post something uncomfortable and people must retaliate to preserve their comfort, their sense of control.
> Yet much less is written about the difficult employees who aren’t responsive to management coaching.
There are legal, ethical and emotional risks attached to writing about failed relationships with difficult colleagues. These stories are meant to be shared over a hot (or strong) drink.
Nobody is naming names in either the good or bad anecdotes.
Hiding the anonymous negative stories doesn’t help anyone.
Nobody writes books about managing your manager, which seems odd. I practiced it, and it worked well for me.
"Managing up" is the term: https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/managing-up.
It's secret knowledge!
3 replies →
Clarifying - If the employee is not coachable why spend years? I know you mentioned the "admitting failure" aspect of letting go (this probably makes me a sociopath to even ask this).
Now coachability could mean different things - Are they absolutely unreceptive to feedback? Were they actually hired in the wrong role? fantastic interviewers but terrible on the job, mislevelled, completely wrong area, passion etc? Record of toxicity?
Arent these (except may be the mislevelled bit) grounds for a PIP to begin with. Ive felt these situations were easier to manage in FAANG?MAANGO etc precisely due to the highly process driven cultures. Also i think the "emotion" of it goes away because hiring is extremely generalized and pipelined (best case you see a candidate's interview feedback if you are the HM and usually you only do that if you are happy with the "numeric rating"). Generalized hiring has its own problems but that's another story. Again this may be different at various companies so just trying to job my memory.
Btw I loved this:
> I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers were able to convert a low performer to a star performer. Similarly, when a high performer becomes a low performer we like reading about how management was at fault.
Often managers are demonized without recognizing that managers themselves are part of the machine that is the company and the culture (and I feel this actually has become so by design).
> I guess the solution is to just join executive leadership ha.
It's really... not? I guess, it probably depends on the person too. But at some level, you have both a lot of power to influence things accidentally in a bad way if you're not careful, and at the same time absolutely minimal power to actually get stuff done (you always need to rely on others for the "doing" part, oftentimes several levels deep/ with a lot of potential for miscommunication).
Those opaque decisions? You _have to_ take decisions, because not taking decisions is very often worse than taking a bad decision. And you don't have the information, you can't have the information, you need to work at a high level of abstraction because it's impossible to know all the details. Unless the relevant details are being communicated to you just in time (spoiler: they won't be), you won't know them. If you actually care about how well you do your job and what is your impact on others, it's not a walk in the park, at all.
I wasnt suggesting that you shouldnt or you cannot take the decisions. We all understand corporate life etc and i think that kind of compartmentalizing is just part of the game. Frankly there is no decision to take - you are just a messenger so you roll with the punches. While we all learn to put up a straight face and explain (nay relay/readout) why sacrificing X000 people because the path to ASI needs new blood etc - if you are not moved by it internally (with your inner self raising that single eye-brow in .... curiosity) then I applaude you for being made of much more sterner stuff than me :)
I was not being clear - I was just trying to say that taking opaque $hit decisions with lots of inverted umbrellas around you is somewhat inevitable and not all fun, either; sure, it's lucrative, so that helps - but otherwise it's not really a solution to the "mixed bag" problem.
> always having to sell opaque higher up decisions as your own
Is that really part of management etiquette? In my experience nothing ruins my trust in my manager more than when they pretend that they love every decision from the higher ups. My favorite managers have always taken a “well this is dumb but we have to do it because the CEO said so” approach. It creates comraderie and lets me know they are a real person.
My least favorite manager of all time laid off a valued member of the team for financial reasons (sad but understandable). Within 24h he had started to rationalize and defend that our team was actually /better/ now. I assume he was trying to convince himself as much as the rest of us.
Managers are weird because they are implicitly asked to take on elements of the organization into their personality. It’s unavoidable to an extent. But some fully become Sartre’s Waiter. I always wondered if this type of manager went home and was totally cool and normal with their family or if they brought The Board home with them too.
1. That's because people are unique and there are infinite people problems to solve, so it will never be easy.
2. I don't believe those are the types that OP was talking about. There are people that will just never work out to begin with, and there are people who have bad days/weeks. The latter are already trusted and deemed worthy, so it's not the same class of problem.
And remember, being a director is just being an inverted $shit umbrella for veeps, so the grass isn't always greener!
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"