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August 1 - August 18, 2023
They know that each member of their team is unique, and they spend a huge amount of time trying to attend to and channel this uniqueness into something productive.
“How can we make sure that we are seeing our people for who they really are?” This is a wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night sort of question for senior leaders,
Many companies also give people performance ratings on a scale of 1–5, either in parallel with or as an alternative to the nine-box process.
Then, before or as part of the talent review, there is a meeting called a “consensus” or “calibration” meeting,
the organization has run out of 4s—which happens often since many team leaders are reluctant to give a person a 3 or, perish the thought, a 2—then your team leader may have to give you a 3 and tell you that, though you truly deserved a 4, it wasn’t your turn this year, and that she will look out for you next year. This is called “forcing the curve,” which is the name given to the rather painful process of reconciling the organization’s need to have only a certain percentage of employees show up as super-high performers with the team leaders’ tendency to give high ratings to everyone so as to
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Forced curves are no one’s idea of fun, but they are felt to be a necessary constraint on team leaders, and a way of ensuring that rewards are appropriately “differentiated,” so that high performers get much more than low performers.
organizations still rate each person against such standard checklists. To aid in this, each competency is defined in terms of behaviors, and then the behaviors are tied to a particular point on the rating scale. So, for example, on a competency called organizational savvy and politics, if you see that the person “Provides examples of savvy approaches to successfully solving organizational problems,” then you’d rate her a three.
Instead, you’ll be acutely aware of a few real-world practicalities that boil down to the fact that your pay, your promotion possibilities, and possibly even your continued employment are being decided in a meeting to which you are conspicuously not invited.
It is going to bother you greatly to learn, then, that in the real world, none of this works. None of the mechanisms and meetings—not the models, not the consensus sessions, not the exhaustive competencies, not the carefully calibrated rating scales—none of them will ensure that the truth of you emerges in the room, because all of them are based on the belief that people can reliably rate other people. And they can’t.
that human beings cannot reliably rate other human beings, on anything at all.
Idiosyncratic Rater Effect explains more than half of why we choose the ratings we do.
Since you’re most concerned that the truth of you be in the room, this should worry you enormously. The rating given to you tells us, in the main, about the rating patterns of your team leader, and yet, in the room, we act as though it tells us about the performance patterns in you.
To all this talk of the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect and data insufficiency, however, some will tell you to calm your fears.
This is the logic upon which 360-degree surveys are based: one person may be off base, but if ten people are telling you that you lack business acumen, then it’s a safe bet that you do indeed lack business
Unfortunately, despite its ubiquity, this line of thinking is wrong.
described example after example of a well-informed majority being wiser than a sole genius.
well-informed crowds are wise, and very often wiser than a small, privileged, expert elite. But the critical qualifier in that sentence is well-informed.
the more we try to standardize the definition with behavioral descriptions such as those we saw earlier, the greater the idiosyncratic rater effect becomes.*
crowd-based fallacy—that all of us are (always) smarter than one of us.
although one person’s rating of you might be bad data, if we combine it with six other people’s equally bad ratings data, we will magically turn it into good data—that somehow the errors will be averaged out.
Noise plus noise plus noise never equals signal; it only ever equals lots of noise.
we can now begin to answer the thorny question of how to measure knowledge-worker performance: we can use our reliability in reporting our experience and intended actions to design a different type of question.
“Do you choose to work with this team member as much as you possibly can?”
“Would you promote this person today if you could?”
“Do you think this person has a performance problem that you need to address immediately?”
tend to think that subjectivity in data is a bug, and that the feature we’re after is objectivity. Actually, however, when it comes to measurement, the pursuit of objectivity is the bug, and reliable subjectivity the feature.
We might observe here, by the way, that the question “what is performance?” is exactly as abstract, and about as helpful, as the question “what is health?”
The key to understanding performance is to stop thinking of it as a broad abstraction, and instead start finding elements of it that we can measure reliably and act on usefully.
when team members feel strongly that they understand what’s expected of them, that they get to use their strengths frequently, that they will be recognized for great work, and that they’re constantly challenged to grow (that is, when they have high scores on the “Me” engagement questions we saw in chapter 1), then their team leader, independently and without knowing their engagement scores, will tend to give them a higher score on the first performance question—will tend, in other words, to go to them more often for excellent
What you want in the room is different: not the truth of you, but just the truth. You don’t want to be represented by data that attempts, arrogantly, to divine who you are. Instead, you want to be represented by data that simply, reliably, and humbly captures the reaction of your team leader to you. That’s not you, and it shouldn’t pretend to be you. It’s your leader, and what she feels, and what she would do in the future. And that’s enough. Truly.
Surely, the cliché that “Our people are our greatest asset” applies to all of the people in the company.
We all would, of course—high-performing, culture-embodying people blessed with oodles of learning agility and lashings of successitude are the stuff of every team leader’s dreams.
When you think about yourself at your best, you land on specific activities you love, or skills at which you shine—whereas
Potential is a one-sided evaluation. Momentum is an ongoing conversation. In a world of “potential,” it’s hard to imagine what, exactly, a career conversation looks like once Maureen has been shunted off into the lo-po dungeon. Momentum, on the other hand, represents the opposite of “up-or-out” thinking. And it’s the best concept to address one of the key survey items that measure engagement and performance: “In my work, I am always challenged to grow.” Potential doesn’t do that—it doesn’t challenge you to grow. It tells you that you either will, or you won’t.
It’s a transaction—we sell our time and our talent so that we can earn enough money to buy the things we love, and to provide for those we love.
the term we use for the money we earn in this transaction is compensation, the same word we use for what we get when we’re injured or wronged in the eyes of the law.
You’ve told yourself that if you can just keep the plates spinning, the balls in the air, the gaps plugged, then perhaps you can parcel out your attention and energy so that no one, in your work or your life, will feel too neglected—so that, although you can’t be all things to all people, your unflagging efforts will at least achieve some sort of equitable distribution.
balance is an unachievable goal anyway, because it asks us to aim for momentary stasis in a world that is ever changing.
The poet Pablo Neruda, in love, wrote “I want to do with you what Spring does with the cherry trees.”
For too long we’ve allowed our organizations to appropriate human words—love, passion, excitement, thrill—and persuade themselves that, by invoking these words, they’ve created genuine human feelings. They haven’t, and they never will. The organization is a fiction, an “intersubjective reality,” to use the term from chapter 1, and it’s simply not real enough or human enough to know which activities at work you love.
Those who reported that they spent at least 20 percent of their time doing things they loved had dramatically lower risk of burnout. Each percentage point reduction below this 20 percent level resulted in a commensurate and almost linear increase in burnout risk. Remove the love from a physician’s work, and the work grates, and grates some more, until it hurts.
“How,” you’re asking yourself, “did she find that role, how did she find that work, how did she find that life? I wish I could find something that fits me as well as her work fits her.”
This person didn’t find this work—she didn’t happen upon it, fully-formed and waiting for her. Instead, she made it.
Select a regular week at work and take a pad around with you for the entire week.
“Loved It” at the top of one column and “Loathed It” at the top of the other.* During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love—before you do something, you actively look forward to it; while you’re doing it, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; after you’ve done it, there’s part of you looking forward to when you can do it again—scribble down exactly what that something was in the “Loved It” column.
Think of these activities as your “red threads.” Your work is made up of many activities, many threads, but some of them feel as though they’re made of particularly powerful material. These red threads are the activities you love, and your challenge is to pinpoint them so you can ensure that, next week, you’ll be able to recreate them, refine them,
The Mayo Clinic researchers found that when the physicians spent more than 20 percent of their time on activities they loved, there was no corresponding reduction in burnout risk.
These red threads are your strengths.
A strength is any activity that strengthens you (for Miles the anesthetist, keeping a patient hovering between life and death), and a weakness is any activity that weakens you, even if you’re good at it (for Miles, helping patients recover).
“Performance” is what you have done well or poorly, and your team leader can be the judge of that. Team leaders and colleagues, however, can’t judge what strengthens or weakens you.
