9.6 Make the process of learning what someone is like open, evolutionary, and iterative.
Articulate your assessment of a person’s values, abilities, and skills up front and share it; listen to their and others’ responses to your description; organize a plan for training and testing; and reassess your conclusions based on the performance you observe. Do this on an ongoing basis. After several months of discussions and real-world tests, you and your report should both have a pretty good idea of what he or she is like. Over time this exercise will crystallize suitable roles and appropriate training or it will reveal that it’s time for the person to find a more appropriate job somewhere else.
a. Make your metrics clear and impartial.
To help you build your perpetual motion machine, have a clear set of rules and a clear set of metrics to track how people are performing against those rules—and predetermined consequences that are determined formulaically based on the output of those metrics.
The more clear-cut the rules are, the less arguing there will be about whether someone did something wrong. For example, we have rules about how employees can manage their own investments in a way that doesn’t conflict with how we manage money for clients. Because these rules are clear-cut, there’s no room for argument when a breach occurs.
Having metrics that allow everyone to see everyone else’s track record will make evaluation more objective and fair. People will do the things that will get them higher grades and will argue less about them. Of course, since most people have a number of things to do that are of different importance, different metrics have to be used and weighted appropriately. The more data you collect, the more immediate and precise the feedback will be. That is one of the reasons I created the Dot Collector tool to work as it does (providing lots of immediate feedback); people often use the feedback that they get during a meeting to course-correct in the meeting in real time.
Once you have your metrics, you can tie them to an algorithm that spits out consequences. They can be as simple as saying that for every time you do X you will earn Y amount of money (or bonus points), or it can be more complex (for example, tying the weighted mix of metrics grades to various algorithms that provide the estimated compensation or bonus points).
While this process will never be exact, it will still be good in even its crudest form, and over time it will evolve to be terrific. Even when flawed, the formulaic output can be used with discretion to provide a more precise evaluation and compensation; over time it will evolve into a wonderful machine that will do much of your managing better than you could do it on your own.
b. Encourage people to be objectively reflective about their performance.
Being able to see yourself from a higher level is essential for personal evolution and achieving your goals. So you and the people who report to you should be looking at the evidence of their performance together; for this to go well, you need lots and lots of evidence and an objective point of view. If required, use agreed-upon others to triangulate the picture the evidence presents.
c. Look at the whole picture.
In reviewing someone, the goal is to see the patterns and to understand the whole picture. No one can be successful in every way (if they are extremely meticulous, for example, they might not be able to be fast, and vice versa). Assessments made in reviews must be concrete; they’re not about what people should be like but what they are like.
d. For performance reviews, start from specific cases, look for patterns, and get in sync with the person being reviewed by looking at the evidence together.
While feedback should be constant, reviews are typically periodic; their purpose is to bring together the accumulated evidence of what a person is like as it pertains to their job performance. If the constant feedback is done well, it will become like a constant review as the bits and pieces will add up to the whole. A review should contain few surprises, because you should continuously be striving to make sense of how the person is doing their job. If you think their job is being done badly, you should have been probing to identify and address the root causes of their underperformance on a case-by-case basis. It’s difficult for people to identify their own weaknesses; they need the appropriate probing (not nit-picking) of specific cases by others to get at the truth of what they are like and how they are fitting into their jobs.
In some cases it won’t take long to see what a person is like; in other cases it’s a lot harder. But over time and with a large enough sample of cases, their track records (the level and the steepness up or down in the trajectories that they are responsible for, rather than the occasional wiggles) should paint a clear picture of what you can expect from them. If there are performance issues, it is either because of design problems (perhaps the person has too many responsibilities) or fit/abilities problems. If the problems are due to the person’s inabilities, these inabilities are either because of the person’s innate weaknesses in doing that job (e.g., someone who’s five foot two probably shouldn’t be a center on the basketball team) or because of inadequate training. A good review, and getting in sync throughout the year, should get at these things. Make sure to make your assessment relative to the absolute bar, not just the progress over time. What matters most is not just outcomes but how responsibilities were handled. The goal of a review is to be clear about what the person can and can’t be trusted to do based on what they are like. From there, you can determine what to do about it.
e. Remember that when it comes to assessing people, the two biggest mistakes you can make are being overconfident in your assessment and failing to get in sync on it.
If you believe that something is true about someone, it’s your responsibility to make sure that it is true and that the person you’re assessing agrees. Of course, in some cases it may be impossible to get in sync (if you believe that someone was dishonest and they insist that they weren’t, for example), but in a culture of truth and transparency it is an obligation to share your view and let others express theirs.
f. Get in sync on assessments in a nonhierarchical way.
In most organizations, evaluations run in only one direction, with the manager assessing the managee. The managee typically disagrees with the assessment, especially if it is worse than his or her self-assessment, because most people believe themselves to be better than they really are. Managees also have opinions about managers that they wouldn’t dare bring up in most companies, so undermines the effectiveness of the environment and the relationships between people. It can be avoided by getting in sync in a high-quality way.
Your reports have to believe that you’re not their enemy—that your sole goal is to move toward the truth; that you are trying to help them and so will not enable their self-deception, perpetuate a lie, or let them off the hook. This has to be done in an honest and transparent way, because if someone believes they are being pigeonholed unfairly the process won’t work. As equal partners, it is up to both of you to get to the truth. When each party is an equal participant, no one can feel cornered.
g. Learn about your people and have them learn about you through frank conversations about mistakes and their root causes.
You need to be clear in conveying your assessments to your reports and open-minded in listening to their replies so you can work on setting their training and career paths together. Recognizing and communicating people’s weaknesses is one of the most difficult things managers have to do. It’s important for the party receiving feedback to be sympathetic to the person trying to give it, because it’s not easy—it takes character on the part of both participants to get to the truth.
h. Understand that making sure people are doing a good job doesn’t require watching everything that everybody is doing at all times.
You just have to know what they are like and get a sampling. Regular sampling of a statistically reliable number of cases will show you what a person is like and what you can expect from them. Select which of their actions are critical enough to need preapproval and which can be examined later. But be sure to do the audit, because people will tend to give themselves too much slack or could cheat when they see that they’re not being checked.
i. Recognize that change is difficult.
Anything that requires change can be difficult. Yet in order to learn and grow and make progress, you must change. When facing a change, ask yourself: Am I being open-minded? Or am I being resistant? Confront your difficulties head-on, force yourself to explore where they come from, and you’ll find that you’ll learn a lot.
j. Help people through the pain that comes with exploring their weaknesses.
Emotions tend to heat up during most disagreements, especially when the subject is someone’s weaknesses. Speak in a calm, slow, and analytical manner to facilitate communication. Put things in perspective by reminding them that their pain is the pain that comes with learning and personal evolution—and that knowing the truth will put them on the path to a much better place. Consider asking them to go away and reflect when they are calm, and have a follow-up conversation a few days later.
Ultimately, to help people succeed you have to do two things: First let them see their failures so clearly that they are motivated to change them, and then show them how to either change what they are doing or rely on others who are strong where they are weak. While doing the first without the second can be demoralizing to the people you are trying to help, doing them both should be invigorating, especially when they start experiencing the benefits.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio