How Can You Manage What You Can’t See?
As the world began to emerge from the Covid pandemic in early 2022, I released an episode about leading in the new remote work paradigm.
During the pandemic, work became performance art for many, as they pursued the goal of looking busy, rather than actually delivering real, value-adding work.
This wasn’t particularly new: there’s always been a fair share of people in the office environment who did exactly this—appearing to be busy while achieving little. But, for leaders, it has definitely become trickier to identify and deal with these people than it was in the past.
How can you tell when someone is substituting the demonstration of their own busyness for real work that produces real value?
We all like to think we’d be able to spot this a mile away, but it’s sometimes a little more complicated than you might imagine. You need to be able to recognize and manage those in your team who are potential Oscar nominees for the award of “best performance in a work role”.
The organizations that do this best have structured processes for talent management and succession planning. If the process is well-executed, managers’ ratings for their people are supported with evidence and robust justification.
There is a clear distinction between performance and potential.
Performance looks backwards: What did this person achieve, and how did they achieve it? How did it compare to our standards? Did it meet the minimum acceptable standard? Was it exceptional? Was it below expectations?
Potential, on the other hand, looks forward: What is this person likely to do in the future based on their past performance and other observable indicators? There is no potential without performance, so you need to start there!
It’s much harder to evaluate potential remotely than it is to evaluate performance remotely, which is why I am so adamant that remote work is a poor substitute for in-person interactions. Remote working disadvantages the individual, not just the team!
Evaluating performance should done in a structured and impartial way, so that it isn’t unduly influenced by our inbuilt biases and perceptions. For example, we will always have a tendency to rate someone higher if we like them, and get on well with them.
There are 3 ways to effectively ensure objectivity in performance evaluation:
- Use a structured performance evaluation framework. If you have clear criteria for performance categories and standards, you can evaluate your people against this predetermined framework
- Ensure that your performance criteria are multi-dimensional. It’s easy to fall in love with someone who produces great results in one performance dimension, for example, someone who achieves top sales figures. But they may be terrible in other areas like working with others, or leading people. Predetermined categories that cover the range of performance areas will keep you honest.
- Seek a range of opinions. To overcome biases of affiliation, recency, and identification, seeking other views from people who work with your people can be extremely helpful. This is an area in which 360-degree feedback can be quite valuable.
Great leaders aren’t deterred by lack of visibility of their people’s work, because they lead for results. They look at outcomes, not inputs, making it much more likely that they’ll be able to separate the real talent from those who are expert in appearing to be busy.
If you’re trying to get a better handle on this, structured assessment tools and processes will help you implement the discipline effectively, and make sure that no one is disadvantaged, no matter where they work from.