Performance - at what point is it just personality

[performance123]

Senior role blah blah… here we are again doing performance calibrations where we discuss/justify the ratings for our teams.

So much of what is discussed is subjective and opinion-based and quite frankly down to personality. If that makes them a bad fit for the role it’s not their fault, surely!!! It’s their line manger’s fault for putting/keeping them there.

Sure there are metrics against some so-called SMART goals but at what point is it just down to personality or natural human behavior?? It’s like “all your normal human reactions are either invalid or inappropriate purely because we’re in a corporate environment.

Some is controllable clearly but some is surely the human element right??

If that makes them a bad fit for the role it’s not their fault, surely!!!

I disagree with this - individual contributors should be aware of their strengths and weaknesses and use this to guide which roles they take within the company.

For example, if a quiet person with poor communication skills insists on taking a heavily client-facing role and flounders then their failure is on them for not having the self awareness to realise that they are not naturally suited to the role. The same if someone with poor attention to detail wants to play a large role in regulatory processes and ends up failing to proofread documentation properly.

I've had to put generally hard working employees on PIPs because their natural lack of fit to the role they decided to take has resulted in lower than expected performance. In the majority of cases this has resulted in the employee moving into a slightly different role and things end up working out fine.

Management cannot be absolved from responsibility for assessing the skills of their staff. Workforce planning and development is vital for ensuring the success of a business, and it’s not up to employees to pick and choose what they want to do.

Yes clearly some people lack self-awareness of what is a fit for them.

But I was sitting there yesterday listening to comments thinking that certain elements are just down to someone’s personality. Yes you can adapt behavior to an extent but ultimately you are who you are underneath right?? And they’re doing a good job, sometimes a great job, but then it’ll be some tiny natural human characteristic that pops out and they are downgraded because it.

i don’t think I’m articulating it very well but fuck me corporate bullshit really is bullshit.

You can certainly coach people to become more extroverted and gain soft skills- they are skills. You can train people to double check work. None of these things are unsolvable.

I would also add in external influences here- I do one job which is very data oriented and technical, need to be word perfect and I do it well. In another job, similar thing except I get a constant stream of messages literal every minute. If you've ever tried focusing on a spreadsheet whilst answering questions constantly you will know it's not that easy! So it might be that the attention to detail person has distractions?

You need to give a concrete example OP, or it’s impossible to say. But line managers generally get the staff they get, they didn’t put them there.

They need to grade against requirements of the job.

So if someone is doing the job well, they shouldn't be downgraded for e.g. not bringing in cakes on their birthday.

So in the OP it depends whether people are being downgraded for relevant issues, or side ones.

You really are going to need to give a concrete example.

In my team there are individual contributors in the same role who have very different personalities and approaches but they are all effective in their role. There are also people who are just less effective in their role - some in the doing well enough to get things done sense, some in the ‘not more performance issues to deal with’ sense.

It isn’t a judgement on their personality. It’s actually about whether they can get the work done to the expected quality and without someone having to keep checking up and prompting them to just do their bloody job. Sometimes their personalities can exacerbate the issues.

For example, in my department, have someone in a people centric analysis role who simply seems incapable (or perhaps unwilling) to act in any proactive way. Even on a PIP with his line manager and the subject area lead checking up on him regularly, it still feels like a struggle to make sure that he has actually booked meetings with stakeholders to find out what he needs to or get feedback on work in progress. The quality of the work is also poor and he doesn’t seem to listen to or act on feedback to improve it (to the point that other people have to go in and make required changes because he’s done nothing a week later and it’s causing the whole team problems). This is made much worse by aspects of his personality - his response to feedback is to become quite aggressively defensive. He’ll just argue back against the team leads, rather than discussing things in a sensible manner.

The issue isn’t his personality in itself - but aspects of it make his general underperformance even worse. The man is in a well paid role (the payband for his level is c. £65-75k a year!) but he’s consistently crap at it. I simply don’t think an ‘oh he can’t help it; maybe it’s our fault for putting him in the wrong role’ attitude is reasonable.

I know a few introverts in sales and it does seem to be a constant challenge for them. I do think part of the problem is that they don't perceive themselves to be introverts. Is this what you mean?

@InefficientProcess

Why is this man still keeping his job ? I'm baffled.

Surely "performance calibrations" are relatively binary and not subjective if your organisation has a clear mission statement and set of objectives? Either someone is delivering or they're not? Sure the assessment of soft skills will be subjective, but results should speak for themselves? Have you got clear metrics?

The PIP process is convoluted and HR want to give loads of chances. More so because he’s had line managers who’ve been reluctant to be the bad guy and have the difficult conversations.

Most companies have expected behaviours and values, a persons personality doesn't override these and they are expected to moderate or adapt to fit the company.

If they won't or can't then that is a performance issue.

We've all at some point encountered the over the top, excessively blunt or rude person who claims 'I'm just living my truth, being myself, if you don't like it then that's your problem.....' type. That is personality but it's also a performance issue because the behaviours may not suit the work environment.

Also because it’s a skills shortage area and it’s so hard to find decent people to do this role. There are a lot of mediocre or worse people doing the role across the industry and replacing them with competent people is really hard.

So people end up taking a better the devil you know attitude to underperforming people in this role.

It’s an aligned role but not the same as the roles in the team I lead. We have far fewer performance issues in my team. But all the teams of this other role seem to have issues. It’s not even that the role is really difficult - I have had to cover for it and it’s no harder than what my team does (it is more boring though so I wouldn’t switch to it even though it’s better paid than my area).

And they’re doing a good job, sometimes a great job, but then it’ll be some tiny natural human characteristic that pops out and they are downgraded because it.

Ah yes. I can definitely identify with this. I've spent the last 6 months conscientiously 'playing the game' for the sake of my end of year rating. It's exhausting.

the problem with this clear metrics approach is that it can mask problems.

For example, if the expectation is to deliver X volume of work, it isn’t necessarily a clear objective metric. It does matter how much support the individual required to deliver that volume of work, and what level of influence they had on it.

This is one of the things that have bitten my department in the bum with guys like the one I described. The team needs to deliver so people do pull together and compensate for his underperformance. But then someone looking only at the metric will say ‘his workstream had to deliver X volume; it did. So he must have achieved that’.

There’s then a big bit of work for the manager or team lead to document the additional handholding and compensatory effort to show that the objective wasn’t achieved even if the metric looks like it was.

@InefficientProcess interesting, so you're measuring output as a team rather than an individual? We do have 'behaviours' we have to be seen to be modelling otherwise it could be picked up that way if someone was otherwise performing but making the environment difficult in some other way.

What a daft way to assess staff...

Not to mention that you need to avoid discriminating when talking about 'personality'. Culture and backgrounds affect how people interact/communicate with each other and you can't expect everyone to always behave in the same way. Not to mention that if you have people with certain disabilities this can also affect how they relate to other people.

The job of a good manager is to make sure people are in the right role, get the right support and to look at team as a whole. Not to try to change/grade something as subjective as people's 'personalities'.

Team are usually best when you have a variety of people with different strength and weaknesses rather than expect everyone to behave in one specific way.

Not really. Individuals have work they need to deliver. But there are client project teams that have to deliver against the delivery targets.

So what happens is that the rest of the team all rush around to cover up and compensate for individual underperformance because the work needs to be delivered to the client. It means that it looks like X volume of work was has been completed, and this had been assigned to X role. So the assumption is the person in that role did it.

What you can’t see there is all the addition work behind the scenes that went on so that the underperformer can sit in their quarterly review, point to the metric and claim they met the objective.

@InefficientProcess sounds like bad management to me, line management should be about more than the end of year review, if others in the team are running around to over compensate for someone why isn't the manager aware of and/or taking action on this? Why aren't they having regular 1:1s with the offending staff member to improve their performance?

Take for example, you have a software development team with an underperforming business analyst. The development team are dependent on the BA producing user stories so they can do their work. It will prevent anyone from
achieving anything if everyone doesn’t step in and sort the situation.

So they do. They aren’t being assessed against team objectives. But the dependencies in the team, and the general expectation of delivery, mean that people compensate.

More senior people just look at the metrics and don’t bother looking at the dynamics. They think everything is fine because they’ve got some crappy sprint velocity measure that looks healthy.

So what do you suggest? There are a few options:

1. the team don't pick up work that isn't there's, metrics drop, management take notice
2. the team inform senior management of the issue, it will be impacting performance, you could be delivering even more if the BA was doing the job they were supposed to do.
3. don't do anything, over compensate, drop in staff morale, it'll impact performance/turnover eventually.

I really don't think this is an end of year review issue, it's an ongoing line management/performance issue but if you leave it until the end of the year you are backing yourself into a corner, end of year reviews need to reflect what has happened throughout the year which can only be reflective when issues are raised through the year. Otherwise it becomes a box ticking "yep getting what we need, all ok here".

It’s cross disciplinary with multiple chains of management. Line management separated from the actual project work. So engineers complain to their manager in engineering. UX complain to their managers in UX. And so on. The line managers never cross paths with each other. Delivery assurance only cares about whether delivery is on track…

So your useless BA can hide unless someone starts digging. Or one of the line managers in the other disciplines decides to take action and seeks out the head of business analysis to escalate their team members’ issues. But even then, it all requires so much documentation and work to demonstrate what the problem is and show that just looking at the metric is not helping.

Ineffective management is a big part of the issue. obviously.

Their's

It becomes an end of year review issue though when you’re talking about the people who coast by doing just enough to not piss everyone off but aren’t performing really well. Or who have been consistently mediocre but just happen to be surrounded by high performers.

They deserve a lower rating even if it doesn’t require any active performance management.

It’s not just personality though. Judgements around soft skills are important - but there are many ways to match effective soft skills with your personality.

Yes of course it becomes an end of year issue, but it won't be resolved at end of year if steps haven't been taken up to that point. An end of year rating should never be a surprise, everyone should have an idea of what grade they are before they get to that stage due to regular 1:1s, especially if someone is underperforming, you can't (well shouldn't) just downgrade someone at end of year, managers should have been supporting through the year to try to get the grade up, and if that hasn't happened the BA will be well aware that their grade is likely low.