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My Performance | Conflicting Goals | So Much To Do | Do Less, Get More

Me, Myself, and My Performance

By Douglas R. Rosensteel, CMC

Your focus as a manager should be on doing those things you are brilliant at doing. Take advantage of your strengths, and supplement your weaknesses by other people’s strengths. But what are your strengths?

Joshua was a high-performance executive in a quickly growing business. He was known for getting incredible results. However, it was not always so. Looking back at his career, which spanned a variety of jobs in different companies, he wondered why he performed so incredibly well in some jobs and so incredibly poorly in others. Why could he not perform consistently well in everything he did? Thinking back, there were specific times when he performed well, and specific times when he did not. What were the conditions? What were the differences?

Times When Joshua Did Well

Joshua’s first management position was very exciting. He was in a position where he could help other people enjoy their jobs. He could help them learn and grow. He could show them that their job was just one component of their life rather than a disjointed entity. He was able to spout “Josh Philosophy,” similar to when he was teaching. He was able to go to bat for his staff and to protect them from managers or non-managers who threatened them. Anyone who mistreated Joshua’s staff had to answer to him. He was their leader and protector.

Times When Joshua Did Not Do So Well

Joshua loved being in a position where he could help people to grow in their personal and professional lives. Becoming a professional manager was a way for him to accomplish that. However, being expected to manage people by someone else’s ideas of management turned out to be a formula for failure. The old-school view of a manager is a driver, a disciplinarian, a person who gets the most out of employees by brute force. Personality, tact, genuine caring, a measurable IQ, and all those talents required of today’s leaders are not important as long as you are “the boss.”

One particular job stood out in Joshua’s mind because of Bob, his boss. Bob wrote the book on “old-school.” He was a self-proclaimed people-hater. His idea of the perfect manufacturing plant was 100% automation with no people. His Number One Goal was to eliminate as many positions requiring people as possible. Joshua and Bob had conflicting values and conflicting methods. Every situation can be seen from many perspectives. From Bob’s perspective, Joshua was a weak manager, a failure, because he gave his staff “special treatment.” From the perspective of Joshua’s staff, he was a great manager, because he made their jobs productive and enjoyable – he treated them like human beings. From Joshua’s perspective, he was a great supervisor, but a lousy manager, because he let different values get in the way of his ability to manage Bob. Upward management, of course, is a very important aspect of leadership.

There were also conflicts regarding the duties of his position – his ideas of what the job should be were different than Bob’s ideas. Joshua thought his position should be responsible for the development of people and systems – a proactive approach to continual improvement. Although Bob loved the phrase “proactive,” and used it in every conversation whether it applied or not, his actions screamed very loudly of reactivity. Joshua wanted to work on the systems responsible for creating customer complaints, eliminating the reasons customers complained. Bob wanted him to answer customer complaints as a routine part of the job. Although he was capable of putting some incredibly creative and effective corrective actions in place, Joshua knew that corrective actions would never get the organization to where he wanted it. Corrective actions are, by definition, reactive. The real leverage in creating a proactive approach to continual improvement was, in Joshua’s mind, in changing the mindset of the whole organization starting with the management team.

In Bob’s eyes Joshua did not perform well in the job because his focus was not on answering customer complaints. In Joshua’s eyes, he did not perform well because he was not changing the thinking of the organization. On this point, both Joshua and Bob agreed – Joshua did not perform well in the job. On the up-side, he learned more from Bob than from any other boss he ever had. Joshua was amazed at how much he learned; simply because his boss’s views on life were so much different than his own that he actually questioned his own thinking.

Joshua once had a job with no apparent purpose. It was his first job out of college. As a management trainee, he just assumed the boss would tell him what to do. Bad assumption. He did not understand the job, and nobody gave him any direction on it. The company sent him through their coveted six-week management orientation program when he first started. The program gave him a great overview of the organization, but did not help him to understand the purpose of his job. He did not know enough to create the purpose for a job where there was no apparent purpose. This was an interesting situation performance-wise. As far as his boss or anyone else knew, Joshua performed wonderfully. He had a great relationship with management and employees alike. Of course, nobody in the company knew what the management trainees were up to, so nobody knew how well they performed.

But Joshua did not have a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day. He didn’t even have a feeling of status quo! In fact, every day he was on the job, he felt his IQ dropping lower and lower. So he left the company after one year without even realizing that he had actually learned a lot about the industry.

Conclusion

Joshua learned from his mistakes and earned a reputation as a high-performance executive. He did this by creating situations where he could focus on his strengths. He created alignment of views. He made certain that his support group (boss, staff, peers, etc.) knew what he was trying to accomplish. They knew his views on managing an organization. They understood his approach to getting things done. Joshua helped them to understand that high performance is created by a special blend of the right person in the right job supported by the right systems. Without the complete package, no amount of tweaking to job descriptions, incentive packages, or performance appraisals will achieve the desired results. High performance is a matter of perspective. In fact, it’s a matter of several perspectives – yours, your boss’s, your staff’s, and your customers’. Performance, good or bad, can only be defined in terms of all views combined. If there is alignment of views, extraordinary performance can be expected. But where misalignment breathes, watch out. Fortunately, you can control this dynamic.

 

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