Chapter 11
Building Capacity
Performance Management and Delegating for Development
What Everybody Is Thinking
If I do an excellent job and deliver against my objectives, I'm a top performer.
The vast majority of people in corporations think that high performance = doing their job well. Many do not realize that high performance is found outside the boundaries of one's job description. A job description is valid only for a moment in time. Then the world changes. High performers realize that they have to break through the limits of their job description and do things over and above it to meet evolving business needs and to develop themselves.
But for the majority of people, if no one has ever given them coaching or the idea that it is important to build their own capability, their tendency will be to keep doing the same work as it was defined for them in the beginning.
Why this happens is so interesting to me, and it has to do largely with a shift that must occur in our self-awareness after finishing school and starting work. Here is what I am referring to. In school, an advancing curriculum is given to you every year. You start school as a small child and learn how to count and sing and finger paint, and then if you master those tasks, you move on to the next year, and you learn how to read and write and do math. Each year after completing the work given to you, you advance to the next grade, where you're given a harder, more challenging set of things to learn.
Your teacher and the school provide a progressively more difficult curriculum for you. If you just show up and do what is asked of you, you will develop—and you will advance. This goes on through middle school and high school and university. But then you graduate. And then comes the dramatic change: Once you leave school…no one will ever do this for you again.
So all of us need to look beyond our job descriptions and make sure to keep advancing and developing ourselves. We need to give ourselves a progressively harder curriculum each year if we want to excel. In particular, your transformation will require that you get enough of the people in your organization motivated and actively looking outside their job descriptions to evolve their work to make your strategy come true, because by definition, whatever the new strategic work is, it is not in people's original job descriptions.
Always Be Growing
Leaders need to apply this development thinking to team performance as well. Your team should be getting more capable over time. Think about it this way. As the leader of a team, on day one, your team has a certain capacity. Your team can deliver a certain amount of work in a certain amount of time, at a particular level of quality and complexity. They have a certain amount of knowledge and particular level of ability to perform. This is their capacity on day one.
If, after a year goes by, you have delivered everything you have been asked, you have done part of your job. But if your team is not more capable in some way—if they can't deliver more, better, faster, or higher quality—or if they have no new knowledge, skills, or ability to perform at a higher level, you have not done the second part of your job. You have not increased the capacity of your team.
Performance Management
A critical factor in both building capability and ensuring your transformation keeps moving forward is how you do performance management. Many times we associate the term “performance management” with managing or eliminating poor performers. But there is a positive side of performance management too.
Effective performance management is as important to stimulate the development and positive performance of your team and the individuals, as it is to deal with poor performers.
Who's with Me? Connecting Performance with Transformation
In leading any kind of transformation, it's important to know who is helping you, who may be against you, and who is basically just ignoring you.
Transformation is hard. You need help. You need people who will stay in it with you through the long Middle and pull their share, and sometimes more than their share, of the weight. The average person is probably avoiding jumping in with both feet.
Performance management is not just about writing a review once a year and sitting down to an awkward conversation. Performance management can and should be about tuning performance so that your organization is clear about what behaviors are expected and rewarded and which ones are not tolerated. In a transformation it's necessary to spell it out: [This] is the increased performance necessary and expected in your role to help drive our transformation.
Willingness, ability, and motivation to personally lead transformation needs to be something that you measure people on, and give them stretch goals for.
You need to build the behaviors you want to see in supporting your transformation into people's performance objectives at all levels of the organization. In a transformation, you want to inspire your top performers to really stretch and you want to make it clear to the people who are not actively helping that they are not meeting expectations.
In a transformation it's too easy for people to hide. Without rigorous performance management, your strategy is at risk.
Lack of clarity about performance expectations related to the transformation creates opportunities every day to ignore the important new work that needs to get done during the Middle.
A good way to start the transformation-performance conversation is to ask each of your team members to suggest performance measures for themselves that relate to the transformation. You will be able to tell right away how bought in they are and if they are willing and able to conceive of and lead the change you need, based on their inputs.
Whatever your company's official performance management process might be, from formal and rigid to sloppy or nonexistent, you have an opportunity to overlay something useful to support your transformation from whatever the existing process is.
The Goal: No Surprises
In my work I talk to lots of people in lots of organizations. And most of them are not getting feedback. It's a shame. I see more leaders who avoid doing performance management than ones who do it well. It is very common that the leader thinks that they have communicated clearly to their direct report, but when he or she talks to the direct report, they have no clue what their manager is thinking.
What Everyone Is Thinking:
How am I doing? Does anybody see me? Is my work valued? Does the company appreciate my hard work? I don't really get much feedback. My manager never talks to me about my performance. When can I get a promotion? How can I get a raise?
Nothing about a person's performance should come as a surprise—ever. To you or to them. Here is an example of what I mean by a surprise. If the employee thinks they are doing a good job, and that they have support and are well regarded, but at the same time, the leader believes there is a performance problem, there is going to be a surprise. If they don't talk about it, by the time a performance review, a ranking, a bonus cycle, or worst case, a layoff happens, that employee is in for a terrible surprise. It's not fair to the employee, and it's not good for the business.
As a leader, if you set your goal as “no surprises” for the quality of performance management you are doing, and if you achieve the goal that no one on your team is ever surprised, that will create all kinds of good outcomes. “No surprises” is actually a good example of a control point as discussed in Chapter 4: Control Points. To achieve that one outcome, you will have to do a bunch of things right: set clear goals, discuss them, communicate expectations and impressions, and agree on measures and follow up on them.
If you never have performance conversations, you miss the opportunity to inspire better performance!
As a leader, you should be communicating expectations and sharing yours and others' views of the performance of an employee at least twice a year. As an employee, if you are not getting this from your manager, you should drive the process. You need to ask, “How am I doing?” How am I doing compared to your expectations? Compared to others? Do you see me as meeting, achieving, or overachieving on my goals? Here is what I think—are we on the same page?”
My view on this is if you are either the manager or the employee, prioritize the performance conversation.
Because I have always believed that the performance conversation is so important, in my own career for 17 years I drove the discussion about my performance with my boss when he was not doing it.
Regular Review
There is no downside to having clear, regular performance conversations, and in fact this is one of the most important traits of being a good manager. You should also be setting expectations for and measuring your managers on doing no-surprise performance management with their teams.
Clarity is your friend here. Strive to be super clear, not only with regard to timelines and deliverables, but also with regard to expectations about communication, leadership, judgment, influence, innovation, growing a team, and (don't forget) supporting the transformation. A performance conversation should also be developmental. There should be a conversation about stretch goals and building on strengths. Building capability in general should be part of every performance conversation.
If you are very clear about expectations and measures in the first performance conversation, in the next one, you can simply refer to the data: “Here's what we talked about last time.” If there are gaps, you can address them simply by saying, “Let's talk about this gap. We agreed to this. What happened? What do you think? What have you learned? What do you propose?” The conversation never needs to get awkward or emotional if you have been clear and you have the data from past conversations.
Delegating = Developing
If you want to build the capability of your team, a good place to start is with your top performers. If you can get your top performers to step up, you can free yourself up to do bigger and better things. Think how much more you and your team could do if you had some people on your team as capable as you are. Think of the important, strategic work you could do if you could delegate more big stuff to top performers. Think about how much more energy you could put into leading your transformation if you could clear your plate of much of the work you have now.
Develop High Performers Like Successors
I learned the lesson of what truly effective delegating is when I started to think about and do succession planning. The big “aha” for me was that if I needed to develop a successor, that was serious development for someone. And then I thought, why not do this type of development even if succession is not the goal?
One of the biggest tools you have for development is delegating. It's important to think about delegating not just as assigning work, but as a technique for teaching, developing, and building capacity in your organization.
The only true way to develop a successor is to delegate a lot of your job so that someone else can practice doing it. By delegating bigger and bigger stuff to someone as though you were developing someone as a successor, you are actually maximizing that person's development. Think about getting a couple of your top performers ready to step into your job. What could be more impactful to increasing the capacity of your team? This is relevant at every level of management.
Here are three important ways to use the succession idea as you delegate for maximum development. And if your goal is in fact to develop a successor, these are still the right things to do:
- Let them practice your work
The first part of someone learning your job is about the work. You need to give them opportunities to practice working at your level.
A lot of times we think the way to motivate our top performers is to have them work on the most fun or interesting projects. That works to a point, but it does not do anything to help get someone ready for your job. Face it, how much fun work do you get to do?
You need to give them opportunities to practice the ugly, mind-numbing, heavily matrixed, controversial, boring, unsupported, no-win kind of work you deal with every day when you wake up. What is the hardest and most distasteful thing you own? That's what you give your top performer! You give them the benefit of seeing what it is really like to be in your shoes. They get to suffer like you do. But they get to work on big stuff. They get access to your network and stakeholders. They have the chance to do something creative and heroic to get this done.
Don't shy away from giving smart people hard work.
- Let them practice your relationships
The next part of getting someone ready for your job is to make sure they are practiced and comfortable with the social requirements at the next level. They need to be someone that your peers feel comfortable with and want to include personally. They can't stand out like a sore thumb as the junior person in the room, who has no basis for being there.
You need to give your top performer a chance to practice these relationships. Give them opportunities to present for you. Arrange one-on-one meetings with them and your peers. Send them as your delegate to your boss's staff meeting when you are out of town. (Go out of town if this never happens.) If your top performer does not develop personal relationships with your boss and peers, they will not be capable of stepping in for you to free you up—because they will not be given the chance.
- Let them practice your decisions
Okay. Here is where the rubber meets the road. You need to give someone a chance to practice making the decisions that you make. If you never delegate important decisions, you are fooling yourself that you are truly developing someone.
Think about the next few months of decisions you need to make: investments, priorities, partnerships, product road map choices, marketing strategies. Give your top performer the task of owning the project and making the decisions. Let them feel the pressure of owning the outcome fully. Let them get the experience explaining, defending, and selling their choices. Let them get the experience fixing it if it goes wrong.
Is this scary? Yes. Might they choose wrong? Yes. Might they choose better than you? Also yes. The point is, if you never let them own and make key decisions, you are cutting off the single most important training you can give your successor. They will never be ready for your job without owning key decisions.
Failure Is the Key to Delegating
Delegating some of your decisions opens up the risk of people getting it wrong. This can be scary but it is one of the most powerful ways that we all learn. There is no learning as great as that which comes after failing. Many managers treat delegating exactly the opposite, as if it is their role to prevent failure by watching closely, jumping in and taking over, and fixing or modifying if it is not going well. If you think about this from a learning perspective, what you have just done is to ensure that no real learning occurs. By always averting failure personally, you inadvertently take away the person's motivation, need, and ability to learn.
It's kind of like teaching a child to ride a bike, by holding on and running alongside—and then never letting go—ever. For the rest of your life, you'll be running alongside, holding on to prevent the potential fall.
Think how much farther they could ride, and how many new things they could discover, if you weren't still hanging on, running alongside and slowing them down.
So what happens if someone fails?
Well, when you fail it feels bad. It is embarrassing. It causes business problems, It causes trouble for other people—so it becomes a big personal motivator to fix it! Real learning occurs when you not only see what you did wrong, but need to live with and deal with the consequences of what you did wrong.
By creating the safety net and filling in all the hard parts for them, the person never really learns and never gets to truly experience what it means to succeed. But if you let a smart person fail, they will figure it out. Isn't that how you got good at what you do? By doing it—trial and error, feedback, trying again. A smart person will learn how to really do it well if you give them a chance.
Also, if you always swoop in to save the day, you are ensuring that they will never get any better at the task than you are.
You are putting an artificial cap on their development. Why not give them the chance to get even better at it than you are? I have often delegated things that I thought I was pretty good at, and had my employee blow me away with their ability to exceed my capabilities. This, to me, is one of the best parts of management—when you can say, “Wow, that's amazing. You did that better than I ever imagined it could be done. Bravo. Thank you. Look at this new capability my team now has!”
Fail Small or Fail Big
Admittedly this is a bit of a paradox—how do you succeed if your people are failing? Think ahead to the desired outcome. Today your team can't do the work as well as you can, so you have two choices. Do it yourself and prevent your team from growing, or take some risk in the short term, and in a year from now have a team that can do more than you ever imagined.
Pick Your Battles
Don't pick the most business critical deliverable and put it with the most junior person. But do pick a meaty task and let a smart person who can learn something run with it. Always be on the lookout for opportunities to let people own outcomes and decisions so they can truly learn in the process. Not everything important is mission critical. It is your job to manage all the outcomes so that you create the space and opportunity for people to fail, learn, succeed, and grow, while at the same time managing the overall outcome to create success.
Everybody Up!
You need to create an environment where doing a bigger job to improve yourself and your team is not only allowed, it is expected. If you want the strongest team possible helping you to drive change, make sure you have people who have the insight and capability to evolve their roles, and challenge and support them to step up. Let some of them work at your level. Let them really learn. And always make sure to keep the conversations about expectations and performance clear and fluent with everyone.