The inspiration for this post comes from an interview I was doing for an Engineering Manager position. I was asking the typical question “tell me a time when you managed someone you felt wasn’t performing at their best” etc. Generally people answer with the typical playbook response of a low performer who needed extra coaching and guidance. And, for bonus points, give a story of making tough decisions when that didn’t work out… [enough on that, this is not a post giving interviewing tips].
Except this time the person didn’t do that. What this person did was the exact opposite. They actually said “I haven’t really had issues with low performers in my teams but…” and then went on to tell a story about a high performer who had got stuck in a rut. And it wasn’t even their fault, it was down to a number of systemic issues outside their control and influence. The interviewing then talked us through how they solved the systemic problems and watched their once shackled high performer fly! [Now I really wish I could remember who this person was in order to give them credit for it but alas, whilst their story struck me their name eludes me.]
I could explain why this is such a brilliant play for your next interview but, again, this isn’t a post on interviewing tips. The story struck me for a different reason. Virtually every interview I’d been in where this question was asked focussed on low performers (which is, after all, what the question is designed to do). But this person brilliantly pointed out that low performers aren’t the issue. High performers are. And this brilliant insight is what this post is all about.
After the interview I had a think. How many times in my 25 years in the industry had I seen a team or an organisation held back by low performers? It wasn’t many. With some effort I could come up with a few but they were at worst simply just slower than the rest of their team or needed a bit more management than usual. In extreme they were causing real issues but that was often for other reasons.
But when I thought of High Performers who were held back in some way or causing harm I could come up with dozens and dozens of cases. They flowed freely through my brain without effort. To the point I started writing them all down!
Why the obsession with Low Performers?
Where does this obsession with low performers come from? I blame HR. And by HR I do mean Human Resources. Because a focus on low performers makes total sense when you view people as Resources.
Take a factory line where you have to manufacture 100 widgets an hour. You have someone on the production line who very rarely gets above 90 widgets per hour. For manager and HR departments who are still ignorant of the Red Bead Experiment, this person is clearly a low performer. If you find a way to performance manage them up to 100 widgets an hour then your factory is able to confidently meet its targets and is more productive.
Now take that exact thinking and apply it to knowledge work. To improve the productivity of the overall workforce (measured by Revenue per Employee) then the whole balloon rises when you drop the ballast of low performers. Not only is that thinking wrong and dangerous it avoids solving the real issue: why your organisation is not just limiting but often pushing your high performers down.
There are so many ways High Performers are held back in organisations that a good academic could write a paper on them. But that’s not my skill set and I’m not studying for a PhD right now so you’ll have to settle for my unresearched and unsubstantiated opinions based on 25 years of experience instead.
The wrong “high performers”
Before we start talking about what holds high performers back we need to acknowledge that reason number 1 is that your high performers probably aren’t who you think they are.
From Bob Sutton’s No Arsehole Rule to the Peter Principle to Hero Syndrome we have an abundance of research on so-called “high performers” who are anything but. That engineer who managed to make themselves indispensable, not because they did a really good job, but because they created an unholy mess only they understand. In wider culture we’re more often hearing phrases such as nepotism and chumocracy. When corporate cultures become really dysfunctional then low performers high in narcissistic traits get all the adoration. We’ve always had cases of inexperienced people who rise through the ranks because they are great political players who “talk-the-talk” but can’t “walk-the-walk”. I once worked in a company which had a corridor between two buildings where managers would constantly walk up and down hoping to “bump into” senior leaders to give them updates or ask a question always delivered with an energy which conveys high urgency and being super busy. It was the most literal case of “being seen to look busy” I’ve ever experienced.
But this is not the subject of this post. Others have already written extensively on these things and I simply want to acknowledge their existence and the serious harm they do to the genuine high performers.
This post is about that interview answer. The genuine high performers who are held back. These are the people who provide the burners who warm the air and lift the rest of the organisation. If only we’d let them.
Those Held Back
I started by thinking of all the incidents in my career where I’d seen high performers held back. Classic cases are those who were promoted into places without support and now struggle. Or they’ve been given too much responsibility and are burned out. This was especially common during layoffs where teams were shrunk but responsibilities and ambitions weren’t and it was unreasonably expected that high performers could pick up the slack.If Health and Safety regulations applied to Knowledge Work and mental health in the way working with asbestos did, then there would be a lot of lawsuits right now.
I worked with a fantastic Project Manager who consistently rescued the most disastrous of projects. Their record was impeccable. They were given a failing project but, because there was a shortage of Product Managers, they were asked to cover the Product role. Product wasn’t their background and the skill sets were totally different. They struggled to adapt as they tried to learn how to do Product Management without any support or coaching. But they were a high performer so with a little more time surely they’d work it out?
We all probably have an example of that brilliant individual who has become so cynical they need constant management. When you sit down and talk to them you find out that they more than understand their lack of impact but are frustrated by the situations they’ve been put in. I worked with a brilliant Designer who had been given the remit to upskill a team. But all their suggestions were overruled by the department’s leadership as not important or denigrated as over the top. The designer knew what excellence looked like, after all it was this which made them a high performer and why they’d been put in the team. But now their experience and expertise was constantly being characterised as ideological and lacking in pragmatism. Is it any wonder they became cynical and disaffected?
The case in the interview was similar. A great backend engineer had been placed in a new team. Their original remit had been to coach the frontend engineers to be full stack and improve productivity so the team could own features end-to-end. But the opposite had happened. They’d been assigned all the BE work. They felt isolated in the team and had become the bottleneck and single point of failure. Now every time a feature was behind or blocked they felt like they were to blame.
What about that person who is brilliant and just gets on with it quietly and without drama but is constantly overlooked because they lack those essential “self promotion” skills. I was once in a performance calibration session where engineering management put someone forward as a high performer. They’d done amazing things turning the team around, up levelling practices and initiated and completed a successful cloud migration. But the VP of Product had never heard of them so that was that. And if they had been in meetings they’d been “very quiet”. Feedback was “make yourself more visible next time. Do some talks and presentations”.
In all these cases not only were the High Performers let down but the organisations were committing acts of self harm.
Mistakes we make
Behind all these cases there are a bunch of common mistakes organisations and managers make. Here are a few examples:
- They’re in the wrong role. High performers aren’t fungible and generic. Just because they perform great in their current role it doesn’t follow that you can throw anything at them without support, coaching or training. Not only is this a waste of good talent but it probably hurts the organisation and the individual in the short to medium term.
- They’re in the wrong place. If you really want to inflict self harm, put a high performer on a project which is harming your business or is a sunk cost. And when that doesn’t work keep adding more and more high performers. Using high performers hoping they’ll fix things so you can avoid difficult business decisions is probably the worst thing you can do.
- They’re spread out thin and isolated, unable to leverage each other’s talents. It looks like a sensible strategy, make sure every team or business area has at least one high performer. But high performers need other high performers to bounce off of. Without like minds around them they can feel isolated and struggle to make an impact.
- You’ve burnt them out. Basically you think Whiplash is a training documentary for managers. Just push your high performers harder and then they’ll reach new heights right? Sorry, wrong.
- Too much coaching burden. Your leverage mix is wrong and you have one high performer to many many juniors. This means your high performer is constantly mentoring and coaching on the basics and doesn’t get to have a bigger impact.
- No coaching opportunities. Your high performer is so busy they have no time to help others and spread their learnings. This seriously limits their impact.
- You believe they don’t need management. You leave them to their own devices. Give them a vague remit with ambiguous goals and job descriptions. You hope that they are so smart they’ll just work through the mess themselves. Even though nobody else in the organisation has.
- You over manage them. In the case of the Designer every decision they tried to make was questioned and overruled by senior leaders. They wanted the designer to work the way leaders were comfortable with and not take risks. Even though they’d asked for change. The designers’ expertise meant nothing and they weren’t trusted to make the changes their experience told them would transform the team.
- You don’t create the right opportunities for them. Every year one of my engineers went for Lead and got turned down. They were told they hadn’t worked on a project with high scale or high complexity or x, y, z. Every year I tried to get them projects but was always pushed back because they hadn’t the experience. When you don’t create opportunities and take risks on high performers they hit a glass ceiling.
Tactics which Work
Most of the solutions to the above require changes to the way we manage teams and individuals. To really get performance gains and free high performers the job required is one of transformation. A focus on low performers will not transform the ways we work. Plus it ignores that the real change required is to the way we manage.
In the interview example the solution was to help get the BE engineer back onto their original remit of coaching the team. This required the EM to manage the team differently by prioritising the long term value and impact of the coaching and how that would change the performance of the team, even though it wasn’t directly connected to delivering features. Which brings me to my first tactic.
Don’t mix delivery with enablement. High performers are often given dual remits. Enable and up skill teams whilst delivering on deadlines. One key insight from Team Topologies is to separate these responsibilities between Enablement Teams and Stream Aligned Teams and understand the difference in interaction modes (Collaboration, Facilitating and X-as-a-Service). If a high performer is enabling, then understand that their role is mentoring and coaching and they will mainly be in a collaboration or facilitation mode. Operating in these modes takes a lot of energy. Often the most effective tactic is to pair them up with the role you want to upskill. Which means don’t score their performance on delivering stuff. Likewise if you make them responsible for that key project, don’t expect amazing results on team transformation.
Build teams around high performers rather than adding high performers to teams. You know which teams are the most business critical (if not I suggest some Wardley Mapping). Make sure you’ve put the right high performers together and build a team around them (and no, this is not “the innovation team”).
This is something which Thoughtworks really excelled at. The idea was to build a core team around key individuals and then supplement with more junior or inexperienced members. Then, via osmosis, the others would learn what it’s like to work in a high performing team. After about 9 months people would be rotated into another team propagating what they’d learned.
This is the opposite of the “spread them out” method where you try to ensure that every team gets an experienced high performer. This falls foul of Jerry Weinberg’s “Law of Raspberry Jam” (“The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets”). The trade-off you have to make is that some teams or some business activities won’t have the level of experience they really need. This is a business priority decision and cannot be avoided. You can’t be good at everything everywhere all at once. That’s the basics of strategy.
Related is to understand your leverage ratio. Although this is a technique mainly employed by consultancies it is a very useful concept for managers of all teams. Leverage ratio essentially means understanding the mix between seniors and juniors. When the ratio is too heavily weighted to juniors then you will find seniors are overwhelmed by coaching and mentoring and have no time to be impactful. When the ratio is in the opposite direction then nobody is learning and you are failing to grow the next generation of talent.
Communities are another powerful tool for sharing knowledge and influence. High performers need time away from the daily grind to talk about what they’ve been doing and learn off of each other. This requires building communities so they can share. Being a community owner is also a great opportunity for some people to learn a wider range of skills. It is also a powerful way to enable high performers to spread their influence in a safe space.
It’s critical to make transformation an explicit goal. Make sure it’s connected to your OKRs or company goals. If the role of a high performer is to transform a team then make sure that remit is clear and understood by all stakeholders. Don’t treat your high performers as your personal Black Ops team. Giving a high performer a covert mission, hoping they can influence from the inside, is a disaster waiting to happen. If you want them to transform the team, give them the authority to transform the team.
Create a shield at the highest level. Don’t leave your high performers to deal with the politics. This is a complete waste of their energies. You’ve probably read all those articles about how transformations need “leadership buy in” and there’s an obvious reason for that. It’s much easier if someone can say “I’m doing this under the CTOs authority, go talk to them” than if they have to spend their time bringing everyone onboard.
Final Thoughts
Now here’s a funny thing. I’ve been saying High Performers throughout. Who are we talking about? The top 10% or 20%? But most of the situations I’ve mentioned actually affect a large part of the workforce. And people who are probably in the top 40% have the opportunity to become a high performer.
This comes back to the original point. If you understand how your organisation holds high performers back the chances are you will lift the whole entire organisation to new levels of performance. And you will probably find that you’re not talking about “low” performers anymore. You’re bell curve will simply shift more to the right.
Yet the more you focus on low performers, the more that fear and anxiety drives your decisions to put more process and bureaucracy in place, the more likely you hold back your high performers.
And if anyone does have some actual y’know evidence and science and stuff which either backs this up or shoots it down, then do let me know.