Avoiding the 5 Common Pitfalls of Managing Others - Part 4

Avoiding the 5 Common Pitfalls of Managing Others

The Managing for Impact Blog Series – Part 4 of 5

A Managing for Impact Participant Experience.

This blog series illustrates several best practices of being an effective people manager, as covered in our award-winning 5-part Managing for Impact development program.

Pitfall 4: Relational Performance Bias

About 18 months ago, I was asked to take on a new role as manager of marketing for my firm. The role came with a healthy amount of visibility from senior leadership yet a significant amount of responsibility. I felt confident I was ready to embrace the challenge and I was excited to get started. I led a team of six marketing staff members who supported various practice groups across the firm. For the most part, we were a solid team. I mention “for the most part” because I had one team member who didn’t seem to be pulling his weight. And I amassed quite a bit of evidence to support my perception. For example, when I would pull activity reports from our marketing tracking tool, the volume of his marketing activity consistently fell short of that of that of his peers over the same time period. In addition, he only supported two practice areas while his peer supported twice as many. These results simply weren’t sustainable. So when it came time for his performance review, I gave him that feedback and offered him 60 days to show improved performance or we’d need to evaluate whether the role was the right fit for him.

In session 4 of the Managing for Impact development series, we explored some of the common biases that can creep into the performance management process. I was surprised to learn that I had allowed one of those biases to influence how I held my team accountable. I unintentionally fell into the trap of comparing one employee’s performance against another’s. This is called relational bias. When I placed my employee on a performance improvement warning, I was violating the standard rule in performance management: Hold people accountable to an organizational standard, not to a relational comparison of performance outcomes. During my small group discussions within the program, I realized that I had not established an organizational standard for what success should look like for the role. For example, how much activity should a marketing specialist be engaged in each month, how many practice areas should they support and how should we measure quality. Instead, I used the results of my top performer as my expectation. I now know that this was unfair.

Immediately after the session, I drafted a set of expectations against which I would hold all team members accountable. I then vetted the draft with my team to get their reaction. What I learned is that it was unrealistic to expect everyone on my team to consistently deliver the same results as my top performers. So instead, I established a fair benchmark that definitely stretched people but was realistic and then held each team member accountable against that same standard. It turns out that my “underperforming” employee wasn’t underperforming at all. His results were reasonable, but they just looked lackluster when compared to others on the team. I also incorporated additional incentives for those team members who wished to far exceed the standard, rather than punishments for those who were happy to meet expectations.

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