Understanding Where You Stand

Before I explain why there is a little Fez in all of us, let’s take a few steps back. The definition of a healthy business is a business that is growing, and by growing I mean it is making more money each year. There’s a plethora of different ways that a company can create this growth, but the basic law of business physics that you should never forget is “As a business grows, so shall its employees.”

The manner by which a business prunes the employees who aren’t assisting in this growth is horrifically efficient. First, we have the employees who have consistently demonstrated an inability or lack of interest in helping with this growth. Their prize is the irrelevant project that no one cares about. Some folks find this banishment to be comforting. “Aaaahh . . . no more fire drills . . . the execs don’t even care about this project, so I can cruise.” That’s right. They don’t care about that particular division because it’s not strategic, which means the moment it’s time to tighten the budgetary belt that is the first group to be nuked. Poof. Welcome to unemployment . Did you learn your lesson, yet? Probably should have taken the time to figure out what XML stood for.

Then we have Fez. Maybe he’s grown complacent with the knowledge that he’s the only person who has a particular skill or set of knowledge. It’s a powerful position to be in . . . for a while.

Maybe the execs won’t fire him because of the perception he has essential knowledge, but, I guarantee, those who are dependent on his black box of knowledge are concocting a devious plan to replace him and his knowledge because they want to grow. Right this second, three guys down the hall have rewritten Fez’s code in C and they’re secretly demonstrating their work to interested parties. They are building support, they are building a revolution, and they’re not going to stop until the person who is hindering their growth is gone.

Whether it’s by organizational evolution or revolution, complacency is a job killer, and if you’re following me, you think Fez has blown it.

Wrong.

I did.

I blew it by not convincing Fez that growth is life.

Annual Reviews , Briefly

Let’s start with the bad news. There’s no silver bullet to solve the Fez issue. Solving Fez is going to involve strategy, effort, inspiration, luck, and, lastly, a bit of time. You won’t solve it in a moment and you won’t solve it in a single meeting. There is a convenient yearly inflection point where everyone panics about their careers. Annual reviews. I’m going to construct this chapter around annual reviews, but I don’t want you to think that performing an annual review will solve the Fez. If you worry about career development once a year, you’re screwed. As you’ll see, avoiding the Fez is a full-time job, but since you get actual allocated time to stress about employee development, why not stress in a constructive manner?

What’s Really on Their Minds

People do care about cash. When that annual review begins, your employee is hanging on every word, carefully listening to your tone, wondering, good review or bad review? If it’s sounding good, that must mean cash; and cash rocks. If it’s sounding bad, they stop listening and start pre-bittering themselves to hate you for the next month since you clearly have no idea where they added their value this year.

Compensation adjustments are the reward everyone cares about, but does anyone actually know how they’re calculated? What happened over the previous 365 days to result in a big cash windfall or an insignificant pittance?

If you don’t draw a concrete line between a coherent understanding of an employee’s performance and their reward or punishment, you are only adding more fuel to the argument that “managers sit around doing nothing all day.” Let’s begin . . .

First, Gather Your Thoughts, but Don’t Think (Yet)

Here’s the deal. If I asked you right this second to tell me about your particular local Fez, you’ve already got a strong opinion, but it’s an opinion of the moment. It’s the last three interactions you’ve had with your Fez, and while those are relevant, they hardly represent a complete picture of a year of work.

When you’re assessing an employee, you need to assess against their job, not the work they’ve done over the past two months. This is hard because this is the Silicon Valley and no one knows what happened two months ago. Facebook IPO’d then Summer then the next iPhone, right? Is Mountain Lion out yet? Did I miss anything important? You probably did, unless you captured it somehow. Every month, your team produced something and it’s your job to document that production. I do this by spending an hour a month jotting down reflections of the team for the past 30 days. What stands out in my mind? What’d we do? Who rocked? Don’t get hung up on documenting every single event or talking about every single person . . . just type. Even if you miss massive contributions by a team member, the act of capturing your thoughts at the time they were happening creates a handy mental bookmark . This bookmark captures not only what you wrote, but everything else hiding around it. When you go back and read last summer’s terribly small entry—“This month blew. No time to write.”—you’ll not only remember that you were on a death march, but you’ll also remember that Eddie the QA guy was there with you that weekend and, oh hey, he’s been here every single weekend and, wow, why aren’t we promoting him?

Regular snapshots of your team’s work will construct an impression of your team that you are incapable of constructing in the moment because, in the moment, you’re cranky about not getting coffee this morning, stressed about your product review next week, and don’t get me started about the 300 mails I have yet to read. How can you create an objective opinion of someone’s performance with all this crap in your head? You gotta step back, take a deep breath, and reflect.

As you sit there staring at the ceiling chewing on a year of thoughts, an overall impression is going to form . . . you can’t avoid it, but I’m asking you to ignore it for now. I’m going to distract you by proposing a model that you can use to look at your employees and begin to understand what exactly their career needs. The model is called Skill vs. Will.

Skill vs. Will Plus Epiphanies

It’s a simple graph. One axis is skill—how much skill does the employee have to do his job? Is he qualified? Overqualified? How long has he been doing it? When is the last time you know he learned something new? How quickly does he handle tasks compared to his peers?

The other axis is will—this is where we measure the employee’s desire. Does she like her job? Really? Has she told you that? Is she viewed as energetic by her team? When is the last time she generated a great idea that blew your mind? Is she talking in meetings or listening? Is she ever talking? Is she always talking?

This graph is not a precision instrument. It’s a tool to better define the impression you’re constructing of your employee. Once you’ve placed someone on the Skill/Will graph, you can begin to consider what your full-time job is—constantly and consistently pushing your employees to the upper-right quadrant. High skill (I’m good at what I do) and high will (I like what I do). This mental map is the first step in constructing a Fez-avoidance insurance policy.

“Rands,” you ask, “um, what exactly am I pushing constantly and consistently?”

Great question.

Worst-case scenario: You’ve ignored everything I’ve said so far. You’re spending 15 days rereading Fez’s review from last year. Then, you spend another 15 throwing together this year’s review by cutting and pasting the one and only review you wrote for all your employees, making it unique by inserting their full name and project name. Dear lord. You’ve really blown it.

Yet, you haven’t fully blown it. A complete fuck-up is when you take this pathetic excuse for a review and present it. You say, “Employee 629, here is your review. You did this well, you did this poorly. Here’s your 2 percent increase and here’s your indecipherable objectives for next year. Back to work.”

You deserve every single Fez that you get. Please stop reading, pack your things, and quietly exit the Silicon Valley. Thanks.

If you’ve taken some time to reflect on the full year, if you’ve mapped your employee against skill and will, you’ve probably had some epiphany regarding the Fez. You’ve realized, “Wow, he’s bored,” or “She really has no clue how to architect software.” Great, an epiphany . . . it’s a start, but it’s not a finish.

You are not the one who needs to have the epiphany. It’s your employee who needs it.

I’ll explain via the real fictional Fez. Go back and think about where you’d put him on the Skill/Will graph. Your gut might say well, he’s worked a lot of years, so he’s high skill and he’s just bored, so he’s low will.

Nice try, but you don’t have the 12 months of fictional notes that I have. See, Fez’s skill used to be high, but it’s fading. It’s middle-of-the-road skill now and the slow erosion is also affecting his confidence . . . his will. His diminishing skill is diminishing his will, which, in turn, further diminishes his skill because he has zero confidence to go gather new skills. Yikes. A skill/will negative feedback loop. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

Here’s the upside. Just as skill and will fade together, they also rise together. If you focus on one, you often fix the other. It’s a brilliant management two-for-one.

Back to Fez. Let’s say your epiphany is to get Fez some technical training. Send him to a C++ class and wham, he’s going to be happy. Hurry, write that down as an objective because wow, you’ve really nailed that Fez problem.

Easy, eager manager. Slow down.

Assertiveness , Briefly

I’ve got a task for you and I’m going to ask you in two different ways. You tell me which request you’re going to actually do:

• Request #1: You—go fix that bug.

• Request #2: Hey, can you look into bug #1837?

The difference between these two requests is a management style that shows up in every personality test. You, Mr. Manager, are either ask assertive, meaning that you ask in order to get stuff done, or tell assertive, which means you tell to make progress.

There are a great many charismatic leaders who’ve made billions by only telling folks what to do. I am not one of them. It’s not that I’m conflict averse or that there are not times that I’m an incessant dictator, it’s merely I hate being told what to do, so I treat others like I’d prefer to be treated.

Telling your Fez what the problem is without belief on their part that a problem exists is tantamount to a personal attack. “You, Fez, are doing a poor job and I’ve decided that objectives x, y, and z are the only way that we’re going to save your job.”

I exaggerate for example, but I’ve had fifteen-plus years of reviews and I’ve had some phenomenal managers turn a review into a speech about me without involving me. Well, I happen to be an expert about me, so can I please be involved in the discussion?

An annual review is a discussion, not a speech. The goal of the discussion is, first, to agree that the review is in the ballpark. Remember, you’ve been thinking about the review for weeks because you’ve got a deadline. Fez is seeing it for the first time and he needs time to mentally digest. It’s very hard to be mentally nimble when your manager is staring you down asking, “Any questions?” It’s doubly hard when he’s just told you that you screwed up for the past year.

Rule of thumb: If you’re delivering big bad news, schedule two meetings. At the first meeting, you’re presenting the review, not the objectives. They’re going to want to know about compensation and you’re going to want to say it, but don’t. The moment you say “No increase,” the review is over, the employee is pissed, and you’re going to be on the defensive. The meeting has become a mental fight and fights only prove who can punch harder.

It’s the second meeting where everyone involved has had time to digest the review. You can have a discussion about objectives because Fez drove home the prior night wondering, “My manager is telling me that I’m getting stale and I vehemently disagree with that . . . buuuuuuut maybe there’s some truth in what he’s saying . . . hmmmmm.”

With just a smidgen of agreement that the review is fair combined with you and your Fez agreeing about his place on Skill/Will, you can start talking objectives. What can we do to increase skill or will? New job? New tasks? Training? Maybe move him off that team of pessimists so he can spread his wings with some optimists?

I don’t know what is up with your particular Fez, so I can’t advise specific objectives, but here are some high-level thoughts about the extremes on the Skill/Will graph:

• High skill, low will: Boredom is imminent—needs a change of scenery and responsibility. Stat.

• High will, low skill: Needs training, needs mentorship. Needs management. The good news is they really, really want it. Savor this because as soon as the skill kicks in, they’re going to start wanting your job. This rules.

• Low will, low skill: Boy, did you screw up. It takes a fairly concerted effort to ignore the needs of your employee so long that (a) they no longer have the skills necessary to do their job, and (b) they don’t want to do it. Roll those sleeves up, pal. You’ve got work to do.

• High skill, high will: Great job but, ummmmm, guess what? No one can maintain this for very long.

Big Finish

Fez is the personification of career drift .

You’ve got some Fez in you right now. You may be the rock star of your company right now, but you have no clue that three guys in a garage in San Jose are spending every waking hour working to make you irrelevant . . . they call it the New Whizbang and you’re going to hate the New Whizbang when it shows up because you know it replaces your corporate relevancy.

Your manager is not going to hate the New Whizbang because she doesn’t feel personally threatened by it. She is going to see you Fezzing out about it and, hopefully, she can figure out to trickle objectivity into your indignation.

I have a simple way of managing against the Fez effect. I tell everyone I hire the same thing: “I hired you because you’ve got enough skill and enough will to have my job one day . . . whether you want it or not.” This statement tells those I work with that I expect them to succeed and reminds me to keep moving because there is nothing like having bright people nipping at your heels to keep you running.