4

“ALL MY PEOPLE ARE GREAT”

Nolan Landry was a longtime manager in IT who thought all his people were great, every one of them. He’d been with Auruco for three decades, a manager for most of that time, and would tell you he had a “tough but fair” reputation around most of his direct reports. His current team of 10 varied among several specialists, a mix of newer and longtime employees, who were loaned out to different departments across the organization to fix things and troubleshoot problems. Some worked remotely.

A Company Cowboy

A few years ago, Nolan’s team had come under HR scrutiny because it wasn’t on an annual performance review schedule. This rankled HR, which told Nolan that he and his team should be aligned with everybody else in the organization and follow the company-wide forced distribution ranking for performance reviews. Ever since, there’d been a level of mistrust between the two.

HR had reasoned with Nolan that performance reviews were important because over the years, grade inflation by managers had become such a problem that it was difficult to identify who was a high potential and worthy of development from those who weren’t. But Nolan wasn’t having it. He went directly to his boss to explain the fallacy of fitting his people along a bell curve, where small percentages of people at the high and low ends were deemed “excellent” and “unsatisfactory,” respectively, and a main group in the middle was “meeting requirements.”

The point of these company regulations, Nolan felt, was to toughen standards for all while increasing productivity, but it basically eliminated those employees at the bottom. His people were productive, and such a system compelled him to waste time on percentages and metrics when he could be doing more important things. He could see how that effort might be worth it in a bigger department or team, where the actual numbers represented by the percentages would be larger, but to practice it on a team of 10 meant that good people would be relegated to the bottom, even when they weren’t poor performers.

Ranking would also undermine his team’s collaboration, he continued. Why would you take your time to help a co-worker if that might place them ahead of you? Why would you ask for help if it might lower your standing? Teamwork was essential. Besides, the staff on Nolan’s team did different things, and couldn’t easily be compared with one another.

Ultimately, Nolan believed, forcing out those at the bottom, although initially controlling costs, would eventually increase outsourcing until the organization realized institutional knowledge had been bled away. He had heard about competitors that had cut too close to the bone. Nolan had also heard other stories of HR departments that didn’t even notice when their organization’s tech talent was being recruited by an attractive competitor—until it was too late.

Nolan’s boss sided with him, HR relented, and ever since the “forced distribution episode,” Nolan had been viewed as a bit of a company cowboy.

For his part, Nolan didn’t miss the hundreds of hours he used to spend each year writing performance reviews, but he now probably spent more time with the team and knew more about what they were doing—he had to, in order to keep up.

Instead of reviews, Nolan’s team routinely met when projects were completed to discuss what happened—and what should have happened. As his team grew, from five to eight to 10, he had dispensed with the weekly one-on-ones in favor of these freewheeling post-mortems. No one seemed to miss the face-to-face chats, and the new people didn’t know what they were missing. Team meetings, on the other hand, seemed useful for everybody, and those not on the specific project detail were also invited to participate, making for a lively discussion. When HR asked if they could sit in on one such discussion, Nolan politely refused. But when Camila Parsons, the company’s new chief talent development officer (CTDO), approached him with the same request, Nolan thought he had to give in.

“Don’t worry,” Camila said. “I won’t stop you and ask you to explain things for me. I’ll try to come prepared.”

Nolan was used to having to explain IT processes and terms to people outside the team, but found it frustrating if customers or invited guests slowed down a team meeting. However, he’d noticed that a couple of the newer team members seemed a little more deliberate about responding in meetings, and might welcome an explanatory pause to get up to speed.

A New CTDO in Town

Camila had been on the job less than a year and was still making the rounds of business-critical departments. She had been hired after Auruco’s new CEO, who was dedicated to talent acquisition and development, announced that he wanted to create more of a business partnership with HR.

Camila had never worked in such a large organization. Auruco was a multinational biotech company worth billions of dollars—an economic monolith whose biomedical research and development division alone employed more than 6,000 scientists and physicians in several locations all over the world. She was expected to develop relationships with entirely different executive teams. In this arrangement, there was both independence and responsibility. Camila was also pretty sure that, thanks to her previous job at a tech startup, the CEO had an expectation that she could promote an innovative culture in an establishment world, or at least recognize one when she saw it.

HR had brought Nolan to Camila’s attention because of his perceived management problems and reluctance to set individual goals for team members, coach them, and do meaningful performance reviews. Members of Nolan’s team often received positive reviews with little to no differentiation. HR thought Nolan had left them little choice.

What’s more, the product line his team had been developing was stalled, and it wasn’t clear if the problem was the product, the team, or its leadership.

Camila agreed with Nolan about the potential hazards and wastes of forced distribution and was relieved that the organization seemed to have moved beyond that as a personnel evaluation method. She preferred other ways to encourage productivity and motivation and cut costs. But what would work best for Nolan and his team? Coaching, reassignment, or something else?

When “How’s It Going?” Isn’t Enough

Camila grabbed her to-go order from the counter and motioned for Nolan to follow her. The Auruco campus sat on hundreds of green acres bordered by woods at the edge of the city research network. The day was bright and blue outside the glassed-in cafeteria, and she headed for a picnic table under a maple tree. As they sat down across from each other and unwrapped their sandwiches, Camila eyed Nolan.

“I had a manager once who used to say he could tell how engaged people were by the time of day they left work,” Camila said.

“Ah, a clock-watcher,” responded Nolan before biting into his sandwich.

“Well, with a twist. It was all about him. If great producers were leaving early, he wondered if he could engage them more. If lesser producers were, he thought about whether he could engage them at all.”

“Sounds like a thoughtful guy…. Look, there’s nothing wrong with the people on my team, if that’s what you’re suggesting; they’re all engaged, great producers.”

“I’m not talking about them.”

Like many longtime tech managers Camila had known, Nolan was technically proficient, but his team was involved in so many different projects that he was challenged to keep up; they were doing work he never saw or perhaps didn’t understand. He might have been their manager, but did he know how to help them? Or himself?

“How do you coach people with different experience than your own? Your remote employees?” Camila asked him. “How’s that going? Or what do you do when ‘how’s it going?’ isn’t enough?”

Nolan took a long swallow of his soda to buy time to think. He wasn’t sure. He had to admit: He hadn’t been asked such a question in a very long time.