Don’t Make it Complicated!

True Story…

We had a baby sitter this summer to help out the wife with the three kids. We found the baby sitter via our church. Very nice young lady who loved our children… but still a typical teen-ager!

Anyway, about 3 weeks into the summer, the wife was starting to be disappointed with what the baby sitter was doing. Actually the problem was with what she was not doing. Specifically, my wife felt like she still had to watch after the kids.

When I would get home at night, my wife would be frustrated that she was unable to get anything done in the house during the day because she had to chase the kids around, etc.

I asked her… did you ever tell the baby sitter what you expected. Or that you were not happy with what she was doing?

My wife’s reply was ‘She is a friend of our family. We go to church with her parents. I don’t want to hurt her feelings…’

My wife is one of the most loving, caring, and sensitive people that I know. But I still had to ask the question…

So if you expect her to change and you never tell her that she needs to change…

Why would expect her to change?

Aren’t you doing the same thing in business?

You fear the hard conversation. You don’t tell employees what they do great and what their improvements need to be. You just get by that month of performance reviews, giving everyone an ‘average’ increase.

All because you are scared to hurt their feelings. Or maybe because you are scared with what they will say back… like: You did not give me measurable goals. Or the business changed… or the other business unit did worse then us and they still got a raise.

So now the employee learns that it does not matter what their performance was because they are going to get the same raise anyway.

You may even try to argue (I call it rationalizing) that your compensation system is messed up and you can’t do anything about it.

Try this…
Take your average wage increase (or target)
Multiply this average by prior year’s salary.
You will get a bucket of money.
Now go through and divide this money among your direct reports.
Yep some of them should get zero if they are not performing.
And others should be rewarded.

Use data to make your decisions and send it to corporate.

Force them to see the issue about differentiating performance. You need to recognize that it is about you. Even if you can’t differentiate the performance because of a ‘broken’ compensation system… you still owe to your employee, your business,and to yourself to give an honest appraisal of their work.

And always remember to think about how you should approach the conversation… more to come on this topic in later posts.