325: Are Your People Doing Their Best?

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:11]:

I recently finished Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead, and it’s a book that had been on my list for a long, long time. And it’s one of those ones that I thought maybe I’d read it already, but I hadn’t. And I have to say, I absolutely loved it. I loved the concepts in it. You know, I know it’s old, older at this stage. It’s not exactly the most recent leadership book, but it surfaces some really interesting insights. But there is one thing that I want to address in it, and that is the purpose of today’s episode. This is the Happier at Work podcast.

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:48]:

I’m your host, Aoife O’Brien. And today we’re going to talk about whether you believe people are doing their best. One of the underlying premises within the book is the assumption that people are doing their best. And I know Brené has these other assumptions, like always assuming positive intent of other people. And in this book, the assumption is that other people are doing their best, but what if that’s not the case? What if people aren’t actually doing their best? And so I want to explore that idea in a little bit more detail and unpack it a bit. And see what we can do as leaders when it comes to addressing issues of underperformance. And I’m sure like me, you’ve also worked with someone who’s coasted, who’s been in the wrong role, who hasn’t had the support that they need to perform at their best. But I think when we assume that someone is doing their best, then we are allowed to go beyond that.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:55]:

If we just decide they’re lazy, they’re incompetent, they’re underperforming, Then it doesn’t allow us to go a little bit deeper and look around and look at our role, our responsibility in their performance. If I think back to my own career, and I’ve been doing a lot of work on understanding the patterns and understanding everything that happened to me in my career from a psychological perspective, from a pattern perspective, from a repeated behaviors perspective. So I’ve been doing a lot of work around that recently and it has surfaced some really interesting things about what I’m good at and what I kind of knew I was good at, but also not realizing that the clues had been there all along throughout my entire career. But if I think broadly about the roles that I’ve had and the experiences that I’ve had, and, you know, there’s one experience very early in my career where I was being compared constantly to people who had way more experience than I did. And my boss was asking me, why can’t you perform the way they’re performing? And all I could think was, well, because they have 5 years more experience than I do. I don’t think I even had the language to say I wasn’t getting the support that I needed. But take another environment where I was doing, again, something very new to me, but I really excelled in that role to the degree that they gave me a 33% pay rise and offered me a permanent position. So, It’s not just about individuals.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:27]:

To me, it’s about finding that good fit or finding that good match. And so this allows us to explore a little bit more of the nuance around when it comes to underperformance. Let’s investigate it a little bit more deeply about what’s really going on. Let’s stick with the assumption that people are doing their best. When someone is not performing, we have a tendency to jump to conclusions about them. So I think, you know, we kind of make sweeping judgments or sweeping statements about their character, like they’re lazy, they’re difficult, they’re unmotivated, or they just don’t care. We tend to jump in quickly and diagnose what’s going on first. But what if we look at all of the different elements? So capability is a word that I’ve started using to describe what I used to call strengths, because I think for me, it’s beyond just strengths.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:20]:

Capability incorporates our experiences, our knowledge, our strengths, Our confidence as well. There’s lots of different elements that go into capability beyond just our strengths. But if we look at someone’s capability first, do they have the skills? Do they have the knowledge? Do they have the experience? Do they have the strengths for this particular work? And do they feel confident enough to do the role? There’s an important distinction here though. Sometimes someone can have all of the capabilities, but they’re still not good enough for what that role demands for lots of different reasons. And we don’t have to pretend that they’re doing a good job. That’s not what compassion is about. And actually, I love what Brené Brown talks about in relation to clear is kind. We need to communicate clearly to people and let them know that’s the kind thing to do.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:12]:

Unclear is unkind. It could be that there is a development gap, that the role has outgrown them, that they were promoted too soon. That’s the Peter principle at play there. I talk about that in Thriving Talent, and there could be a fundamental mismatch between the strengths they have and the role that they’re doing. And if I think back to that, that role that I had very early in my career, I think it was just a mismatch of strengths. I, you know, I was doing what I could, but the role required something very different of me. Beyond capabilities, we can think about the conditions that we’ve created as an organization, as a leader. Could this person perform perform better under different conditions, under different circumstances, somewhere else in a different organization, in a different role, in a different department, in a different team? Have we given them expectations that are really clear? Are they clear on those expectations? Do they have sufficient autonomy, but not too much, but also not too little? And are we as leaders trying to not be that micromanaging boss, So much that we haven’t given them clear guidance? Do they have the resources that they need? Do they have the support that they need to do the role? How’s my leadership? Am I leading them well? And am I giving them what they need? Have I created an environment of psychological safety where they feel safe to speak up, to share what’s going on? How about the workload and the prioritization? Are there competing priorities? Do they just have too much on? Do they have the opportunity to use their capability in the role that they have? And again, going back to this idea of their capabilities, is there a mismatch between what they’re being asked to do and what they’re able to do in the role? Are we making it difficult for them to succeed in the role? And I think this is hard because it requires us to look at ourselves rather than just naming someone as a difficult person or someone who’s underperforming, we have to really think about ourselves and our contribution to it.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:18]:

But then there’s also life. Sometimes life just gets in the way. There can be bereavement or caring responsibilities, a relationship breakdown, health issues, financial pressure, and it can be something that you just have no idea about. It doesn’t mean that You can’t still hold them accountable. You can be compassionate to what they’re going through, but still let them know what’s required in the role. How about coasting? Have you ever worked with someone who you thought they were a total coaster? They were doing the bare minimum required. And when I was thinking about this, when preparing for this episode, there’s probably people I thought maybe weren’t that good, but when I think about it, maybe it was I didn’t think they were that good because they were coasting. And because I’m not a coaster myself, I probably just— the thought never even occurred to me.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:11]:

So this is another really interesting area. And again, when I was drilling into, well, what could be causing this or what could be going on here, there’s some interesting nuances to this as well. So it’s not just that person’s a coaster. There’s various different reasons that people can be coasting. So this is not about capability. It’s not about conditions. It’s not about their lifestyle. circumstances.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:35]:

This is being able to do, but not doing it. So, there’s the comfortable coasting, and this is where people are not rewarded for going above and beyond. They’re not reprimanded for doing below the minimum. They know what they need to do just to get by, and they’re comfortable just doing that. Maybe they’re thinking, why expend the extra energy that it’s going to take? If I’m not going to be rewarded or punished for this performance. Then there’s the disengaged coasting where they used to give it their all, but something happened to change that. So maybe they were overlooked for a promotion. Maybe there’s been a change of manager or a broken promise.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:19]:

They somehow stopped believing, or somewhere along the line, they stopped believing that any extra effort wasn’t really worth it because it’s not gonna change their circumstances. Then there’s the protective coasting. So this is when someone went above and beyond for a long time, but maybe they burnt out because of it. This tends to happen with the people who, when they work a lot, they’re rewarded with even more work. Now they’re deliberately protecting the capacity that they have. Strategic coasting is where someone invests the more or less the bare minimum in the job, knowing that they’ll put their ambition elsewhere. So they don’t feel like they have to give it their all, go above and beyond. Then there’s the learned coasting where the environment tends to reward people in the same way, no matter the level of performance.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:11]:

So high performers and mediocre performers get the same level of promotions, the same level of rewards. So the organization has unintentionally trained people not to really bother. And sometimes there’s actual underperformance when Everything else is in place, but the person is just not doing the job. It’s why thinking that someone is just not doing their best is not a very useful way to think about it. So we need to reframe that. And before we directly go and diagnose and say, well, that person’s an underperformer, we need to take a step back and look at everything that can be contributing to that. So if we contrast the judgment that we have, so the judgment is they’re not trying, with the diagnosis, what’s preventing the performance we need? Maybe what’s being prevented is they can’t, so they don’t have the capability. They can’t hear, that’s about the conditions we’ve created.

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:04]:

They don’t know what’s expected, that’s about clarity and giving them clear expectations. Or something else is happening. So that could be the circumstances that they currently find themselves in. They won’t, that could be to do with motivation or accountability. They’re not being held to account to their performance. Or it could be that it’s the wrong fit. And they would perform better in a different role. So that’s a role decision.

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:28]:

And when we have that diagnosis, a different diagnosis, then we can fix the problem in a different way rather than just assuming that someone is underperforming. And if we come back now to Brené Brown and what she says, there was something in the book that really struck a chord with me, and I’m going to read it out to you now. It’s the idea that it’s easier to assume that people are not doing their best, but if we believe that, it means we We as leaders don’t know how to lead them. What we’re doing is not working. We choose to stay resentful and disappointed rather than have a difficult conversation about deficits. Who are you currently frustrated or disappointed with, and what conversation or decision might that frustration be allowing you to avoid? That’s the question I want to leave you with today. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, Don’t forget to share it with someone else who may benefit from listening.