Cognitive Bias And Why Performance Management is So Hard

Photo Credit: Tim Gouw on Unsplashed

Often, at work, you might come across someone who is “not doing their job”. It can be a peer, a report, or even your own manager. If it’s a report, we’ll often refer to this as a “performance problem”. As a manager of managers, I see examples of this all the time with my peers and colleagues.

It’s important that you accurately diagnose the problem before trying to fix it. Google has “open-sourced” its manager training slides, and they have a great framework for diagnosis. In their framework, performance problems tend to be caused by:

• Unclear expectations: Your colleague does not know what is expected of them. Maybe their manager (you?) hasn’t set expectations for them clearly, or a team-mate has not clarified that they are blocked on their work or harmed by their quality of work.
• Lack of skill: Your colleague does not know how to perform the tasks expected of them.
• Lack of will: Your colleague is not motivated or interested in doing those tasks (they lack understanding or agreement of why they should be doing those tasks).

Andy Grove has a similar framework in his High Output Management book:

“When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person…