people are doing well, there should not be a reluctance to profile people in a way that describes their weaknesses. It is vital that you be accurate.
... 105) Make this discovery process open, evolutionary, and iterative.
Articulate your theory of a person’s values, abilities, and skills upfront and share this with him; listen to his and others’ response to your description; organize a plan for training and testing; and reassess your theory based on theperformance you observe. Do this on an ongoing basis. After several months of discussions and real-world tests, you and he should have a pretty good idea of what he is like. Over time this exercise will crystallize suitable roles and appropriate training, or it will reveal that it’s time for the person to leave Bridgewater.
... 106) Provide constant, clear, and honest feedback, and encourage discussion of this
feedback.
Don’t hesitate to be both critical and complimentary—and be sure to be open-minded. Training and assessing will be better if you frequently explain your observations. Providing this feedback constantly is the most effective way to train.66106a) Put your compliments and criticisms into perspective. I find that many people tend to blow evaluations out of proportion, so it helps to clarify that the weakness or mistake under discussion is not indicative of your total evaluation. Example: One day I told one of the new research people what a good job I thought he was doing and how strong his thinking was. It was a very positive initial
evaluation. A few days later I heard him chatting away for hours about stuff that wasn’t related to work, so I spoke to him about the cost to his and our development if he regularly wasted time. Afterward I learned he took away from that encounter the idea that I thought he was doing a horrible job and that he was on the brink of being fired. But my comment about his need for focus had nothing to do with my overall evaluation of him. If I had explained myself when we sat down that second time, he could have better put my comments in perspective.
106b) Remember that convincing people of their strengths is generally much easier than
convincing them of their weaknesses. People don’t like to face their weaknesses. At Bridgewater, because we always seek excellence, more time is spent discussing weaknesses. Similarly, problems require more time than things that are going well. Problems must be figured out and worked on, while things that are running smoothly require less attention. So we spend a lot of time focusing on people’s weaknesses and problems. This is great because we focus on improving, not celebrating how great we are, which is in fact how we get to be great. For people who don’t understand this fact, the environment can be difficult. It’s therefore important to 1) clarify and draw attention to people’s strengths and what’s being done well; and2) constantly remind them of the healthy motive behind this process of exploring weaknesses. Aim for complete accuracy in your assessments. Don’t feel you have to find an equal number of “good and bad” qualities in a person. Just describe the person or the circumstances as accurately as possible, celebrating what is good and noting what is bad.
106c) Encourage objective reflection—lots and lots of it.
106d) Employee reviews: While feedback should be constant, reviews are periodic. The purpose of a review is to review the employee's performance and to state what the person is like as it pertains to their doing their job.
A job review should have little surprises in it—this is because throughout the year, if you can’t make sense of how the person is doing their job or if you think it’s being done badly, you should probe them to seek understanding of root causes of their performance. Because it is very difficult for people to identify their own weaknesses, they need the appropriate probing (not nitpicking) of specific cases by others to get at the truth of what they are like and how they are fitting into their jobs.
From examining these specific cases and getting in synch about them, agreed-upon patterns will emerge. As successes and failures will occur in everyone (every batter strikes out a lot), in reviewing someone the goal is see the patterns and to understand the whole picture rather than to assume that one or a few failures or successes is representative of the person. You have to understand the person’s modus operandi and that to be successful, they can’t be successful in all ways—e.g., to be meticulous they might not be able to be fast (and vice versa). Steve Jobs has been criticized as being autocratic and impersonal, but his modus operandi might require him being that way, so the real choice in assessing his fit for his job is to have him the way he is or not at all: that assessment must
66 Child psychologists, dog trainers, and other behavior modification specialists will tell you that constant, no-exception feedback is
be made in the review, not just a theoretical assessment that he should do what he is doing and be less autocratic.
In some cases it won’t take long to see what a person is like—e.g., it doesn’t take long to hear if a person can sing. In other cases it takes a significant number of samples and time to reflect on them. Over time and with a large sample size you should be able to see what people are like, and their track records (i.e., the level and the steepness up or down in the trajectories that they are responsible for, rather than the wiggles in these) paint a very clear picture of what you can expect from them. If there are performance problems, it is either because of design problems (e.g., the person has too many responsibilities) or fit/abilities problems. If the problems are due to the person’s inabilities, these inabilities are either because of the person’s innate weaknesses in doing that job (e.g., with a height of 5-foot-2, the person probably shouldn’t be a center on the basketball team) or because of
inadequate training to do the job. A good review, and getting in synch throughout the year, should get at these things.
The goal of a review is to be clear about what the person can and can’t be trusted to do based on what the person is like. From there, “what to do about it” (i.e., how these qualities fit into the job requirement) can be determined.