Can This be Right?
August 31, 2011
During a recent coaching session, my client, gave me a copy of her most recent performance review saying, “I need help fixing this.”
While she was rated exceptional in several areas, her supervisor said that her employees found her “curt, and abrasive” and they felt unappreciated. She runs a group of about 20 in a facility with about 100 employees. They have a matrix organizational chart so each person may have responsibilities to several managers.
She said that she had asked her supervisor for specific examples he could not provide any.
To say she was perplexed was an understatement, especially since this was the first time in 4 years, she had gotten this kind of feedback.
At first, we discussed how managers are often not the best judges of their own performance, and then I asked if she could think of any instances that might have led to the criticism. She could only cite one fellow manager who she admitted she had “issues” with, but said she had never heard any of her group even mumble anything about her management style. (NB: She holds weekly status meetings with the whole group and meets regularly with direct reports.)
She admitted she was very confident and could be blunt but she didn’t sense any problems.
We went through her daily and weekly routines. I tried to help her analyze her interpersonal contacts, and offered some suggestions about how she might make some changes, but I had to admit, I was a bit perplexed.
After spending a number of hours with her, and reviewing how her department worked and her interactions, I couldn’t figure out what her boss was getting at either. She is direct, but after 4 years, with minimal turnover, employees usually come to understand a manager’s communication style and adapt to it.
We even spent some time exploring whether she was miscast as a mid-level manager and was more suited for another role outside the company.
As we talked, over several sessions, I could not find any patterns in her presentation that was anything but professional, knowledgeable, confident and caring. She didn’t strike me as the kind of pathological, egotistical boss that fills the pages of most management textbooks.
She wasn’t familiar with many of the terms of Emotional Intelligence, but she seemed to have a good sense of the tools and was already using some.
In the end, I tried to assure her that she was on the right track and while she could make some changes in listening and trying to be attuned to the needs of her staff, maybe the best option was to just assume her boss was basing his critique on bad information, or on a single example. Possibly, he was just wrong or more euphemistically, ‘ill-informed.’
Three weeks later, she learned he was being eased out of his position, so maybe, there was something else going on.
The lesson: I would never ignore what’s on your performance review, but if it doesn’t ring true, you may need to question some of the underlying assumptions and decide for yourself if changes are warranted.
