For Business

For business

Questions for leaders.

Answer these yourself rather than sending them round the team. The ones you draw a blank on are the interesting ones.

Who on your team did their best work this year, and what was different about the conditions they were working in?
What do you actually know about how each person works, beyond what they are good at?
Which of your standing meetings would nobody schedule if it did not already exist?
When someone underperforms, how long do you spend on the conditions before you conclude something about the person?
Who has been on demanding work continuously, with no gap, for longer than you would have guessed?
What do you decide about people based on how they show up in a room you chose, at a time you set?
Which conditions on your team are genuinely fixed, and which ones has nobody questioned in years?
If someone needed a condition changed to do their best work, is there a way for them to ask that does not cost them anything?

A caution worth stating. Conditions can quietly track with protected characteristics. Needing to leave by five tracks with caregiving. Preferring written communication can track with disability or with speaking English as a second language. So change the shape of the work, not the list of people you offer it to. If someone needs to leave by five, move the meeting. Do not quietly stop putting them forward for the engagement that makes careers.

Want a set built for your team? These are general. A version built around how your firm actually staffs and reviews work is more useful, and building them is part of this project. Email leahgerber@outlook.com with the shape of your team and what you are trying to work out. Free. Nothing goes into a performance file and no individual gets scored.

Reading for this

Essays about how firms decide things about people.

Useful whether you make these decisions or they get made about you. Most of what gets sold to firms about their people rests on research that does not say what the pitch says.

Does a job that suits you make you better at it, or just happier? 172 studies. Fit predicts satisfaction and commitment. It barely predicts performance. Anyone selling you the second thing is citing the first.
Do you vary more than you differ from other people? Why a firm average cannot tell you what one person needs, and what happened when I checked the best number supporting that.
You are a poor judge of how much you vary. The reason a self-report questionnaire cannot give you this, and why the record has to come from what actually happened.
What does it mean when they say a trait is 50 percent genetic? Useful before a vendor offers to assess your people from a sample or a score.
Your age, your DNA. What do you do about the things you cannot change? Findings about a person expire. What you concluded about someone five years ago may not hold.