What is performance?
I love words.
But the English language has bunched together so many meanings into individual words. We use the word “performance” to describe an exhibition of artistic talent like a play, concert, etc. Performance also can refer to the financial metrics of a business, the mechanical health of a car, the speed of our internet service, and the quality of our athletic gear. In the workplace, it also means the level of proficiency of job skills of an employee or team. Oof.
I give all those possible definitions because they demonstrate of how muddled our understanding can be. When one word can refer to many different things, we can get all mixed up in our minds about the meaning being applied to a specific situation.
We can also start to apply the wrong meaning (and ultimately: paradigms or lenses) to each use of that same word.
For example -- with financial metrics of a business and the mechanical health of a car:
we’re looking at binary things.
Either the business met the goals for the quarter or it didn’t.
We’re looking at numbers on a report like projected, goal and actual. Actual just is. There’s no room for argument. We can explain how we reached these metrics, but we can’t argue what the end result or number is. Performance for financial business metrics is, or is not.
The car is performing or it isn’t.
WIth the car example, there’s the expectation that there’s a cap on performance based on the specific parts used, the lifetime or maintenance of those parts, and the overall aerodynamics of the car. Certain upgrades could be made to the car to impact performance -- like new parts.
Performance for cars means it is or isn’t performing, and performance can be upgraded, but it’s limited for an individual car.
So… what about people? Well, we could consider performance binary like with financial metrics. Either they performed, or they didn’t.
That gets messy though -- people aren’t binary.
There’s a lot more to whether someone performed in their job or they didn’t. And it can feel nearly impossible to compare one person’s performance to another’s. We certainly try to, under the disguise of “fairness”. But when thinking of performance of people at work, we have to open up our eyes to the external factors influencing performance.
Was that person experiencing extreme hardship in their life this year?
Was this person working the same number of work days as the people they are compared to?
Was this person performing tasks and taking responsibilities in another area of the company because the business needed it?
Does this person have the same education, background, coaching, and access to support as the people they’re compared to?
This is where we have to start looking at different ways to measure performance of people. It’s why we have performance reviews, for one, and why any good leader needs to step back from people metrics and ask questions like these.
We can’t forget the assumptions and bias we all shoulder when it comes to our expectations of people because of race, gender, age, and more.
Our own minds work against us a lot of the time when we try to make performance of people as binary as that of a car or the business financial metrics.
People are not binary. There’s a whole host of factors that influence the performance of people.
TAKE ACTION
Spend time in Self-Reflection -- have you been thinking about your people only as binary? Why or why not?
Identify where you can challenge your own assumptions about the performance of your team.
“Once you break past your own limited worldview and lens, your awareness changes. Awareness is the first step towards behavior change.”
(c) 2019 - 2024 Katie McLaughlin, McLaughlin Method
