In Just Work, author Kim Scott made the comment (pertinent to sports coaches) that score is a lagging indicator of what the coach is doing well or badly. Fair point, and somehow struck me as novel. But incomplete.
If I’m a coach and all of my games are losses, it seems to show that I’m doing something badly. I mean, we’re losing. A lot. But what if my team is composed of players who can only fill one role and the sport has several roles to fill? If my team only has goalies, we’re probably going to lose no matter how great a job I’m doing as a coach.
The argument could be made that if I’m a good coach I’d find a way to get different players added, but that’s not always up to you as a coach. Or as a manager.
At your company, if you’ve been put in charge of a team of artists yet you’re on the hook to solve engineering problems, your performance scores as a manager probably won’t look that great. But it’s also probably not on you to just swap out your artists for engineers. This example is extreme for demonstration purposes, but it’s similar to being given engineers too low in skill or too few in number.
So the main reason I viewed Ms. Scott’s initial comment as incomplete is that it doesn’t account for resources. Software. Hardware. Information. Or skills. If managers aren’t given the resources to do the job, some may generate better results than others based on their ability as a manager, but that’s only meaningful on a relative scale. On an absolute scale – which is how businesses operate – it’s highly unlikely any of those managers are delivering good results.
What do you do about that?
If I’m a manager of a team and Director Biff is my boss, imagine Biff comes to me and asks, “Keith, does your team have what it needs to do the work?” Possible responses include:
- Yes – My assessment is we have the right skills and other resources. It is laggy but fair to judge my performance as a manager on the results delivered by the team.
- No – I’m looking at my team and telling Biff I need more people or differently skilled people. I probably don’t have the pull to make those changes myself so this is a chance for Biff to say, “I hear you. I’ll see what I can do.”
- I don’t know – Not every manager is going to be adept at assessing their team’s capacity. If Biff gets this response from me, he should realize this is a skill gap for me as a manager. Hopefully he’ll call that out and address it with me.
In any scenario that isn’t “Yes”, my performance as a manager has more to do with recognizing the deficiencies of my team and communicating my needs. In most orgs I’ll need an advocate to institute any changes, so until those changes take place it should be understood that the “score” is not only a lagging indicator of my performance but also wildly incomplete.