Professor Amy Edmondson’s description of a spectrum of types of failure lists Lack of Ability as somewhere between Blameworthy and Praiseworthy, tending towards the blame side. In my own experience and in discussions with clients, it’s probably the category most heavily populated by the mishaps typical in white collar knowledge work. If anything goes wrong at work, odds are that it was cause by someone’s lack of ability.
OK, but which someone?
Biff was hired as a senior engineer. His manager, Chet, put him in charge of encabulating the freem gear. That’s an easy senior level task (obviously). A few weeks in and the deliverable is late, the client is angry, and we’ve definitely had a Failure. It’s possible that the root cause is a bad process. Or that the process being followed is still challengingly complex. But for the sake of this discussion we’ll just say this was caused by someone’s lack of ability. Let’s review the likely culprits.
Biff
Biff is the leading contestant on Whose Lack of Ability Is It Anyway. He was supposed to do the thing, by the deadline, and he didn’t. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we need to drag him into a performance meeting. You could hire me to design an opera house by next Tuesday. If I don’t, yeah maybe that’s lack of ability. But should I be blamed for that? I don’t know how to design opera houses. So let’s look at…
Chet
Chet is Biff’s manager, and he put Biff on the freem gear project after only a week of onboarding as a new hire. Should Chet have done a better job of prepping Biff for the task? Maybe. But anyone hired as a senior engineer should be able to handle a simple freem gear encabulation job. Who told Chet that Biff is rated as a senior engineer? Let’s look at…
Interview Team
We’ll consider anyone responsible for interviewing engineering candidates as part of the Interview Team for now. This Team has the job of reviewing resumes, asking questions, and delivering a hire/no-hire evaluation of each candidate. They clearly decided Biff was the best available candidate for the senior engineer position so they extended an offer. In this case, the end result of their work is that an engineer was hired at a level clearly mismatched to their ability. I mean, c’mon. A senior engineer who can’t encabulate a freem gear? How did the Interview Team miss that?
The root cause analysis can go even further. Did the Interview Team have a clear process to follow? Did Chet not receive enough training on how to be an effective manager? Should the company provide more of a first-90-days framework around all new hires, even those at a senior level?
Blaming Biff is an easy out, and maybe it’s warranted. It depends. The concept of accountability means you’re on the hook for results. Biff should know he messed up and work to fix it. Ask for more help. Something. Clean up this mess and move on. If Biff goofs up another encabulation next month we may need to start asking ourselves…is the coaching working. Is Biff right for the job. Whatever the response, don’t just let it slide. Don’t send the message that you can stay employed here doing shoddy work.
We can improve the processes. We can train managers. What we shouldn’t do is immediately leap to putting Biff on a PIP over a single freem gear.
image courtesy of tunafish mayonnaise via unsplash