One of the most counterproductive things that companies do is coach people to not judge their coworkers. Having an understanding of your coworkers’ performance means that you understand what they do, and understanding what they do is critical to making sure you collaborate with them effectively. This is especially important if you’re in a leadership role or a cross-functional team. Also, raising the alarm on peer underperformance can be both necessary and highly impactful.
A Sad Story
In the early days of a startup, teams are in survival mode - if you’re not pulling your weight, we’re not sharing food with you. Startups that became successful rarely stifled peer feedback in the early days.
Then you hire more vocations. As you add PM and Design and Product Marketing, you eventually hit your first conflict between these groups. It’s usually an engineer alleging that another vocation is not doing their job because, amongst other reasons, engineers are usually hired first (more tenured). And then the big lie begins - you don’t understand what we do, stay in your lane.
Your company dies a bit on that day.
Eventually someone again alleges someone is not doing their job, and the leader of the target employee agrees with the assessment, but they’re not gonna let someone who’s never been in their shoes tell them how to run their team. So they drag their feet and nobody does anything about it.
Your company dies a bit more on that day.
Meanwhile, the leaders you’ve hired are trying not to get into fights while ramping up, and your CEO is trying to avoid criticism that they don’t know how to hire executives or manage different kinds of employees. Everyone is trying to avoid being accused of being a fraud; they don’t cast judgement on others to avoid getting judged themselves.
Finally, you get to a place where there’s enough mediocrity that the few truth tellers left start to get punished because they’re the only ones who won’t pretend that standards have fallen.
As then your company is officially dead.
You’ll make it until the last of the good tenured leaders stick around to keep the boats afloat. Eventually the whole company will be mediocre and a company that throws underperformers off the island will invade and take your land.
A Different Way
It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, with the right guidance you can encourage your team to judge their coworkers’ abilities, learn from it, and have it be part of a healthy ecosystem of accountability and growth.
Here’s how to do it.
Ground Rules
First, things fail when people start attacking others directly and publicly. People can disagree in meetings, but people should not be making judgements on their teammates in public. Performance is public, performance management is private. Make it clear to your team that any and all feedback shared on a coworker’s ability is shared either in a private conversation between a person and their own manager, or in the peer feedback section of a performance review.
Second, follow-ups are done privately. There is never the expectation that people are privy to the details of some else’s performance management. That said, if a peer’s performance is causing significant issues for an individual, team, or the business, it may be appropriate to talk about how to work around those issues while performance management is happening.
Finally, you must make clear that nobody is promised a perfect coworker. All teammates are imperfect, and the average action is not termination but coaching. One of the teachable moments in a discussion about peer performance is making clear that people are expected to succeed despite imperfect coworkers; imperfect coworker performance is a reality, not an excuse.
How To Do It
OK, here’s how to productively encourage your team to think about evaluating their coworkers’ performance.
First of all, you should set an expectation that your reports actually have an opinion on their peers’ performance. Sometime in the first few months you should say out loud something like: We strongly value peer feedback and the ability to understand and evaluate peer performance. As we work together, I’ll periodically ask you how your peers are doing and I’d like you to be able to have thoughtful conversations about it.
Furthermore, if they’re in a leadership position, you might add something like: It’s quite important that you have a mature opinion on how your cross-functional partners are doing. Please make sure that you’re thinking about the different roles and responsibilities you share, how they are performing, and where you see opportunities for improvement.
Next, you should periodically ask your report (e.g. once every 6-12 months) how they think their peers are doing. This is now when the productive conversation starts.
If they think someone is doing well, why? This is a teachable moment - what do you think good performance looks like? Through this exercise you can help people understand:
- The difference between superhuman performance and expectations (people often glamourize or mythify people just doing a really good job)
- The ingredients of certain people’s success. Sometimes it’s as simple as highlighting that a strong performer works really hard.
- The differences in leveling and experience. That person is doing a solid job, but they’re three levels above you and a lot of what they do is quite expected in role.
If they think someone is doing poorly, why? Again, this is a very teachable moment. It’s a critical opportunity for you to be aware of underperformance, the perception of underperformance, or a misunderstanding. This is often a great opportunity to help people understand:
- What the role of a person actually is. Many times critical perceptions are driven by a misunderstanding of what someone is actually supposed to do. No, actually, your PM is not your project manager.
- The differences in leveling and experience. Sometimes people think someone isn’t good at their job, but they forget that they are 4 levels beneath them in the ladder.
These conversations are also a very important way to get real time updates on the performance of teammates. Getting significant critical feedback from many people about a specific person is almost always a signal of underperformance. Getting this feedback in a continuous fashion is quite valuable, as many companies leave it to very infrequent performance review cycles to solicit that signal.
Finally, an awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of a peer lets people supplement their work more effectively. OK, Bob isn’t great at meeting follow-ups. His manager can work on that for him, but can you, as someone who is great at it, help the team not fail when something is missed?
Closing Thoughts
All of this boils down to not letting tension relief run your company.
When people work together and things fail, it’s somebody’s fault. One of the most evil things a company can do to people is not hold people accountable. I’ve felt bad for people who have had mean bosses, but I feel terrible for people with overly protective bosses. I’ve seen people literally ruin their career because they spent years under a manager who didn’t have the guts to give them feedback, even when other teams were complaining.
Especially for leaders, not knowing how to evaluate the performance of your peer leaders is a major miss. If you don’t know what they’re supposed to do, how can you make sure you’re working together to create a business outcome? How can you improve processes across your vocational boundaries if you don’t even know what their job is? This is why it’s important that all leaders have some sense of how the business fundamentally works. This is why telling people to stay in their lane is so messed up - the minute you tell someone they couldn’t possibly know what they’re talking about when it comes to other vocations, they can never be held accountable to end to end business value again.
And for junior hires, how can they learn without knowing what good looks like? How can you learn what good looks like without ever having the ability to point to someone and talk about their performance?
Judge your coworkers, lest you not be judged, because to not be judged is to never learn.
Assorted Notes
- Holding people accountable doesn’t always mean severe punishment. In fact it almost never means severe punishment. At a small scale, it simply means having clarity on who actually owned a thing that didn’t go well. At a large enough scale, it should mean some action is taken, and that action should be referenced in performance reviews. A lot of the industry moved too far into blameless culture in the last decade. A lot of stuff is someone’s fault, and it’s ok to say it.
- It really is inexcusable for a senior leader to not have a point of view on a peer’s performance. Senior leaders should be knowledgeable enough to evaluate and heavily incentivized to care how their peers are doing. Apathy from a leader about peer performance is smoke that one or both of those is not true of the leader you’re evaluating.
- One of the biggest opportunities of letting people judge their peers is coaching them when they’re wrong in that assessment because they don’t understand the person’s role. Very few people have intuition about other roles and responsibilities, and almost no companies are going to make explicit time to teach you about them. These conversations can be one of the only places to learn what other people are supposed to be doing.