Business Book Review: Creating High Performers

Welcome to another Business Book Review on The Indiepreneur! Last week, while I was waiting in the lobby for hours during my wife’s MRI, I needed a new book to read. So, after searching the interblags and all that, I came across an interesting new release, the Second Edition of Creating High Performers – 7 Questions to Ask Your Direct Reports by William Dann. What is it, what does it do, and is it any good?

High Level Summary of Creating High Performers

Worth a Read for Indiepreneurs: Absolutely…if you have employees

What It Does Well: Takes a step back on the performance review process and tries to make it something worthwhile

What It Doesn’t Do: Have a paper edition (yet!), give guidance on how to convince your terrible boss uses these questions

Overall Thoughts

The performance review process is broken. At least that’s been my experience. I’ve been on both sides of the table, and I’ve never had anything but a sick feeling in my stomach as I’ve gone through this annual ritual.

Creating High Performers, which a title that is a bit of a mouthful of a name once you add in the subtitle about 7 questions, aims to fix this performance review problem.

Managers don’t really manage in so many organizations. They’re promoted for their technical skills. Now they’re managing and they don’t know what to do. This leads to strained boss/employee relationships and lots of pointing fingers. And, worst of all, there’s rarely guidance given by the higher ups on how to fix it.

Which isn’t a surprise. Guess how THEY got there? Right, the exact same rise from technical to manager to even higher manager.

Creating High Performers centers around 7 questions designed to open a dialog between manager and employee. If you can really, truly get to “yes” on all of those questions, then the employee should be well on their way to being a high performer.

I just finished the book and I’ve yet to try out the questions. But as I was reading through the text, I kept nodding my head, thinking, “Yes, if I had only been able to work through this issue with my boss, things would have been better.”

We’ve got good ideas here. Or at least I think so. For those who have tried out these 7 questions (on either side of the table) I’d love to hear how it has worked.

Key Takeaways from Creating High Performers

There’s a lot of good stuff in here, including the 7 questions (which you’ll have to read the book to get…I don’t want to take away from William Dann’s sales). Here’s a few highlights to give you a taste.

So Many Bad Bosses

Right from the start, this quote sucked me in:

“Bad bosses” are the greatest cause of disengagement as well as unwanted turnover and may be the leading contributor to underperformance of organizations.

I’ve thought quite a bit about what makes a “bad boss.” William Dann specifically define that in Creating High Performers, but he does go on to list out things that bosses need to do better.

What Is a Manager

How do you become a manager in the typical corporate structure? As noted above, it’s not based on your amazing management skills.

My years in public accounting were a perfect example of this progression. You start out really low on the totem pole. After proving you can do good technical work, you’re awarded the manager title. Which, if you’re lucky, you’ve taken one class on how to do. And if you’re REALLY lucky, the company will pay for you to go through a crash course.

The expectation is that your amazing technical skills should magically spread to those under you. So, as a manager, your performance review is based on how well you develop your staff, right?

Um, no. It’s still based on technical work.

So what do you do? Hide in your technical work hole, getting mad at the people below you for not performing better without knowing how to make them better.

That, Dann argues, is all kinds of wrong. He says, “managers should not be doing technical work and in cases where they are required to do so, that technical work should be extremely limited.”

Value managers based on how well they lift others, rather than what of their underlings they can spruce up to make the department look good. All while secretly (or not so secretly) seething about how poorly the staff is performing.

Separate Review from Compensation

Most performance reviews are an annual affair where you hurry through some generic, predefined questions (and maybe assign an arbitrary number) that neither the manager nor the employee really want to talk about. Once you’ve rushed through that, the employee gets a raise, or maybe a bonus.

Creating High Performers confirms the feelings I’ve had in those occasions: I don’t care what’s on that piece of paper, I just want to know if my salary will beat COLA.

If we hope to help our employees do better, we need to separate performance reviews if we want them to be effective. Even if the company bureaucracy requires an annual performance review, the manager can add additional performance reviews throughout the year separate them from pay.

“Can’t Do” vs “Won’t Do”

I’m a little torn about the wording in Creating High Performers, but the book separates employees into two buckets: “Can’t Do” vs “Won’t Do.”

“Can’t Do” Employees: The vast majority of employees “can’t do” their job to the boss’s expectation for reasons that are mostly in the boss’s court. The 7 Questions are intended to suss out these “can’t do” issues to improve on them.

They want to do the job, but for various reasons that the boss has a lot of control over, they simply can’t.

“Won’t Do” Employees: William Dann pegs only about 13% of employees (based on a Gallup survey) as really tricky employees. Dann states that the issues are typically (1) external issues (like family issues or concerns) or (2) simply not having the skill set needed. Again, while it’s easy for a manager do group problem employees into this “won’t do” field, the vast majority of employees DO NOT BELONG HERE.

I like the distinction and the emphasis on very few employees being in the “won’t do” bucket. But I don’t like the “won’t do” phrase. Based on his description, it seems like the “won’t do” reasons are really “can’t do” issues that are EXTERNAL to the company, whereas “can’t do” are INTERNAL to the company.

Disagreement on diction aside, Dann has a powerful point: the vast majority of employees aren’t performing because issue internal to the company, OFTEN due to the boss. If you’re having a problem with an employee, it’s saftest to start by assuming it’s your fault then moving forward from there.

Or, at the very least, there’s a whole bunch that you can do to make it better.

This Is A Partnership

I’ve gotten a lot of boss/employee advice over the years, and I’ve liked very little of it.

Creating High Performers has some advice I can finally get behind: the manager is in a partnership with their direct reports. This should not be an authoritarian “my word goes,” situation. Nor should it be a low level swelling of murmurs about the idiots above. Both sides should be actively working with one another, trying to find ways for all to improve.

If the employee gets burned talking to a manager, that person is going to do everything possible to avoid those confrontations. Then neither side can help the other.

If, however, you’re open, approachable, clear, and honest, both sides have a much better chance of growing.

Image by Enirehtacess from Pixabay