A heinously negative trinity in which to judge employees/contractors
Thomas E. Enebo (C) 2001
All managers like ways of gauging workers performance. Here is a quick
test you can do with your employees/contractors. Take the following
three attributes and put them in the corners of a triangle: Inept,
Charlatan, and Bridge-builder. Now consider each employee and put him
or her somewhere within the triangle. Before you start doing this here
is an explanation of what each corner represents:
The inept corner represents a worker that with the best intentions
still manages to screw up everything they get their hands on. They
follow instructions but always interpret them incorrectly.
The charlatan represents a worker who does as little as possible to
accomplish a task in the eyes of management. This is to say that the
task will not actually be accomplished. They will do whatever it takes
to make it appear accomplished. Often this is more work than just
performing the task.
The bridge builder represents a worker who must do a never-ending set
of infrastructure tasks before they can start the task they are
actually tasked with. These people eat and breathe complexity. They
also exude it.
Now map out your employees between the three. A perfect employee is
one in the center of the triangle. I interpret this employee as:
- They are competent enough to complete the tasks with an acceptable
amount of error and in an acceptable amount of time.
- They decieve only when they need extra time to finish the task in
the way they think is best.
- They do not build overly complex solutions and stay mostly on
target.
An acceptable employee falls somewhat within an inner triangle whose
vertices are the mid points of the outer triangle (yeah, you try to
explain this without a picture). These vertices are:
Inept-bridgebuilder, bridge builder-charlatan, and
inept-charlatan.
To determine your overall balance within a group of employees
average all of their points within the triangle to get one group
point. Hopefully the average of these points falls near the center.
So why use these unflattering characteristics? Sometimes you
have to call a horse a horse. The truth is that humans are not
perfect. Judging people by their shortcomings has as much value as
judging them by their strengths. Also, managers get emotionally
attached to workers personalities. If they like them they will
mostly concentrate on the positives. If they don't like them they will
likely eventually fire them regardless of how good they are at their
job (after all who likes working with someone they don't like).
Perhaps, doing this exercise will be too painful for most managers.
They will notice a decent portion of their staff are not really worth
keeping around other than for lunch break. It is painful to confront,
but before you do....rank yourself first as you may be the real problem.
Good luck....
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