Behind the Blame Game - the Individual or the Role?

In this, the first of two articles on understanding why some individuals in teams and businesses under-perform, I’m going to explore the relationship between the person and the role they fulfil from a systemic perspective.

So here’s the scenario – it’s approaching the end of an under-performing new starter’s probation period and you need to decide whether to pass them, extend the probation or give them a week’s notice and start the search for a replacement.

Frankly, you’re disappointed in them. You were incredibly thorough in your search: writing a detailed job spec; briefing recruitment agencies; reviewing CVs; making time for interviews often outside working hours; constructing a reliable and fair process; receiving consensus from your colleagues; and negotiating hard with your FD to meet the candidate’s salary request (which was, as usual, above the budgeted amount). You thought you’d found the perfect person.

And yet it’s quite apparent that they’re not up to the job. Either they pulled a fast one in the interview and overclaimed their experience, or they just don’t get the way things are done in this business. Either way it's not working.

But are they really to blame?

Often in organisations you’ll find this happening multiple times on the same client business or in the same role. I’ve seen the same head of department role filled three times in one year, with the blame each time being with the individual for not fulfilling the expectations of the recruiting manager.

At what point do you explore the role and not the individual? Before you get to this stage ideally!

How then do you define a role? Is it getting the previous employee to write down what they did? Is it creating a long list of experiences, skills and evidenced successes? Is it none of these things (he asks rhetorically!)?

For a role to be truly and fairly defined it needs to be considered through 5 core lenses – task, resources, purpose, boundaries and authority. Let’s take these in order.

Is there total clarity, and more importantly, honesty over the task to be performed? Task definition needs to be specific about the type of work to be done in reality rather than in some vision for what the business is trying to be in the future. This is a common mistake often made because the manager writing the job spec will not be the direct line manager of the role being hired for. Misrepresentation of the reality of a role is a frequent cause of much 'under-performance'.

Once the task is clear, are the resources for the individual to complete the task available to them? Resources can be infrastructural – as in the necessary tools, systems and processes, as well as access to the required skillsets within the organisation; and they can be social – the right support network and manager access to create containment in the role.

Next up, how does this role and its task ladder up to deliver against the team or business objectives – what is its purpose within the wider organisation. For example, a creative marketing agency may be focused on winning industry awards – how does a Project Manager on one of the teams contribute to this? What about the Head of Data Insight? How about the Office Manager? Understanding the contributing purpose for every role in a team and organisation is critical to both the ability to meet the business’s primary objective, but also in providing a contextual direction that helps an individual make the right decisions in everyday tasks.

Okay, so now what is a boundary in this context of role – here I’m referring to the sub-systems within the organisation and the need for clarity over the role’s area of responsibility and accountability. The modern workplace has become increasingly complex especially with the advent of working methodologies such as agile, lean and Kanban. No longer is a product passed along a linear series of departments taking it from raw material to finished product. With this change, there has become a blurring of ownership and a resulting drop in accountability for the quality at each stage of a process. Frameworks that provide role clarity such as RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted and informed) can be helpful in defining the expectation of each person at each stage.

And finally, authority – Anton Obholzer wrote that ‘Authority refers to the right to make decisions which are binding on others’ whereas ‘power… is having the resources to be able to enact and implement decisions’. Has the role in question been provided with the necessary authority to act and the resources to deliver? One give-away is whether the role description includes that of Facilitator – a role that demands the individual take on the responsibility and accountability but without providing them with the authority. We are now not only in the Information Age, but the Audit Age as well - delegation of KPIs without the delegation of the authority to decide how to meet them is a common and unfortunate experience for many in middle management.

In conclusion, if you have someone in your team or in your business who is not performing in a new role – ask yourself whether you have truly defined and communicated the role to them. Only then can you honestly determine whether it is the person who is struggling with the role, or the role that is causing the person to struggle. Simply exiting the individual and hoping the next person will be right is both poor management and deeply damaging to the persons involved.