From Manager to Coach: Analyze

I sat in that manager meeting in the big boardroom excited to share with my peers what I'd discovered. I thought what I had was pretty revolutionary. I mean, nobody had ever shown me anything like this, and I'd been through all the manager training anyone ever cared to offer me.

We did the roundtable portion of the meeting and when it came to my moment, I shared my cool tool. Energetically, I told them all about it, how I'd been using it for months and the success I'd had with it. With a few brave exceptions, most of the group were now looking down at the table, the walls or the floor. Then finally, someone was brave enough to break the silence and state what apparently everyone else but me, was feeling. "I don't think we should be ranking our people. It might not be very well-received if anyone ever found out they were on some sort of 'ranking list', you know?"

It felt a lot like a day back in college when I was sitting in an entrepreneurship class in the business school and the professor asked, "Why does someone start a business?" After answers like, "Too serve humanity" or "To employ people" or "To bring the world great products", I raised my hand and said, "To make a profit." I'll never forget the weight as all eyes fell on me as though I was the spawn of some demon from the netherworld. I was all like, "What?" The professor, rescued me as he said emphatically, "Exactly, right!" I realized later I was surrounded by business majors with their business ethics and "make the world a better place" idealism. I was an Econ major and we never spoke of such things. I was just giving the only answer I knew. It's not my fault I was right.

Back at my management meeting I was right again, but no one was coming to my rescue. Just like that day in college, I was getting the equivalent, albeit less overt version, of the demon glare. After the "we oughtn't be ranking our people" comment, I didn't push, but my thought was, "Wait a minute, you rank your people all the time. I hear it in what you say about them." I'm doing it in an objective, fair way and with an employee development purpose.

What did I share with them? More on that in a minute.

This is the second in a blog series called "From Manager to Coach" where I'm introducing a concept that's pretty revolutionary. The concept, in a nutshell, is that managers should be coaches first and managers of projects and initiatives, time permitting. Today, we're talking about the first in the three-part cycle of: Analyze - Observe - Feedback.

What I shared in that management meeting looked sort of like a stack ranking, but it wasn't. A stack ranking is what all your teachers did in school. They took everybody's total points and crammed them under a normal curve and established your letter grade based on where you and your points fell under that curve.

What I shared in that manger meeting was what I'm now calling the "Employee Performance Rater" (I'm still looking for a sexier name). It looks like this:

It's a spreadsheet, and yes it does rank people, but it's not about forcing them under a normal distribution. It's about rating people against objective or near-objective measures, and then using that information to help each member of the team with an individualized approach--coaching. With a stack ranking, you're really only focusing on the people at the bottom in order to either shape them up or ship them out.

That is NOT what this is about, because with this it forces the question--for every individual--whether at the top, middle or bottom, "What can I do for this person?" Admittedly, the answer to that question, might be termination, but only after you've done all you can.

How does it work? It's a rating on a scale of 1 to 3, in the areas of role-specific productivity, knowledge, talent, and time on job. How can an arbitrary 1 to 3 rating be objective? Well, you have to have objective measures behind your 1 to 3 ratings. Each of those areas are combined in a weighted average to give a score.

What about these objective measures?

Productivity (factor weight of 4)

Hopefully, you have some metric in place already that tells you how productive each employee is. If you don't have that, you need to get one. You can't be productive if you don't know what productivity looks like. If you have cashiers in a retail store, maybe it's the number of transactions per hour as a ratio of total number of transactions for all cashiers. For sales people it's whether or not they hit their quota in the period. For a widget assembler, it's the number of widgets produced per hour. You've got to have a productivity metric, and if you don't have one, you've got to get one.

Knowledge (factor weight of 2)

This one crosses the border between objective and subjective, but you can still make a pretty fair assessment based on what people are able to do on the job. If they can perform all processes with precision, they're a 3. If they can do many of the processes, they're probably a 2. If they struggle with most processes, they're at 1.

Talent (factor weight of 3)

This is the one you're probably thinking can't be objectively measured. If you're thinking that, you're wrong, and it's going to be easier than you think. It's pretty straightforward, but it'll take some work and some conversations and some employee self-evaluation. You'll find this number by having each team member define how they feel about every task they perform on a daily basis. Have them do this for a week. The way you want them to rate each task is based on whether they love it or loathe it. If it's something that gives them energy and they lose track of time while doing it, it's a peak experience and we only have those doing things for which we have talent. If, on the other hand, they have tasks that drain their energy and if they never do them again, their lives will be greatly improved, yeah those things...those are things for which they have no talent. Then figure out what proportion of their time is spent in each area. The sweet zone for working in your areas of talent is 75% or higher. That's generally sustainable.

Time on Job (factor weight of 1)

This is very objective. The scale will need to be adjusted for your particular business case and based on how long it takes for employees to experience everything. For one business it might be 0-6 months is a 1, 7-12 months is a 2, 12 months or more is a 3. You'll know how to adjust this better than me.

Analyze - Do Something Good!

After you have all this, and after you've rated each member on your team, you then go back and look at each person based on the factors and make a determination as to next steps. If for example someone has high productivity, high knowledge, but low talent, like Hugh Jass or Sharon Barron in the figure above, they are at risk for burnout. Working for an extended period doing work you hate is just not sustainable, regardless of what you're being paid or how many perks come with the job. Look at Sally Galley. She's got low productivity, high knowledge, moderate talent and high time on job. What's her deal? You better find out, because for some reason she's slacking. Is something distracting her? Problems at home, looking for a new job? Since her talent is only moderate, maybe she's burned out. Can you do something to save her, or do you need to help her find a new career? Whatever the final outcome, she'll thank you for it, trust me.

If you want to make the shift From Manager to Coach, you have to start with this sort of analysis. This is the "Analyze" portion of the coaching cycle. There are other things you may need to analyze as well, but if you only did this process, you're going to find productivity, engagement and all your other metrics will be positively impacted. For me, in the last year at that job where I introduced this, over 60% of my employees were promoted. Some had to leave my team, yes, but that's value added to the company, even though it hurt me. It's also value added to the individual in terms of development. Ironically, I took some short-sighted heat for having too many of my people leaving me to move to other teams. Since they were promotions, and I had some of the highest employee engagement results that company has ever seen, I was in a highly defensible position.

Join me!

Do you want to learn more about this? Keep reading this blog series. If you want to get into a discussion with a cohort of other managers, sign up for my 5 session Zoom training "From Manager to Coach". It starts on Saturday, September 12, 2020 and runs for 5 Saturdays. It's only 1 hour out of your Saturday morning and you'll gain knowledge and tools that you can put to use on Monday.

Ryan Houmand has consulted, coached, trained and been a speaker to senior leaders and managers all over the world. He has 25 years of management experience in corporate and retail environments. He's the author of "A Passion for Monday" and has appeared on FOX, NBC and CBS discussing "The 3 Mistakes That Make People Hate Monday".