Creating and Sustaining Positive Organizations

By Ryan Quinn
I recently spoke about Lift at a conference of administrators from the field of public school education. After I spoke, a woman who was an assistant superintendent approached me. She said that she has been getting multiple calls lately from parents who are complaining about one of the principals in her district. She said that she has tried to help this principal improve relationships like these for years, and she was starting to wonder if it was possible. Obviously, her current strategy for working with this principal was not working. Should she change her strategy but continue to work with the principal? Should she fire the principal? What other options did she have?

This issue is a specific instance of a common problem: How do I manage people when their performance does not meet expectations? And at a blog about the application of Positive Organizational Scholarship, we are inclined to ask specifically if this difficult situation can be transformed into a positive one.

Uniqueness

Before I address these questions, I need to state that there is not one single answer to the question of how to manage a person whose performance does not meet expectations. There are published articles on performance management that give a bullet-point lists of steps that a manager can take to handle “low performers,” and some of these articles are useful and appropriate. For example, I think John Gabarro and Linda Hill’s Harvard Business School technical note on managing performance is an excellent article on this topic.

Gabarro and Hill offer a bullet-pointed list of steps to take when managing performance, which is helpful, but the thing I like the most about their note is the emphasis they put on treating each performance management situation as unique. As Donald Schön [1] found in his research on professional practice, the quality or artfulness with which a professional (like a manager) performs is determined by how reflective that professional is about the activities they perform, and a professional’s reflectiveness is determined by how unique the professional perceives the activity to be. It is easy for a manager to fall into the trap of thinking that each episode of performance management is the same or similar to previous episodes, and as a result to fail to reflect on the episode, before, during, and after participating in it.

I raise this point about reflective practice for three reasons. One reason is simply to remind managers about the importance of reflection and preparation. The second reason is to illustrate why having questions like the four questions we propose in Lift are important: because they help us know what to focus our attention on when we reflect. And third, to highlight the point that I cannot know what the most artful answer to the assistant superintendent’s question is because I do not know enough of the details of her situation to know what makes it unique. So the suggestions I propose in this entry are not meant to be “the answer.” I still want to apply the four questions from Lift to the assistant superintendent’s question, though, because it will help us to think about how to apply the questions in a situation like this one.

The Four Questions

If I were to imagine, then, that I were the assistant superintendent, here is how I might approach the issue:

1. What result do I want to create? [2] I do not know what issues the parents were complaining to the assistant superintendent about, but I do know that the assistant superintendent must have felt that there was some validity to the parents’ claims, given that the assistant superintendent talked to the principal about them and did not defend the principal to the parents. I do not expect parents and principals to agree on every issue. But I would want my principals to (a) have the kind of relationships with the parents of our schoolchildren that enable them to come up with collaborative solutions to most issues, and (b) to make prudent and defensible decisions on issues where you cannot please everyone.
2. What would my story be if I were living up to the values I expect of others? As an assistant superintendent, I suspect it would bother me if I kept hearing the same kinds of complaints from parents about one of my principals again and again. This emotion tells me about values that I expect of others, such as responsibility (taking care of one’s stewardships so that problems do not escalate) and self-improvement (investing the time and effort to improve my abilities so that the same problems do not occur again and again). The fact that these problems keep occurring, though, may suggest that I am either not being responsible or not improving myself with regards to how I am managing this principal. For me to be responsible in this situation may require me to clear other items from my schedule so that I can focus on the management of this principal. For me to engage in self-improvement, I may need to read more or get more training in performance management, to practice, and to get feedback. Also, if I have done all I can reasonably do to investigate the ways in which I may be part of the problem in this principal’s development and the principal still does not improve, then responsibility may require me to fire the principal or move the principal to another position.
3. How do others feel about this situation? The “others” in this situation include at a minimum the principal, the parents, the schoolchildren, the teachers, and peer principals. The principal may feel upset about the parents going to the assistant superintendent, insecure about her performance, or afraid about losing her job. The parents may feel upset about repeated problems with the principal and worry over the effect that these issues may have on their children. Teachers may be frustrated about their ability to teach in an environment with repeated problems. Children may feel confused. Peer principals may be wondering what the implications of this principal’s situation are for them. As the assistant superintendent tries to empathize with each of these stakeholders, these feelings will help motivate her to want to enact a story that as many of the people involved can tell in a positive way, from their own point of view.
4. What are three (or four or five) strategies I could use to ensure that the principal (a) has the kind of relationships with the parents of our schoolchildren that enable them to come up with collaborative solutions to most issues, and (b) makes prudent and defensible decisions on issues where you cannot please everyone? Here are some possibilities I could use if I were the assistant superintendent:
   • Read through an article like the Gabarro and Hill article mentioned above. Evaluate how well I am doing at each point. (Perhaps even ask others to help me evaluate myself so I am less biased.) Identify areas of improvement. Make a plan for how I will conduct the next performance management session with the principal with specific attention to improving in the areas where I need improvement. Engage in another performance management session–perhaps even with a peer or a coach there to help me with the process.
   • Focus on the relationship instead of the person. In an article on resistance to change [3], Jeff and Laurie Ford point out that managers tend to create resistance in their employees by participating in conversations that treat employees as resistors. The alternative, they point out, is to focus on relationships. By asking people questions such as “What do you need from [person A] to accomplish [activity X]?” rather than “What is [person A] doing wrong?” or “How is [person B] resisting the change?” we focus people on relationships and productivity rather than on attacking others or having to defend themselves. The assistant superintendent could use questions like these to change the principal’s and parent’s focus of attention.
   • The assistant superintendent could treat conflicts as development opportunities, using a see-do-teach model of  development. First, she addresses one of the conflicts herself, asking the principal to watch and to report what she learns from watching. Second, the assistant superintendent has the principal address a conflict while the assistant superintendent watches and then gives her feedback afterward. Finally, she has the principal teach others about what she learned to help the principal cement those learnings.
   • The assistant superintendent could also achieve more collaborative relationships between the principal and the parents by moving the principal to another position or firing her.

Having multiple options will probably help the assistant superintendent become open to feedback and learning, helping her to adapt and improvise as she goes through this process.

Scenarios

My purpose in this week’s blog entry and my entry from two weeks ago has been to illustrate how the four questions from Lift can be applied to distinct situations. Illustrating principles across different situations tends to improve learning and generate insights. Although the scenarios in these two blog entries are different, they both illustrate ways to think about turning difficult relationships into positive ones. I focused on relationships to help managers think about how to create the kinds of teams that can lead to high performance and quality work experiences. Each relationship and each situation is, of course, unique. This is why leading with questions is so important. Good questions help us treat each situation reflectively and become more effective leaders as a result.

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References

[1] Schön, D. A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.

[2] Fritz, R. (1984). The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life. New York: Fawcett Books.

[3] Ford, J. D., Ford, L. W., D’Amelio, A. 2008. Resistance to Change: The Rest of the Story. Academy of Management Review. Vol. 33, no. 2: 362-377.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 3:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.