Page 135 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

124 HBR Leader’s Handbook

What makes it even harder is that most of the time your people truly
are working diligently, putting in long hours and extra effort. Add in the
fact that they probably are loyal and committed to you and the organiza-
tion, may have been around a long time, and are critical contributors in
lots of other ways. So, you rationalize to yourself, how can you take punitive
action against such well-meaning subordinates? Instead, it makes more
sense to give them another chance, empathize with all the difficulties, and
reward them for effort rather than results.
As reasonable as this sounds, making this the standard way of deal-
ing with your team will lead to a breakdown in accountability and likely
failure in achieving your stretch goals. There may be some situations in
which it might be the right thing to do, particularly with innovative, high-
risk initiatives, new business startups, or truly unexpected situations. But
on the whole, if some people are let off the hook, then everyone expects it.
Eventually it becomes acceptable to try hard (or look like you’re trying
hard) but not deliver results, which means that mediocre performance be-
comes the norm. This isn’t good for the organization and isn’t healthy for
your leadership. As Gary Rodkin, the former CEO of ConAgra, explained,
“I can sleep at night only if I know that the commitments my people make
are set in stone and that they will indeed deliver.”
Instead, focusing on results means that you must evaluate your people
on what they actually deliver. There is no A for effort. So you should be
sympathetic to the challenges they are facing, the distractions they have to
overcome, the organizational barriers, the bad weather, and everything
else that makes it difficult to meet goals. And you should help them think
through how to overcome these and what it will take to be successful. This
is what Jack Welch called the “softhearted” part of making tough people
decisions that we talked about in chapter 3. However, you can’t wait too
long to shift into the hardheaded part of this process. If they can’t deliver,
despite all the help, support, and encouragement, then you have to take
action or they won’t take the goals seriously. This is also part of the social
contract that we discussed in chapter 3.
You don’t have to don a Darth Vader costume and fire anyone on the
spot if they don’t meet their goals. You can give the person a specific mile-