Comments on: When Employees Do the Bare Minimum and Want a Promotion

By: BocaExecuSpace

BocaExecuSpace — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:27:52 +0000

It’s nice to read this again. Being promoted is great, but we should understand that new skills, excellent knowledge, and effort are necessary.

By: BocaExecuSpace

BocaExecuSpace — Mon, 01 May 2023 01:57:29 +0000

I like your response in that situation, and I learned a lot from this blog. I am grateful that I have a boss that helps me grow, and I know someday I can get the promotion, but for now, I am focusing on gaining more skills. Thanks for posting!

By: Wes

Wes — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:55:32 +0000

In reply to Hank Epstein.

“What gets measured gets done” is often a two-edged sword. What is easy to measure is often the less important part of a person’s or company’s output. Safety comes to mind; it is easy to measure how many people are reminded to wear hardhats and gloves while missing the hard-to-measure attitude of making decisions to meet a deadline (see the events earlier in the day before the Deepwater Horizon explosion).
The output of some employee positions are easy to measure, some are difficult, and some are too expensive or too difficult to measure (juice not worth the squeeze). Easily measured metrics make a manager’s job easier. Not having measurable metrics makes it imperative that managers be well-trained in the art of management.

By: Wes

Wes — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:37:30 +0000

Thre are other parameters that are possibly in play. One is initial pay when starting the job. An employee hired in at a considerablely lower rate of pay, for the same position in the same group, will naturally want that to be corrected ASAP by the manager. When it is not, the employee may decide to work at the level of pay that they are receiving – you pay me less, you will get less. It appears self defeating, but quite reasonable for the employee’s mental health.
Another is ‘what is considered par for good performance’? If it is the amount of time spent at the office every day (very easy to observe) vs the output of work performed (in many jobs not nearly as easy to measure), the efficeint employee with a life outside of work may look less deserving than the workaholic employee who arrives early and/or stays late (while usually appearing busy).
A third parameter, as Jeff mentioned, may be long-held instutional policies such as tenure and date-of-hire that can lead to a feeing of entitlement by seasoned employees (“I get raises and promotions independant of performance”), which greatly diminshes the pot of money for raises to newer employees in the same positions, who then tend to emulate the seasoned employee’s work level without the necessary political capitol/savvy to go with it – thereby appearing to be doing the bare minimum while expecting a raise.
Each of these parameters essentially boil down to management decisions – but at what level?

By: Jeff Grigg

Jeff Grigg — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:42:23 +0000

In reply to Amanda.

Yes: Let’s not ignore the contributions of the employee’s manager, and of the organization itself.

Probably, in most cases, most individual performance problems are an issue with that person and need to be addressed mostly with changes that that person makes.

But, as W. Edwards Deming so compellingly pointed out, if your “people problems” are similar across a number of people in your organization, then you should look up to the common boss that they share, and you will often find the problem there.

And some organizations have organization-wide problems. And some are just in industries where opportunities are limited. (But we do exceptional organizations that shine, even in the most restricted of industries.)

So while it’s not usually the first place to look, we must keep our minds open to the contributions made by *all* of the actors involved — not just the isolated individual employee.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 14:47:41 +0000

In reply to Amanda.

Amanda – you mentioned “Don’t know if it was inexperience, naïveté or if he was just a bad manager, or perhaps some combination of the three…” and I would add to that a company that is not clearly defining its expectations (job descriptions) for its people. A manager may or may not be “bad”, however if they do not have the tools to be successful a lot of them are not sure how to be successful leaders.😒 A seasoned employee might know to ask for this – but many do not and are taken aback when they are less than successful.

By: Hank Epstein

Hank Epstein — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 13:33:29 +0000

A useful response & I think there is also some preventive action to be taken as well in the form of a role description that specifies the outcomes to be accomplished & the metrics that determine how the quality of the accomplishments will be measured. This is distinguished from a job description which is used for hiring & describes the criteria to be met by candidates who aspire to that position. In my 33 years of experience as an executive coach job descriptions are almost always missing. Isn’t this performance management 101?

By: Amanda

Amanda — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 12:41:03 +0000

Excellent response. I remember when I was a few years into the workforce and I received my first ever bad performance review. My boss explained “It was because you didn’t do X,Y and Z.” And I responded with “You never asked me to do X,Y and Z. I am happy to do X,Y and Z but I didn’t do them before now because nobody ever asked or told me to.” It felt SO unfair to have a bad review on my record because a manager never verbalized his expectations. Don’t know if it was inexperience, naïveté or if he was just a bad manager, or perhaps some combination of the three, but I can honestly say that if my manager had told me to do X,Y and Z I would have done it.

By: Thomas Fons

Thomas Fons — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 12:27:10 +0000

This is a very timely article since we are having performance conversations and this exact situation is happening. Appreciate the idea of stepping back and outlining the competencies/expectations. And not getting personally anxious. This is why it’s important to have clear competencies that you can go back to – as well as of course pointing to top performers. However, my caution about that is that you do not want to pit one person against another. I tend to talk more about our clear competencies than a top performer for that reason.