What’s actually happening behind the scene when you’re being performance managed
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If you’re being performance managed, this section won’t be happy reading. Because the short version is; someone has a problem with you, and it’s probably fair, so stop blaming your boss, because you’re probably shooting the messenger. If you want to know why you’re blaming your boss unfairly, read here. So does this mean your boss is right and you should just suck it up and do what they say? Maybe. But understanding what is pushing your boss to call this meeting can understand what is driving them to this meeting and analyze whether they are fair reasons, and help you rationally deal with the situation.
Your boss is under pressure from their boss
Perhaps read here first to get some insight into what they want. Your boss also has targets, KPIs, outputs that they need to deliver to the business and their boss requires them to deliver them. You may have good reasons to you about how you can’t, or shouldn’t be expected to deliver what needs to be delivered, but those reasons very quickly lose weight the further they are from you and your boss, because the significance of empathy diminishes. That’s complex, so let’s use an example.
If you’re struggling to do part of your job due to juggling out-of-work commitments, you may feel your boss should empathize and accommodate. But it’s significantly harder for your boss to get their boss to empathize and accommodate. It’s even harder, if not impossible to get any wider management/executive team to empathize and accommodate, unless it’s a life-threatening situation. In short, remember your boss has to take your justifications for performance gaps and sell it to the business.
Your co-workers are complaining
In a similar way, your performance could be under heat because of other departments. This is discussed more here, that you are always upstream from someone else; how you do your job effects how others do their job, and if you’re not doing it quite right, then someone else has to fix, cover, adjust or do what you’re not doing. Their complaints may be the reasons for this meeting.
There are two reasons why this may not be fair. Firstly, everyone has an opinion about their co-workers’ priorities, and these are biased. A car company’s accountant has different opinion about the salesperson’s priorities to those of the salesperson, with a greater skew towards margin than customer service. Secondly there may be material and significant difference of opinion about responsibilities. They may think its you’re job to make sure something is done, and vice versa. It’s very common to have two co-workers saying it’s the other person’s responsibility when it comes to unpleasant work.
Customers are complaining
Also similar (but also sufficiently distinct to discuss separately) is the role of customers. Customers are the recipients of your labour, which results in your company putting money in your pocket. Without deep-diving too much into whether ‘the customer is always right’, what they think should be happening plays a big part in whether the money will go in your pocket in the future. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but it’s a risky play by the company to back you over the customer.
Who has the most say in how you do your job? How you prioritize your job?
Employees like to do their job a certain way (this is discussed more here). Given a choice, we would like to decide what we do, in what order, to what standard, and when. But every job everywhere has someone else with stakes in the game - everyone has a customer, and most of us have bosses and co-workers, who are affected by how we do our jobs. It is this need to compromise with external factors that is a big part of performance management.
