There’s more to on-the-job performance than being right

Dear Bob …

I hold the top rank position in the IT section of my agency. I’m an architect.

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Every year, my performance review is plagued by unsatisfactory assessments more than “meet requirements.” What is often mentioned is I “talk at an MBA level.” They respect my background, and I do talk at higher levels than the ordinary staff because I know I have the experience to back anything I claim to be.

The problem is that my approaches, I’m told, do not reflect our needs. When I present anything we need to do, it is either rejected or set aside; consequently, the assignment given is incomplete and reflects on my performance.

Am I wrong to approach it this way? All I’m trying to do is to point us in the right direction. My CIO and higher-ups don’t consider my input becase they have their own agenda. As a result, I’m set aside and I get menial assignments not at the level of my classification.

I know my next appraisal will follow this trend. This time, perhaps, I’ll be put on a timeline with HR involved.

As a professional unit, we have many shortcomings and we are overwhelmed by the work to be done. Each year, we do the our Strategic Plan. Upon completion, my job is to assess its contents agains the Service Level Agreements and recorded strategies.

I take this document and the first thing I do is evaluate its risk. The current architecture and infrastructure tell me which of these risks need to be prioritized and in what order. Then, in a form of recommendation I publicize my findings with the tactical approach that will bring our group and agency to comply with our customers’ requests.

For this, I’m called something just short of lunatic. And I get another blotch.

I also do Storage Management assessments to arrest prevalent financial waste, and again, I’m crazy. Data management is plagued with inaccuracies, I offer centralization and governance. Ditto.

Why won’t they pay attention?

– Voice in the wilderness

Dear Voice …

Without watching what’s going on, I have to draw some inferences. My guess: You’re making a common mistake, which is that you’re trying to be right, instead of trying to make the organization right enough.

Another way of explaining this: Your conclusions and recommendations are probably solid. Your attempts at persuasion are, I suspect, seriously misguided.

The first red flag for me is the criticism that you “talk at an MBA level.” Stop doing that. The first rule of communication is to present your ideas within your audience’s vocabulary and experiential framework, not your own. Talk their language. Use your empathy to understand what they’re likely to care about, and connect your conclusions to that.

Second suggestion: I strongly suspect you’re trying to sell the solution. That never works. To persuade, you have to sell the problem (or the opportunity). And it has to be a problem for your audience, not just for you or for IT.

Finally: From your description, it appears you do a lot of bench work, put it all together, wrap it up, put a bow on it, and then present it as a gift for the recipients to unwrap and admire. Don’t do that — it never works. (Or as they sang on the HMS Pinafore, “Well hardly ever!”)

To get an organization to be right enough, you have to bring the decision-makers along so that there are no surprises when they see your final recommendations. My guess is that there are no more than a half-dozen key decision-makers or probably fewer. What I’d suggest is that you perform a preliminary analysis, then schedule one-on-one time with each of them to give them a sense of the situation, let them know how you plan to approach it, and ask their opinions.

Take careful note of their opinions — they’ll have to appear in some form or other in your final recommendations, and you’ll have to give credit for each and every one of them: “Fred, this is directly tied to what we talked about … your concern that we might be overspending on storage.”

Schedule a second on-on-one after you’ve put your thoughts together but before you’ve turned them into a draft deliverable. Again, meet one-on-one to brief each decision-maker. Make it clear everything in front of them is open to discussion. Even better would be to provide multiple alternatives, which will foster a sense that they’re part of the process instead of its recipient (and, therefore, a critic).

After this second round, you can prepare your final deliverable and schedule a group meeting to present it to all of the decision-makers at the same time. By then, they’ll be in consensus without knowing it because that’s what your earlier one-on-one meetings were for: to get everyone on the same page.

You’re operating at a level where engineering only gets you so far. What you have to master is the discipline of social engineering, which is a far more complex field. This is just a start — hope it helps point you in a more productive direction.

– Bob

This story, “There’s more to on-the-job performance than being right,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com or subscribe to the Advice Line newsletter for the latest wisdom on managing your IT career.