Cyclic Performers - The Classic Performance Management Trap

How long should you keep investing in someone before letting them go?

When leaders tolerate cyclic performance (a pattern of temporary improvements followed by regression to ineffective behavior), the costs ripple through their organizations in ways that are often invisible until it's too late.

Beyond the immediate drain on management energy spent on monitoring and intervening, these situations typically lead to increased volatility in team performance, demoralized high performers, and a gradual erosion of organizational standards.

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In this piece you’ll find a short case study along with a couple of frameworks and coaching questions to help you get back on track with performance management.

Storytime

“Yes, but last week she actually did publish a new version of her team’s project commitments.”

This was the critical moment in a coaching session with a client (James) as we worked through a problem he’d been having with a member of his team (Susie).

Susie had spent the prior 6 months operating as a team lead but failing to do some fundamental things to make the team effective. In particular, she’d always been a bit cynical about the value of having a structured process for delivering the team’s work. So when James had initially expressed concern that the team often seemed to be pulling in opposite directions, she’d laughed it off with a comment about ‘herding cats’.

The Cycle of Ineffective Performance Management

Over the ensuing weeks, James had tried to support her and offer guidance around the value of having clear strategies, tactics, priorities and so forth. He made sure she was getting all the feedback she needed to help her decide what behaviors were most correlated with success.

He would make the strongest case he could for various deliberate leadership practices and she’d commit to trying them. Each change would help for a while and then, when James’ attention was elsewhere, Susie would lapse back to her default, laissez-faire state. In other words, Susie was demonstrating the qualities of a classic cyclic performer.

The Tipping Point

Over 6 months James had fallen into a pattern of hunting for anything she’d done that was positive and/or aligned with his guidance and biasing that signal over all others. He wanted desperately to believe in a redemption story that wasn’t materializing. It was this habit that brought us to the critical moment in the coaching session. The question he needed to hear was this…

“You’ve identified that, every few weeks, Susie’s doing a couple of things you’ve advised. She does that for a week or two and then it falls away. So her positive impact is coming in little, unsustainable bursts driven by your intervention. That pattern costs you time and focus… 

How many cycles of that pattern would count as ‘too many’ and why?”

Once James addressed that question, everything fell into place fairly quickly and, unfortunately, Susie was ultimately exited.

The Smoke Before The Firing

In reflecting on James’ experience, we worked through three key questions…

• What signals were there that this situation wasn’t going to end well?

• If those signals had been handled differently, how much earlier could action have been taken?

• Were there things about James’ personality / identity / values that got in the way of assessing those signals fairly? Was he being ‘too hopeful’, for example?

Very few of us in professional life have deep psychology training and people are complex, so it’s always a bit fraught to try and draw grand conclusions along these lines.

As leaders, we need multiple signals that converge to a reasonable inference. In the beginning, anything that might be an indication of a problem is usually a very weak signal, at best. What James concluded was that he could have amplified those weak signals by asking more questions early on.

When Susie had joked about ‘herding cats’, he could have both shared a laugh at the knowing humor in that statement and asked how she thought about the ‘drag’ on her team from such misalignment. When would she decide that more process / direction was essential and how would she go about choosing those things? What would she do if she, herself, got pushback from people who were a bit cynical about the value of processes?

Every coaching question like this could have exposed more of Susie’s thinking and provided him with a crucial sense of how deliberate she was being, in evaluating and addressing the problems. In other words, early detection of cyclic performance often comes from spotting that a colleague’s problem-solving machinery has gaps in it.

How To Detect Cyclic Performers Earlier

A Diligent Problem Solving Process

When people are being as deliberate as possible about solving problems, this is the process we see them use…

1. Estimation: Assigning a rough value to solving a particular problem (often by understanding the approximate costs of allowing that problem to go unaddressed).

2. Prioritization: Choose which problem to focus on bearing in mind that this will usually mean that all the other problems are now ‘parked’ pending completion of the chosen one.

3. Formulation: Developing a hypothesis for what to try and how it might impact the problem. This would include a definition of success.

4. Execution: Ensuring that the right steps are taken, by the right people, in the right order.

5. Evaluation: Measuring progress regularly and judging whether success has been achieved in a meaningful timeframe.

For complex problems, perfectly capable individuals might not initially have a clue how they’re going to satisfy one of these steps. However, crucially, they are clear that each step is important and they won’t casually skip one.

Probing Their Thinking With Coaching

Cyclic performers, by contrast, may improvise some / all of the above steps and may have difficulty explaining their reasoning (or even recognizing that reasoning should have taken place). Early detection of these kinds of gaps can involve questions like this…

• How did you decide problem A was a more valuable problem to focus on than problem B?

• You’ve said you don’t believe there’s a problem with X. What would it take to change your mind? How often do you plan to check whether you should do so?

• You want to try implementing X. What are you hoping to see as a result? If X pays off, what would a bare minimum success look like?

• How are you deciding who to involve and when?

Unsatisfactory answers to these questions should prompt leaders to ask more abstract questions like…

• What’s your approach to prioritizing the list of problems on your plate?

• How do you keep track of the initiatives you should be measuring and how those things are performing?

• You’re accountable for X. Help me understand the kinds of things you do regularly to make sure X is a success.

Finally, if you find you’re getting good theoretical answers to your questions but performance never quite materializes, then that might be a signal that your colleague has motivation / engagement problems. In other words, they may have the mental tools but not the energy / drive to apply them consistently. That’s a different challenge and one we’ll address in a future post.

Note: As a People Manager, it’s obviously important to document these conversations along the way to ensure that you are able to demonstrate risk management and fair treatment if needed in future.

Next Steps

If you’re accountable or responsible for the performance of others, it’s a good time to think about team members that might be showing early signs of the kinds of cycling described above. Try deploying coaching questions early and often to give yourself a better signal to reinforce / refute your instincts so you can take action in a timely fashion.

Lastly, if you’d like more support on this topic, we’re happy to provide coaching. Please book a coaching intro call to see if it makes sense for your situation.