Understand that making sure people are doing a good job doesn’t require watching everything that everybody is doing at all times. You just have to know what they are like and get a sampling. Regular sampling of a statistically reliable number of cases will show you what a person is like and what you can expect from them. Select which of their actions are critical enough to need preapproval and which can be examined later. But be sure to do the audit, because people will tend to give themselves too much slack or could cheat when they see that they’re not being checked.
Recognize that change is difficult. Anything that requires change can be difficult. Yet in order to learn and grow and make progress, you must change. When facing a change, ask yourself: Am I being open-minded? Or am I being resistant? Confront your difficulties head-on, force yourself to explore where they come from, and you’ll find that you’ll learn a lot.
Help people through the pain that comes with exploring their weaknesses. Emotions tend to heat up during most disagreements, especially when the subject is someone’s weaknesses. Speak in a calm, slow, and analytical manner to facilitate communication. Put things in perspective by reminding them that their pain is the pain that comes with learning and personal evolution, and that knowing the truth will put them on the path to a much better place. Consider asking them to go away and reflect when they are calm, and have a follow-up conversation a few days later. Ultimately, to help people succeed you have to do two things: First let them see their failures so clearly that they are motivated to change them, and then show them how to either change what they are doing or rely on others who are strong where they are weak. While doing the first without the second can be demoralizing to the people you are trying to help, doing them both should be invigorating, especially when they start experiencing the benefits.
Knowing how people operate and being able to judge whether that way of operating will lead to good results is more important than knowing what they did. Knowing what people are like is the best indicator of how well they are likely to handle their responsibilities in the future. At Bridgewater, we call this “paying more attention to the swing than the shot.” Since good and bad outcomes can arise from circumstances that might not have had anything to do with how the individual handled the situation, it is preferable to assess people based on both their reasoning and their outcomes. I probe their thinking in a very frank way so as not to let them off the hook. Doing this has taught me a lot about how to assess others’ logic, and how to have better logic myself. When both the outcomes and the thinking behind them are bad, and when this happens a number of times, I know I don’t want them to do that type of thinking anymore. For example, if you’re a poker player and you play a lot of poker, you will win some hands and lose others and on any given night you might walk away with less money than a lesser player who’s gotten lucky. It would be a mistake to judge the quality of a player based on just one outcome. Instead, look at how well someone does what they do and the outcomes they produce over time.
If someone is doing their job poorly, consider whether it is due to inadequate learning or inadequate ability. Think of people’s performance as being made up of two things: learning and ability. A weakness that is due to a lack of experience or training can be fixed, while a weakness that is due to a lack of ability can’t be. Failing to distinguish between these causes is a common mistake among managers, because managers are often reluctant to appear unkind or judgmental. Also, they know that people assessed this way tend to push back. This is another one of those situations in which you must force yourself to be practical and realistic.
Training and testing a poor performer to see if he or she can acquire the required skills without simultaneously trying to assess their abilities is a common mistake. Skills are readily testable, so they should be easy to determine. Abilities, especially right-brained abilities, are more difficult to assess. When thinking about why someone is a poor performer, openly consider whether it is a problem with their abilities.