The space between being unsuccessful and being in an unsuccessful system

Complexity has a way of disappearing in the retelling.

A year of meetings, decisions, misunderstandings, good intentions and conflicting pressures can eventually become an adjective.

Difficult. Slow. Political. Not strategic enough. Too strategic. Not commercial. Too ambitious. Not ambitious enough.

This is partly practical. Nobody can attach a 14-page ethnography to every performance review. The trouble begins when the adjective starts to look like a permanent feature of the person.

A manager who asks a lot of questions may be seen as rigorous in one company and obstructive in another. Someone who takes time over a decision can look painfully slow in an organisation that values speed, then remarkably sensible in one recovering from a series of expensive rushed decisions.

Neither interpretation has to be dishonest. The room changes what we see.

We can be quick to treat performance as though it lives neatly inside the individual. Someone succeeds because she is excellent. Someone struggles because he is weak. A job ends badly and the ending begins to rewrite everything that came before it.

Sometimes that is fair. And sometimes the room deserves a paragraph too.

The job on paper and the job in practice

An unsuccessful system does not necessarily look unsuccessful. It may have intelligent people, healthy revenues and the word trust displayed in prominent places.

The difficulty can sit much lower down.

The job you were hired to do can change depending on who is in the meeting. You are responsible for an outcome but cannot make the decisions required to produce it. One leader recruits you to change things; another becomes nervous once things begin changing. The company wants entrepreneurial behaviour, provided everybody checks first.

It wants candour, although perhaps not that candour.

It wants transformation, ideally by the end of the quarter and without upsetting anything currently in place.

Maybe targets stay fixed while teams and budgets shrink. Or a new leader arrives with a new direction. Then another arrives with a newer one. People become skilled at appearing enthusiastic about the fourth strategic reset in eighteen months.

None of this gives the individual a free pass.

People misread situations. They push too hard. They wait too long. They choose the wrong battle. They fail to notice that the organisation they joined is different from the one they imagined.

But those mistakes do not occur in laboratory conditions.

A decisive person can become increasingly forceful when every decision disappears into another meeting. Someone hired for ambition can acquire the label “disruptive” when the appetite for change turns out to be smaller than advertised. Independence looks excellent under a leader who delegates and rather less charming under one who wants to approve everything.

We like the idea that competence is portable: hire excellent people, place them in the building, wait for excellence.

It would make recruitment much easier. Curiously, we are often less rigid about this in sport. A footballer can look ordinary in one team and exceptional after a transfer, and we don’t find this especially mysterious. We talk about the coach, the formation, the position he was asked to play, the players around him, confidence and timing. We understand that performance emerges from a person operating inside a system.

At work, we can be strangely quick to turn the same phenomenon into a judgement about the person.

He failed. She couldn’t cope. They weren’t senior enough.

Sometimes that is exactly what happened. But the speed with which a complicated interaction becomes a judgement is worth noticing.

And that is where leadership enters the picture.

Leaders have a harder job than labelling

When somebody is struggling, attention naturally moves to the person. What did they misjudge? What were they not ready for? What could they have handled differently?

Those are reasonable questions. A good leader asks another set as well.

Was the mandate understood in the same way by everyone involved? Did responsibility come with enough authority? Was the feedback specific, consistent and early enough to be useful? Have other capable people struggled in similar ways? Does the organisation reward, in ordinary daily behaviour, the qualities it says it values?

The answer may still be that the person is wrong for the role. People do have weaknesses. Some are genuinely poor fits for certain kinds of work. Some simply need to get better. But asking the wider questions gives the leader information about the company as well.

That matters because organisations can become surprisingly efficient at reproducing the same problem with a succession of apparently disappointing people.

At some point, three consecutive “bad hires” in the same role become interesting.

There is also a cost to overcorrecting. Blaming every disappointing outcome on “the system” is just another way of avoiding scrutiny. A person can be badly managed and still have behaved badly. A company can be chaotic and still have made the right decision to let someone go.

The harder work is to understand the proportions.

How much belonged to the person? How much belonged to the manager? How much belonged to a job that was never as clear as everybody pretended it was? How much was simply a poor combination of temperament, timing and circumstance?

That is a less satisfying answer than an adjective. It is usually a more useful one.

What you carry forward

Experiences at work are unusually good at following people home. An opinion formed in one organisation can become part of somebody’s account of themselves long after they have left it. “I struggled there” quietly becomes “I am bad at this.” “My manager found me difficult” becomes “I am difficult.” A local judgement acquires a passport.

This is where Design / Inhabit has become interesting to me.

Some parts of a difficult experience can still be designed. You can look at what happened without flattering yourself. You can ask people you trust for uncomfortable feedback. You can become clearer about the environments in which you work well. You can notice earlier when responsibility and authority have drifted apart. You can change your own behaviour where it needs changing.

Other parts have already happened.

Someone may continue to misunderstand you. A job may have ended badly. A decision may have been made in a room you were not in. There is limited value in conducting increasingly sophisticated imaginary versions of the meeting afterwards.

Those parts have to be inhabited.

I think the work is in separating them carefully. There is almost always something worth learning from a failure, including one produced partly by circumstance. There is also a point at which reflection turns into taking ownership of things that were never entirely yours.

Perhaps that is why the adjective matters so much.

“Difficult”, “slow” or “unsuccessful” can sound like descriptions of a person. Sometimes they are descriptions of what happened when a person met a particular room.