Review season, and you're about to score someone whose struggle might be the role
This is for you if it's review season and one name is the hard one to write. Their numbers slipped this year, and what you put on the record follows them. Underneath sits a doubt: is this them, or a job that stopped fitting them?
A review asks: how did they do? But two things tangle: how well they did the work, and how well it fit them. Score it as one number, and a low mark for a fit problem they never chose follows them. It can cost them a raise, or the job, when what they really needed was a different seat.
Their own results pull the two apart in one sitting, across two sections of the report.
Open The Five Types of Work, near the back of their Career Discovery report. It names what energizes them and what quietly taxes them:
- Analytical: data, logic, the right answer.
- Creative: ideas, designing, making something new.
- Integrative: connecting people and pieces, seeing the whole.
- Influential: persuading, rallying people to a direction.
- Operational: running the system, keeping things on track.
Their primary type and complement are where they come alive; the rest costs them.
Then open Discovering Your Strengths, earlier in the report. It ranks their strengths and names what each makes them good at.
Now do the split.
- Hold the role against The Five Types of Work. List what the seat demands and mark each in their grain or against it. A big share against the grain means the struggle is partly the work, not the person.
- Hold their record against Discovering Your Strengths. Walk their year. Where their strengths had room, how did the work land? That counts as performance.
- Split the shortfall in two. One pile is what they controlled and still missed. The other fell short only because the seat leans on work they are starved of. The first you rate; the second is a fit gap you own.
- Rate the first pile. Set the number on what they controlled, and do not let the fit gap drag it down. A misfit a role change fixes should not cost someone a rating.
- Write the fix, separately. One line, outside the rating: the work type the seat starves, and one change you'll make before the next cycle. Reshape a slice, hand off the against-grain piece, or talk about a better seat.
You walk away with two things: a rating set on what they controlled, and a fix line for your desk, not their record. Both are fairer than the single mark.
