Low Performers

"There is always a high turnover of generals in wartime. Some get replaced because they turn out to be no good at the job, but many others are changed because they have failed at a task that was beyond anybody's ability to accomplish.

They are fired, in other words, because the alternative would be to blame the person who gave them that impossible task.'
Historian Gwynne Dyer from his blog entry Afghanistan: Changing Generals in Midstream


In jobs where you have lots of people doing the same thing (e.g. in a call centre) it reasonably objective to compare one individual with another and rightly label someone a poor performer. However, when it comes to a unique project (like the Afghanistan civil war) one can really only judge someone against expectations. And if the expectations are wrong, whose fault is it: the employee or their boss?

It possible to argue that"poor performance" is always chiefly the boss's fault. Either they had unrealistic expectations, assigned the wrong person to the task or failed to provide them adequate support.

One doesn't want to run with that argument too far becuase it gets ridiculous, but it does remind us that in performance management the responsibility for an employee's success is very much shared between the boss and employee. We should be slow to stick the "poor performer" label on someone's head and instead seek out root causes for failure in the broader system of boss, peers and business processes.

Changing generals in Kabul is unlikely to help and often blaming someone for a performance problem won't help either, in fact placing blame can merely be an excuse not to look more closely at the underlying causes.