My observations on the first two hours of the Pentz review meeting

Well, I haven't seen all 12 hours of the outgoing City Manager Pentz's review meeting videos yet. I hope to finish them in the coming days, but work is fairly hectic right now and I was only able to watch the first couple of hours before bed last night. I'm grateful to Amy for posting those and allowing us all to have access to them so we can see for ourselves how the meeting transpired. I have some observations based on those first couple of hours, which I thought I'd share.

My impression from the first two hours is that everyone on the Council and a lot of people in the audience had obviously made up their minds before going into this meeting. The folks who had concerns with Pentz AND the folks who were going to give him glowing reports. You can tell that in these opening hours and how they dealt with the information. Given the significant amount of pre-processing they'd all done on this, though, that doesn't surprise or bother me that the Council had firm opinions. Given the relatively uninformed position of the public, though, I was disappointed that the audience seemed to have made up its mind well before even hearing the facts.

The other thing that strikes me from these first two hours is the grim reality of personnel reviews. Having conducted dozens of personnel reviews myself, watching this one begin to unfold reminds me of some of the commonalities to our human nature. You may have had similar experience, too, if you've ever been responsible for reviewing personnel, and especially if you've ever had to give a negative review to someone. And especially if that negative review had to be given to someone who was otherwise popular in the organization. It's a very unpleasant situation for a manager to be in.

As I say, my own experience both conducting personnel reviews - and taking leadership and management development training specifically to hone my reviewing methods and better understand how personnel dynamics develop and are best handled - has led me to appreciate some true, if grim, realities about personnel management. Honestly, I could write a management book on personnel reviews if I had any inclination to add one more to the ever-growing pile. But I'll simply let this post suffice (though it may be a small novella before I'm done).

Let's start with Grim Reality #1: Personnel reviews are virtually never completely objective. We try our hardest to quantify the expectations and measure the progress of a worker, developing all kinds of rubrics and tools. But very few kinds of jobs can be so reduced. Indeed, the several minutes in these first two hours where the Council is debating back and forth over the review tool is a conversation I've seen unfold so many times that it's laughable to see it again. It's not like you can just count the billable hours, or sales numbers. Most job descriptions, like the City Manager's, have a significant amount of subjective criteria in them and you're seeing the Council grapple with the age-old problem of how to evaluate such criteria in a meaningful way.

Which leads to Grim Reality #2: managing relationships is part of your competence. If you perform "satisfactorily" in your basic job function, but don't get along with key members of your team (either your subordinates, your peers, your boss(es) or your clients), then it's not good. Such interpersonal conflicts can be poisonous to morale and esprit de corps and seriously undermine effectiveness in the long run. They are very legitimate factors to consider in a review.

Which leads to Grim Reality #3: Relationship problems are seldom categorically bad - that is, usually the person being reviewed will not have categorical relationship conflicts with everyone. Systemically dysfunctional people like that usually have been weeded out via the vetting and hiring process. No, what can happen, though, is that someone will have their friends and supporters but will have interpersonal conflicts with one or a few key people. And the fact that you don't get along with only a few of your colleagues is no less serious simply because you DO get along with some others. Nor does it mean that the worker is blameless.

Raising Grim Reality #4: Because of our human nature and Western culture, personnel reviews are inherently distrusted, authority is questioned, bosses are usually viewed as somewhat adversarial by the rank-and-file and any management giving a negative review is inherently given less credence. It is a significant part of our culture to complain about the "pointy-haired boss" who is stupid or mean or out to get you. I've seen this happen time and again, where folks naturally give the worker the benefit of the doubt in situations where they really only have one side of the story: the worker's. It's why Dilbert and The Office resonate so much with folks, I guess. It's populist, and popular, in our culture to imagine the boss is a jerk.

Leading to Grim Reality #5: Because of the inherent subjectivity of most personnel reviews, the importance of relational issues, the inconsistency in interpersonal conflicts, and the inherent bias against a manager who provides a negative review, managers have an extremely steep uphill climb when trying to address interpersonal conflict and related concerns in a performance review. The age old adage "document, document, document" is one that managers know like a mantra (or will, if they don't already).

And this leads to what is perhaps the most frustrating thing about these kinds of reviews - Grim Reality #6: If there are multiple people weighing in on the review, and some of those people have not had interpersonal conflict with the worker, or are even friends with the worker, then what usually happens is that they will act as foils to the process of addressing the underlying relational concern. One of the ways that this is done is to use non sequitur arguments (such as "well, we had a good fourth quarter, so he must be doing a good job", when the company may be succeeding in spite of the worker's incompetence because others on the team are picking up the slack). Another way is make the review about the reviewer, rather than the reviewed (such as "well, I've never had a problem working with this person, so surely your problems with him must be your doing"). Folks engage in this kind of obstruction without even thinking about it, simply instinctively defending their friend from a negative review.

Finally, there is Grim Reality #7: Because of the (appropriately) subjective nature of part of the review, the uphill climb the reviewer has before him or her, the passive distrust by the uninformed public and the active obstruction of a negative review by the worker's friends involved in the process, even an appropriately negative review can be severely undermined by quenching, even a small degree, the manager's ability or willingness to communicate his concerns. Two ways to do this: bring a lawyer to the review and make it public. The former inhibits the manager's willingness to actually speak the criticism that might need to be said, for fear of some kind of legal repercussions. The latter increases the political fallout for the manager, making the manager less inclined to be direct and pointed in their criticisms and instead making him or her feel pressured to sugar coat their concerns.

This is a knife in the heart of a personnel review, and is why such reviews are usually conducted in a closed, or Executive, session. It's not to keep things hidden in a back-room star chamber where the worker can be raked over the coals with impunity (though that's a risk). It's to allow as frank, open and transparent a discussion of concerns without having to worry about exposing sensitive issues or avoiding the political ramifications or posturing for a constituency.

In fact, dealing with negative reviews in which interpersonal conflict is a significant factor, the only way that a manager can actually surmount all of the above-mentioned obstacles to actually hold the worker accountable is to be fairly forceful and pointed in the review. There probably will be a lot of appeal to emotion and non sequitur provided by the worker or his proponents. This has to be cut through with a razor-sharp incisiveness. There will likely be innuendo and ad hominem against the reviewer and this must be addressed very directly. And this incisiveness and directness is further interpreted as meanness or being "out to get" the worker, by onlookers.

All told, there can be a major political cost to the manager for giving an honest, negative review (and by political, I mean that in the neutral sense, and regardless of whether the manager is a politician), and few will have the courage to actually go through with it. Many people complain about how there is little accountability in politics, for example, but then they castigate those politicians who try to hold people accountable when it doesn't agree with their own opinons. The result is a general undermining of the whole culture of accountability and excellence by a public which doesn't back up their elected representatives to make the hard decisions, and may actively undermine them when they try to do so.

Again, from my own experience: in working through a problematic personnel review last year, which took over nine months to resolve, I encountered all of these things. If you haven't been through a personnel situation like this - one that gets so incredibly hairy and emotionally charged - it's impossible for you to appreciate the complexity of what's going on. As I was working through it and consulting with various others to provide assistance, my supervisor and our organization's HR expert complimented me on the professionalism with which I handled it. The latter fellow, a man of decades of experience in dealing with similar situations, also said (if I may paraphrase):

"These kind of situations can be the most emotionally draining, time-consuming and disruptive that a manager will ever encounter, but they must be faced head-on, for the good of everyone.

But in fact, what usually happens is that the amount of time, effort and energy that is required to deal with these kind of personnel issues is so great, and the potential fallout so massive, that most managers simply don't have the courage to face them. They will just leave them for the next manager to have to deal with. That kind of thing allows a cancer to grow in an organization, and encourages mediocrity (or worse) while morale continues to drop.

It's far better for everyone to go through the agony of dealing with these things when they arise."

So, as I've watched the first two hours of Pentz's reviews, this familiar pattern of human nature seems to be developing again. All of the signs are there, that are so familiar.

a. Councilman Sepulveda not making explanatory comments on the review sheet, because he prefers to share them in Executive session, while Councilman Caccamo suggests that low marks should be thrown out since they don't have explanatory comments by them.

b. The Mayor calling the review sheet a part of a good process when it supports his argument that everyone should have honored it and filled it out completely, and then a few minutes later calling it a horrible instrument when it supports his argument that the numbers shouldn't be scrutinized too closely if they reflect poorly on Pentz.

c. Councilman Huggins suggesting that there were 18 of 22 reviewers who gave the City Manager a satisfactory or above rating, missing the fact that the 360-review respondents are not asked to review the same things the Council is (the reviews are apples and oranges) and that having even a few people who respond negatively in a personnel review is a major red flag and usually cause for serious concern.

d. Councilman Caccamo's straightforward yet inherently flawed approach to grading the City Manager, using his former teacher's principal's rubric of "90% or better is an A", which neglects the fact that some issues are obviously more crucial than others. You can do 9 out of 10 things satisfactorily and blow the tenth, and if the tenth is a major factor, then it's not even a passing grade, much less an "A".

e. There's the populist groaning from an unfriendly audience when Westbrooks makes the valid comment that subordinates and peers may inflate scores on a 360 review if they have any sense that the person being reviewed could learn who said what. The review consultant confirmed that the data was confidential, but it's appropriate to note what Westbrooks did. The moaning from folks in the relatively uninformed audience, this early in the review, on a simple point of the reality of personnel reviews, is a pretty good indication that many of the attendees were not really interested in approaching this with an open mind. Some of them came with their minds made up and were obviously gunning for certain Council members. Those folks probably wouldn't be convinced of the legitimacy of a negative review by ANY information that came out, short of a videotape of Pentz kicking a kitten or going ballistic on an elderly nun in a Bashas' checkout line for taking too long to sift change from her coinpurse.

To be really honest, there's the palpable sense of kabuki to this thing. Or perhaps a Balinese shadow-play. I can't express to you how formulaic it all is. Everyone is in their place, playing their part.

Mayor Dunn is the quintessential partisan, who must temper somewhat his overt partisan views and serve as facilitator, lest he lose credibility as the nominal leader of the Council. There's the gruff, acerbic Caccamo, who stabs the microphone button with his finger every time he concludes a tart observation, just so we all understand how miffed he is to have to be enduring this. There's Wallace who, despite her obvious earnestness, seems a bit taken aback at the fact that the review is so politically charged. There's the cold-addled Westbrooks, who is trying to be reasonable, but seems to have only now discovered that reason is not what will win the hearts and minds of his detractors, as the knives flash upon him even in his first comments.

There's the no-nonsense Huggins, whose simple, grandfatherly approach has the appearance of deep wisdom, but when scrutinized, his insights appear to have missed the mark a bit about what's really going on. There's the intense Sepulveda, who needs to make his case definitively in the face of significant opposition, and in so doing, comes across as argumentative, further agitating his detractors. And there's the newcomer Orlando, who is trying to address flaws in the reasoning of others while walking on eggshells, so as not to seem too edgy and trigger even further emotional backlash.

And there's the audience, who is already acculturated to reject the perceived "villains" when they come on stage, without even needing to hear anything from them.

I wish I could tell you that these "types" are unique to this review meeting. But I suspect that similar characters appear in hundreds of meetings every day in our country. Whether it's a personnel review or evaluating a controversial plan or whatever, the same dynamics keep appearing. We humans, it seems, aren't all that inventive when it comes to the way we deal with this kind of social dynamic.

So I'm looking forward to watching the rest of these videos. But if the first two hours is any indication, I suspect I've probably seen essentially the same meeting a few times before in my career.