Leadership Axiom #3

Patterns not Attributions
As a supervisor, I am often required to evaluate employees, occasionally with serious consequences. Over the years, I have evaluated hundreds of employees and I have learned a few valuable lessons. First and foremost, I have discovered that you can objectively point out patterns in others behaviors, but it doesn't behoove you to tell them why those patterns occurred.
Sometimes, as supervisors, we are tempted to deal with why people do what they do (the attributions) in order to help them continue or stop the behaviors. I have even seen some administrators who take great pride in this sort of analysis, almost as if the gift of supervision is truly, as the name suggests, "sight from above." I find this vain and dangerous, not from my own successes and failures as a supervisor, but from the incorrect projections of a few of my former bosses. There is nothing worse than being told "why" you did something wrong - whether the provided attribution was correct or not.
I am not sure if this type of clairvoyance is useful anyway. I think the notion that supervision includes this type of hyper-ability is somewhat pedantic. It should be enough that one can detect and isolate appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, particularly those that are consistent. A good supervisor should know the mission and goals of her organization, and then be able to evaluate the performance of the people she supervises in that shared context. Nothing is more powerful than a pattern, and patterns (good and bad) are often undeniable. When I recognize a pattern in someone's behavior, that becomes a primary evaluation point - not the reason behind it.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on dealing with negative patterns in employee evaluations and how to manage the subsequent discussions. First, a good supervisor never reveals these issues in a summative evaluation (e.g., an end of the year performance appraisal) - this is not the first time an employee should hear about the issue, especially given that it has become a pattern. When negative feedback arises, the supervisor should always share the information with the employee. Often, it will be an anomaly, and either the feedback arose from a misunderstanding which can be addressed, or the employee armed with the information will ameliorate the valid concern. But without the information, even the erroneous feedback from a misunderstanding will lead to further issues, and the employee will have no chance to deal with legitimate problems. Nothing feels more like a betrayal than being made aware of complaints and issues long after they materialize.
Consistent feedback is a very powerful tool to use with an employee, whether the employee admits responsibility for it or not. These issues become patterns that are unacceptable for any reason. The task of the supervisor and employee becomes to end the pattern regardless of the cause. I will provide an example that I have dealt with on a few occasions working in an urban educational setting - that of conflict between White female teachers and African-American female students.
In each instance, I suppose I could have come to the conclusion that either the teacher was a racist, or that the student was being far too sensitive maybe even playing the race card for personal gain. I also realized that dealing with the issue, even raising it would provoke such accusations on the part of the teacher. In each instance, I began the discussion reminding the instructor of the repeated issues, and the pattern they indicated. I then asked the instructor why she thought those students reacted the way they did, letting her provide the attribution. After some discussion and reassurance that I wasn't labeling her as a racist, we got down to some useful information. It seemed that the friction occurred over what the instructor believed to be her "rigorous standards." The initial reaction to this was usually a declaration by the instructor that she "wasn't about to lower her standards" for anyone. At this point I would inevitably add that no matter what the cause, the school could not afford this pattern. It was a harsh admonition, but it got her attention. This is where we would get to work. I would remind her I believed she wasn't a racist, but also that there were other instructors who had similar standards that were not experiencing the same reactions from this group of students. Given these two stipulations, I suggested a new attribution - I asserted that the instructor did have the right to have high expectations of her class, but also that she needed to convey to them that she cared about them in proportion to her demands. Perhaps they weren't getting this, that she cared for them, because I believe she did. This became the issue at hand - pushing the students while letting them know she cared about them. My favorite aphorism became "you can beat the heck out of them if they know you care about them." We then got about the business of showing students this concern, at which point I shared some strategies that might help, many from their equally demanding peers.
In all instances except one, we were able to improve the dynamics of the class. In each case, I had listened to teacher and student alike, had let the teacher describe the issue, and then found some common ground to create or find an attribution that had promise. I am not saying it was easy, but it allowed us to avoid some threatening avenues that would have yielded no results. I truly admired those teachers who took the feedback and made honest adjustments. I would like to think I have done the same, and looking back, I was able to do so when the feedback was offered to me honestly, and did not threaten the core of my integrity.