Chris Williams is a former vice president at Microsoft with over 40 years of experience. Williams says that doing a good job isn’t enough to avoid being called an “under performer.” Four ways.
Some companies have abandoned people called “under performers.” Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Intuit have been doing all this recently.
The lesson from these layoffs is that simply doing your job isn’t enough. You’ve been doing a great job for decades, but you can still get caught up in these layoffs.
It helps you understand how it happens, avoiding what appears to be a random label.
What is the low performance?
It seems clear to his face. If businesses want to cut costs, it makes sense to abandon the poorest people.
The problem is the coincidence way in which these assessments are often made. Dozens of long-term employees, including Meta, Microsoft, and more, have taken them to social media to share their shock. They tell 10, 20 or 30 years of careers with an uninterrupted string of excellent reviews, but only to get the shocking and horrifying reviews that will immediately follow the layoffs.
Poor performers – those who fail to meet basic indicators and who are repeatedly short of the warnings, are no one to challenge themselves as candidates for termination. That’s exactly why companies use this label.
Companies know that layoffs are bad, but getting rid of poor performers looks great
The broad news of layoffs brand the company as it is suffering. Companies know that thousands of potential open position candidates will avoid joining a company that has just layoffs.
On the other hand, branding layoffs to choose poor performers looks great.
The company is trying to remove dead trees, maintain higher standards and reach the highest level. Rather than seeing the pain, they look aggressive and healthy. High-performance people look for companies like this.
Additionally, firing people for performance helps avoid the scope of potential legal issues. If performance is justification, many notification rules do not apply. Companies can avoid or minimize their retirement obligations when fired for performance, and many discrimination laws can be avoided as well.
If performance-based layoffs are disproportionately hit by older or other protected classes of workers, the excuse could be “but their performance.”
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How companies perform these layoffs is a problem
These companies already have built-in mechanisms to identify and remove chronic poor performers. Some of them have quota systems that require a certain percentage of employees to be labeled in the bottom performance layer. These employees are routinely deleted in what is known as “non-re-exiting.”
But these layoffs come. Managers at all levels are told to identify poor performers and solve them. They’ve already been doing it for years.
Now they may need to find more, and it is often done in a sarcasm and random way. “They were here forever, how about them?” “No one likes them, they can go” or “What have they done for me recently?”
It’s a coincidence way that even good people can get brands as low-performance.
How to avoid underperformer labels
Managers don’t just rank teams and pull people at the bottom. It’s dry. What they do is join their peers and try to find a potential layoff from their ranks. They discuss their achievements with individuals.
The worst thing that can happen at that meeting is that the group quickly agrees to you. It could be because of a very visible mistake you made, a disagreement you feared, or the confusion you caused.
It is difficult or impossible to avoid labels at that point. No one will rush to your defense around the table.
However, it’s a bad thing for the group to say, “Who?” – So they don’t know what you did and the impact you had. Your manager may protect you, but without support you are in trouble. Even hitting a decades-long KPI can’t isolate you if you’re doing it alone.
The way to avoid this is to make sure you are well known. Luckily there are several ways to do that.
1. You realize beyond the team.
Volunteering on visible projects. Offer to become the face of work outside of the team. Presentation to the VP. Find ways to successfully highlight your work outside of your immediate team.
2. Work with other teams in the company.
Volunteer to be a contact between your team and the groups it depends on. Raise your hands to participate in the company-wide random initiatives that always come up.
3. Move to different teams within the company.
Working for different people in different groups and in very different parts of the organization will help you develop your impact.
4. Networks far beyond teams.
If you are unable to actually move to another team, please connect there. Find ways to connect with your boss’s peers and those who work for them. Find others well outside of your discipline and reach out. Have a coffee or zoom and connect – any connection.
The best defense is a good attack
If you do this well, the manager will move on to someone else and you will survive this round of layoffs.
Unfortunately, once you receive this label it will be too late. Even if labels appear to be randomly assigned, it’s hard to shake them.
Work actively to become well known. Find connections and connect with people that may be around that table. No matter what sacrifices you make, avoid being “Who is it?”
Chris Williams is former vice president of Microsoft. He is an executive-level advisor and consultant with over 40 years of experience leading and building over 40 years of experience.
