Transforming
a poor performer
A director was frustrated by a creative programmer who continually failed
to meet deadlines and seemed distracted, played computer games and surfed
the 'Net. The director's response was to restrict his projects and tighten
deadlines, yet the programmer’s output further decreased. Some of
the programmer's work was exceptional, so the organisation preferred not
to lose him.
Our facilitator identified that the programmer's metaphor was of a 'primordial
soup' behind him, which he fed via Internet information, biology books
and video games. Ahead of him were seven landing sites - current projects
that the primordial soup would produce solutions to. These would come
as a spark and would instantaneously form as a fully functioning model,
which absolutely fitted the 'problem' and were original and quite brilliant.
The important nature of his creativity model was that without 'having
seven useful landing sites' and 'feeding' the soup with new information,
he couldn't influence his system, meaning he couldn't keep to deadlines
or say when a solution would be created!
Realising that restricting workload and giving tighter deadlines was guaranteed
to produce worse results in this system, the director did the opposite
to ensure the 'landing sites' were always filled with work based problems,
and freed the programmer up to surf and read at his leisure. The employee's
productivity increased dramatically and he took on the role of a 'roving'
thinker popping out solutions to problems throughout the organisation. |
