Performance at Work

A manager asks to change something in her second month. You tell her to run it as written. You are right.

Eighteen months later she asks again. This time she brings evidence, she can name what the rule protects, and she can tell you exactly what she is not going to touch.

And you give her the same answer.

Nothing about the sentence changed. Everything underneath it did.

Organizations are extraordinarily well equipped for the first half of performance. They define expectations, teach the work, measure results, correct failure, and recognize improvement, and most of them do all of it seriously. There is almost never any machinery for the second half. Once capability has changed, who asks whether the distribution of decisions should change with it? Nothing owns that question. It is on no form, in no cycle, and in nobody’s objectives.

So the rating goes up and the relationship stays exactly where it was.

This book is about what an organization owes a person whose capability it has already proven.

It is not an argument for autonomy. Discretion handed to someone who cannot yet carry it is not development, and it has a chapter of its own. Hold, narrow, and build capability first are treated throughout as honest answers rather than failures of nerve. The goal is correspondence between what a person can do and what they are permitted to decide, maintained as both keep changing.

Twenty-two short chapters across four movements, each ending in work you do in your own operation.

• EXECUTE. Find the floor, and separate what was decided from what merely accumulated.


• PROVE. Establish what the evidence supports, across reliability, judgment, stewardship, and learning.


• EARN. Move one decision, deliberately, with a boundary and a review date.


• ADAPT, EXPAND, RENEW. Govern the adaptation already happening, and decide what the organization now knows.

Written for the district manager, the store manager, the shift supervisor, and anyone who can see that a decision should move and cannot move it. Four assignments, no software, nothing anyone else has to see.

Part of the At Work series. Short books on the human capacities organizations cannot afford to lose.