The 8 Mental Blocks To Managing Performance

Over my last decade of coaching, I have observed eight psychological blockers that can limit or undermine a startup leader’s ability to manage performance. I summarize the blockers in the table below. If you want to dig in to understand each blocker and learn how to overcome it -- keep reading below.

#1 - Undeserving-ness

Sometimes when I sense a startup leader is really struggling to make quality hires or is tolerating underperformers for too long, I ask them this question:

Do you deserve to have great people working for you?

I rarely hear a simple “No,” but I do hear rationalizations like: “Well, we’re so early….I’m paying below-market...This is my first company...we haven’t proven ourselves yet…I’ve never managed executives before so I’m not sure how to even know they’re great...” and so on.

There is an important difference between an economic reality that your company doesn’t have the budget (yet) to afford a hire who commands a certain price in that labor market and a more internally-constructed “reality” that, when you dig past all the rationalizations, eventually comes down to you not believing you deserve or are worthy of having great people work for you.

What does this blocker look like in practice?

Not reaching high enough when hiring/shying away from recruiting the super-star who no one thinks you can get and settling for the person who feels more ‘gettable’
Tolerating too much underperformance and for too long
Not enough demanding/insisting on the quality you are hoping for (or even just asking for it in the first place)

The antidotes to this are two-fold:

1 - Cultivating your own worthiness; a deeper belief that as a human, you are worthy enough to have “great” people helping and supporting you, and that “worth” is not conditional on some external accolade or metric you need to “prove” first.

2 - Re-framing my question to be less about you and more about your product, company, team, or mission. This shifts you to the role of “steward” and it’s usually easier to demand quality when you are care-taking for someone/something else rather than insisting on it for yourself.

Does this product deserve to have great people working to help it grow and thrive?
Does this team deserve to have great people joining it?

These questions are often easier to answer in the affirmative without equivocation. And that belief will shift your behaviors and set you up to manage performance more effectively.

#2 - Fear of “Being Wrong”

This blocker emerges when it’s time to set/communicate expectations to an employee or time to make a decision/judgment call about whether they are performing sufficiently or not. It tends to sound like this on loop: “I just don’t know what to expect from someone leading that function, I’ve never led that area myself before….Are my expectations even realistic? How can I know that if I replace them I will get better performance?....I just don’t know!”

To be clear, asking these questions is a normal part of any performance management practice. Asking these questions invites us to seek out additional perspective. Calibrating expectations with others whose judgment you trust is a useful practice. (For example, calling up an advisor, mentor or operating partner from your VC firm who specializes in that functional area as they can help you calibrate what is fair to expect from someone in that role at a company of your stage/size, etc.) Reflecting on your expectations, revisiting your assumptions about what level of ability you need for this role at your company can also help you to gain perspective.

If, after absorbing this perspective, you decide to adjust or shift your expectations, that can be an effective part of your practice as well.

It’s when you are asking those questions on an infinite loop that the blocker disrupts or undermines the efficiency of your performance management. It’s a reflection that you ultimately don’t trust yourself to make this decision, and that lack of trust stems from a deeper fear of “being wrong.”

The antidote to this is: cultivating more trust in your ability to make the best decisions you can with the information you have.

You will make some “bad” performance management decisions along the way. You’ll hire ineffectively at times. You’ll let an underperformer languish for too long. You’ll fail to “set someone up to succeed.” That is part of the BINGO-game-we-call-manager-development. The key is learning how to learn so that you only fill each square of that BINGO card once.

How can you improve your ability to make decisions about performance? How can you get better and quicker access to information that will help you decide? If you focus on that, you will naturally build more trust in your ability to decide about performance -- from hiring to firing and everything in between.

#3 False Omnipotence

This blocker manifests in two ways:

The first is more internal: You set unrealistic expectations of your own managerial abilities and what you “should” be able to do.

The second emerges more in how you relate to your employees or direct reports: You put too much pressure or responsibility on yourself for your teammates’ success and happiness at work.

The first antidote starts here: You are not a Superhero Manager so take off the cape and goggles. And take a clear-eyed and compassionate look at your own manager story, and the current conditions and challenges you are facing.

Who are you right now as a manager?

What are your strengths and where are your weak spots?
How do the current conditions at your startup limit what you can achieve in some areas?
How do those same conditions free you up to do other things to learn + grow as you go?
Where do you need to let go of naivete or magical thinking about your abilities, limits or constraints?

Self-acceptance is not lazy. It won’t block you from pushing yourself to grow. It will only focus and direct those pushes to have maximum impact.

The second antidote is also about acceptance, but this time a more external-looking acceptance: Where can you, as a manager, influence conditions for employees? Those become your responsibilities as a manager.

And importantly, ask yourself: where is it the employee’s self-responsibility to manage themselves alone? They are separate human beings who are outside of our control. Those answers become your boundaries as a manager. (And for the vast majority of managers, responsibilities are easier to implement than boundaries.)

Alarm bells fire for me whenever I hear startup managers talk about how part of their job is to “make sure their reports are happy.” No matter how emotionally skilled you are, no matter how attuned, another person’s emotions are never under your control. And any notion or attempt to take responsibility for someone else’s innermost thoughts and feelings will lead to some very ineffective (if not, destructive) performance management.

The boundary can be hard to see and feel sometimes, but it’s there. Yes, we often tell managers part of their job is to “retain talent” but what we mean by that is: “try your best to create conditions where most talented people will, of their own volition, want to stay for as long as we need them to continue creating value for the company.” We don’t mean: “do things, say things and decide things that keep people happy and also make sure to take on all their negative feelings as your own burden to manage and regulate.”

Many startups are averse or even allergic to “cold, hierarchical, corporate” cultures -- instead they strive to be warm, flat and highly collegial/collaborative -- but these cultures have their own shadows. Startups, especially those that tout their caring and human-centered cultures, can over-correct and create norms where managers over-empathize and bring a false sense of omnipotence to their interactions with reports, rather than focus on creating conditions for self-responsibility.

#4 - Fear of “Personal” Failure

For this blocker, it’s important to emphasize that I am not referencing some general fear of failure (i.e., like the company failing) but a more personalized fear of being “a failure”.

This blocker leads to behaviors that “protect” the individual manager from “feeling like a failure,” but (ironically) often increase the probability that the team will struggle to achieve goals, thereby increasing the chances the company will fail.

This includes behaviors like:

procrastinating or freezing when needing to make a tough decision or engage in a tough conversation re: performance (The implicit logic is: If I don’t do the thing, I can’t fail at it.)
over-anchoring to the (individual) costs of “bad hire” error and ignoring the (company) costs of “languishing underperformer” error
selection bias: “cherry-picking” data to support the “easier” next step for a manager (i.e., “This person is actually performing acceptably, well, right?”)

The two antidotes for combatting this particular form of fear are cultivated by:

1 - Taking actions from a place of interpersonal courage vs. intrapersonal fear. Start with actions (doing/saying things) that feel lower risk to you and increase the risk level as you go. Keep track of whether your fears manifested as expected and what rewards you discovered on the other side of the action. You’re rewiring your brain to feel less threatened by the fear and more incentivized by longer-term rewards of more honest disclosure.

2 - Shifting your reflexive response after something you call a mistake/failure away from generating shame and towards generating curiosity. I sometimes call this the “Fierce Learning Reflex” because it needs to be fierce and feisty to compete with the years/decades of a behavior pattern where you negatively label yourself and feel some form of shame after an error/failure/loss. In the words of my coach Ed, “You’re not a screw-up...you’re figuring it out.”

#5 - Misplaced Loyalty

This blocker runs rampant at startups, particularly in contrast to their more corporate/mature company counterparts. Startups, especially at an early stage, are composed of small teams who work together in conditions that forge a lot of intimacy (long hours, high stakes, emotional intensity) and many teams recruit from their “friends and former teammate” groups so these pre-existing bonds further amp the strength of interpersonal connection.

When you misplace loyalty, you treat your employees (either in your head or in person) as you would treat friends or family. As a result, you may be slower or hazier to provide constructive feedback, or evaluate performance negatively or make changes to their role.

You’re also more prone to over-empathize with employees instead of compassionately managing them and their performance.

And here’s the thing: these people are not your friends or your family. The re-frame I heard once is: “A company is a team, not a family.” You decide which players to put on the field for any given game. You decide when to retire or trade a player. You make commitments to players while they are on your team, but you don’t owe them the life-long loyalty most people feel they owe family or friends. It sounds reasonable enough.

But to be honest, as un-clever as it is, I have come to believe that the best metaphor for a manager-employee relationship is no metaphor at all, but instead a clear-eyed appraisal of what’s possible and what’s not possible in that unique relationship context.

I know there is a deeply held bias here in startups; it’s why I often feel compelled to write “teammate” instead of “employee” because that’s how many founders and leaders refer to their people, believing the latter is too cold and corporate a term.

But what if we make it possible to have a rich and meaningful interpersonal relationship between a manager and employee? Such that we don’t have to mislead ourselves by thinking of them as friends, family or teammates?

The antidote is cultivating manager-employee relationships that can be close, intimate and have a strong foundation of interpersonal connection --- but still retain the boundaries, power differential and mutual expectations that come with a “manager-employee” relationship.

A CEO I knew once put this distinction to me quite starkly: “I used to feel bummed or even a little hurt that my teammates wouldn’t invite me to certain happy hours or social gatherings. Then, when we went through a major RIF and I had to fire 20+ people in one day, it finally clicked for me. My teammates are not my friends. Friends don’t have the power to fire you and take away your salary + benefits with a single decision.”

Do people “become friends” with the people with whom they work? Of course. Work is a HUGE thing to have in common and we spend a lot of time there (especially in a startup). I am all for the startup manager-employee relationship having elements of collegiality or emotional intimacy if those elements serve both sides and help an employee to perform.

The key is to check in with yourself at intervals: “How does this closeness serve my ability to manage? How does it serve my employee’s ability to perform?” If the answer is shifting to the closeness becoming more of a blocker, you need to hit reset in some way.

Final note: What about when you hire your best friend as your first employee? Or recruit a college buddy to join your team? Ask yourself:

Could I fire this person when their ability to perform no longer meets what the company demands?

If the answer is no, don’t hire them. (And notice that I chose to use “when” not “if” in the question above--it helps you to confront this scenario more head-on.)

#6 - Hot-Cold Empathy Gap

As a human, it’s always easier to say you’d never do X, but in the heat of the moment you might actually do X. Why? Because our brains are bad at predicting how our emotions in the moment might direct our behavior. Psychologists call this the “hot-cold empathy gap.”

Many startup managers (in a “cold” moment) have a solid cognitive understanding of what they need to do, say, or take action on to manage performance -- but in the “heat” of the moment, they struggle to actually do the thing or say the thing. (Example: You go into a 1-1 with all your feedback talking points swimming in your head, and then in the “heat” of the conversation you only squeak out one or two points with a much more accommodating tone than you had planned to use.)

What’s the antidote? You can’t just “will” yourself to follow-through in the hot moment or hope you’ll remember the resolve you felt in the cold moment. Instead, you have to bolster your practices or your processes to ensure you make the choice you want to make in the hot moment. Instead of just hoping you’ll bridge the hot-cold empathy gap on your own, you build a bridge ahead of time.

There are myriad practices and processes you can build -- it just depends on which particular hot moment you want to address. Examples:

If you often sugar-coat feedback, you can: (1) make sure you write out your feedback and then in the 1-1 hand your feedback to your direct report so you have both your dialogue to calibrate the conversation; or (2) communicate on a 1-10 scale how urgent/important something is for them to address (if something is an 8, it will grab their attention even if your tone lands a bit soft or accommodating)
If you’re worried you will give away too much in the heat of a severance/departure negotiation, you can ask a teammate/co-founder/HR rep to join you for the conversation and pre-game with them to step-in if they see you at risk for undermining your position.
If you know you will let “work” get in the way of doing your end-of-month rapid performance evaluations, you can turn a peer manager into an “accountability buddy” to meet with monthly and check-in briefly on how your respective rapid evals went.

#7 - Short-Term Emotion Bias

Similar to the hot-cold empathy gap, this blocker comes installed with the way the human brain is designed.

Startup managers, and all humans, are susceptible to emotional bias that leads us to make decisions that feel “good” in the short-term but actually set us up to experience “bad” outcomes in the long-term.

Broadly-speaking, this blocker manifests whenever you: make decisions that privilege minimizing discomfort or negative emotion now over emotional upsides & benefits in the future.

For example, have you ever:

fired a recent hire before they even reach their 30-day review?

told someone who has been giving 100% for months that it’s still not enough for them to stay in a role?
informed a hiring panel that you aren’t going to hire the one candidate they all love and spent weeks interviewing?

If so, how did it feel? If not, how uncomfortable is it to imagine doing those things?

Our brains come pre-wired with discomfort signals and fear-response mechanisms to keep us from doing something that is dangerous to ourselves or others. But sometimes we need to pause and re-calibrate the risks our overactive brain perceives.

If the thought of saying/doing something feels uncomfortable or unpleasant, is it accurate to take that as a sign that we should not say or do the thing? Emotional bias loses its power to mislead us if we simply pause to challenge it. One tactic I often use here is 2/2/2. If you do X, how will you feel in 2 hours, 2 days, 2 weeks? Or, how will you feel in 2 days, 2 months, 2 years? Forcing yourself to imagine how a future you might feel is sometimes all you need to get past this particular blocker.

#8 - Fear of “Starting Over”

Hiring is hard. It takes a tremendous amount of time and energy, especially when the team is under-resourced or scaling quickly and starving for you to hire more. And when you’re hiring executives, we are talking about searches that typically take months of sustained effort, not weeks.

In these contexts, it can feel incredibly deflating or distressing when you first realize you might need to fire and replace someone who is relatively new.

I’ve heard many leaders express these intense feelings, saying things like: “I can’t believe I have to start over.” They feel a mix of fear, dread, regret, resentment and this mix of heightened negative emotion can undermine their ability to accurately forecast the cost-benefit of re-hiring or replacing an employee.

It’s a common dilemma that startup leaders face: Is it better to keep an underperformer in the role or better to have that role be empty for some time? There aren’t easy answers to that question, but what I do know is that getting your head clear so you can grapple with that question is essential.

The antidote, then, is to dive into that question from a place of greater clarity by re-framing the story. You are not “starting over” on this hire. You are hitting reset. Things are different now. Time has passed. The context is more clear and you can see more nuance. You have learned. And, most importantly, you are a different leader & manager for having hired & fired in that role. You’re not starting over, you’re hitting reset. And, yes, resets aren’t without cost or negative emotion---but they’re not the same as being back at square one.

Photo by Matthew Garoffolo on Unsplash