Scenario 3: Sydney’s values are Exceeding but they are falling behind....

Sydney’s been a member of the Design team for nearly two years and was promoted at the beginning of the year.

• They’re a brilliant team player: they bake great brownies to celebrate team birthday’s and successes, they take time to support and coach junior members of the team and follow up on their ideas, they’re also a qualified meditation teacher and have initiated Zoom meditation sessions to calm the team during busy periods.

<aside> 💡 There was no doubt, during the sense check, that Sydney thoroughly deserves an Exceeds values rating.

However, in your view, Sydney is failing to deliver on certain key elements of their role and you need to give them a Meets Most indicator for capabilities today.

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<aside> 💡 Sydney has rated their performance and their values as Meets All.

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• Sydney has become inconsistent in the way they document and track analysis, their reports can be hard to follow and often contain small errors or typos which get spotted by members of your team and other departments.
• Whenever you have spoken to Sydney about these, they always apologise profusely and resolve them immediately…but it has been a repetitive issue.
• Last month, there was some significant confusion over the workflow of a project that Sydney was managing. This very nearly led to the delay of a new feature launch and, while the Engineering team saved the day, it was clear that Sydney had failed to communicate a clear vision and set of recommendations and that there had been some significant gaps in the testing phase that should have been spotted.
• Stevie, a member of the Engineering team mentioned to you at the time that Sydney had seemed out of their depth when asked to make firm recommendations - “it felt like the whole project lacked an anchor, deadlines were extended and there was no sense of urgency until it was almost too late - which is ridiculous given that delaying the feature would have had a significant financial impact”.
• Sydney has talked in 121 about enjoying the creative and collaborative aspects of their role the most and “being on a learning curve” with the need to present their recommendations in a clear, structured and inspiring way.
• You know they live and breathe the world of learning and spend a lot of their spare time visiting sites and making notes. They have lots of insight but often make suggestions that are vague and lack compelling data.
• A more junior member of the Sydney’s team recently mentioned to you in confidence that “while Sydney is a completely amazing colleague on a personal level, everyone is getting increasingly uncomfortable because key decisions never get taken in time, or we decide one thing and then the parameters shift. It’s kind of stressful for everyone - including Sydney”