It’s Hard To Aspire To Awesomeness

“But what does my kid have to do to get a Happy Face?!”  
                          —– Frustrated dad at his child’s grade school Parents’ Night, in response to teacher’s explanation about her grading system.

I think it all started a few decades ago with the Happy Face sticker as a way to avoid facing up to the truth that some performance is better than others, and the difficulties of communicating that harsh reality to the performers.

You can see how it happened: Use a big, friendly-looking icon to communicate a generalized kind of approval — “You’ve made me happy” — while sidestepping the troubling business of actually evaluating the work and recognizing it with As, Bs, Cs, Ds and Fs, and running the risk of making somebody feel bad.

As time went on, the aversion to Performance Evaluation found its way into corporate. Some companies are even throwing up their hands and doing away with appraisals altogether.

So it was not particularly surprising to see in a recent article showing some graphs of management effectiveness, the Y axis of performance labeled “awesomeness.”

The article’s actually quite good, and offers some important insights. It’s that particular word choice I found problematic.

Sure, awesome and awesomeness have been around and people have been using them liberally — along with amazing and perfect — to describe everything from meals out to concerts and clothing — almost anything.

As we’ve pointed out in a previous article, the overuse of any adjective tends to crowd out other words that would be more descriptive in a particular case. In addition, the broadening of a superlative so that its use includes so-so kinds of behaviors and results tends to reduce its usefulness in describing things that are, well, truly superlative.

While all this may be harmless enough in common conversation, problems arise when this word version of the Happy Face finds its way into describing what we expect of leaders in the work place:

• As a definition, it’s over-broad. It includes too many different kinds of qualities.
• As a standard it’s vague. How much “awesome” is good enough, more than adequate, abundant?
• It describes a perceived general character trait when we should be talking about specific behaviors.
• Worst of all, it attaches itself to individual, privately-held standards of “happy-ness,” to be doled out — or not — in sync with the personal mood of the observer.

This last one’s particularly troubling, and harkens back to the origins of the Happy Face: “If someone’s happy, then you as their leader must have made them so, and you should be proclaimed awesome. But if they’re sad or displeased, then sorry, you’re not so awesome after all.”

Work is complicated enough without managers having their decisions evaluated on the whimsical scales of the happiness levels of individual team members at any given moment in time.

When prescribing standards for work, drop the verbal Happy Face. Use words that clearly and unequivocally communicate the results you’re looking for, hold up the performance to those standards and communicate about it.

See our LinkedIn post Before You Drop Appraisals, Try Fixing Them.