Antifragile Management and the End of the Annual Performance Review

by Mary Jo Finch and Autumn Solomon on December 6, 2017

MARY JO FINCH is Director and AUTUMN SOLOMON is Associate Director of Westbank Community Library District in Austin (TX). Contact Mary Jo at maryjo@westbanklibrary.com. Contact Autumn at autumn@westbanklibrary.com. Mary Jo is currently reading The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work by Christine Carter. Autumn is currently reading Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman.

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In late 2012, Nassim Nicholas Taleb published Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, the fourth book in his Incerto series, which started with Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and The Bed of Procrustes. Whereas stress breaks fragile systems and does not affect resilient systems at all, Taleb explained, antifragile systems grow stronger when exposed to moderately stressful events. Antifragile systems have the best chance of surviving a “Black Swan,” that unpredictable big event, because they learn how to adapt and evolve through regular exposure to stressors.¹

This idea instantly captivated our administrative team at Westbank Community Library District in Austin (TX). We were new to our roles, and while we were reasonably confident about how a library operates, we had nagging worries about how to protect the library, to make sure it’s still here and thriving a year from now and ten years from now and well beyond our own retirements.

We began pondering how a library could become more antifragile. How could we become the sort of library that could survive a tax cut, a public challenge, a local disaster, or some other unforeseen crisis? How could we become the sort of library that stays relevant to the ever-changing needs of the community? Many staff conversations later, we had the beginnings of a still-growing list of antifragile work culture elements. A new way of handling feedback would be central to the overall culture shift to come.

Elements of an Antifragile Work Culture

We began our examination of the concept of antifragility by looking at nature’s exquisite example, the human body. The body’s muscles and bones grow stronger with exercise, its immune system grows stronger through exposure to germs, its psyche grows stronger one small heartbreak at a time. It has rigid parts and flexible parts. Its biological functions are orchestrated across systems through the sophisticated messaging of hormones and nerves. Its spirit is sustained by relationships and meaningful work. It may not do well under chronic stress or extreme, debilitating stress, but periodic stressors with intermittent recovery time make a person stronger.

Translating this example to our organization, we reasoned that our antifragile library needed

• clear channels of communication;
• teamwork and cross-training;
• employees who are fully engaged, making decisions within their area of expertise;
• employees who know they are valued and are given opportunities to develop;
• supportive relationships both inside and outside our walls;
• regular practice for staff in navigating change and learning new things; and
• an attitude that embraces stressors as information and opportunities to learn, including change, complaints from the public, mistakes, and feedback.

Some of this was already well in place. Our smart, dedicated staff were already working in teams, were already serving as backup for each other, and already had a warm, supportive relationship with the community. They have always had exemplary engagement with their work. We also have an amazing roster of volunteers from the community who work side-by-side with staff, providing 14,000 hours of labor each year and serving as a bridge to different sectors of the community.

Staff were generously prepared to indulge a newbie director and associate director down this path called Antifragile, whatever that meant and wherever it would lead. We began by using the concept of antifragility as a framework for decision making. When faced with a choice, which one makes us stronger? Which one keeps us flexible, which one builds relationships, which one is sustainable, which one is simplest?

Over time, staff members became more conversant in antifragile parlance. Together we learned that while antifragility tends to be simpler, it also tends to be messier, which requires us all to be more flexible. We learned to get comfortable with the unknown and with taking some risks. When we find ourselves making new rules to solve a problem, someone on staff will inevitably remind the rest of us that we are being fragile. We repeat mantras to each other like “It’s not a problem until it’s a problem” and “Mistakes are opportunities” and “This is a good problem to have.”

Creating an Antifragile Workplace

While we didn’t set out to shift our work culture—things were working pretty well when we arrived—the culture did begin to shift, one decision at a time. Our very first antifragile decision was to stop requiring members to have their library card with them to check out materials. This rule had long been a bane of the circulation team, who had to explain to members that even though we could find their account in the system in order to make them a new library card, we weren’t prepared to just checkout their materials to them without selling them a new $1 card or waiting till they returned to the library with their original card. There were multiple justifiable concerns behind this rule, but the rule itself was damaging to our relationship with our members. We took a risk and abandoned the rule. We made a lot of people happy.

This set the tone for decisions to come, many of which were broader in scope. We separated policies from procedures in our documentation and began simplifying them. We restructured our teams with a focus on public service and cross-training, and redesigned our organizational chart to de-emphasize hierarchy. We flattened our management structure as much as possible by encouraging managers to be “bottom-up” in their approach, supporting and guiding more than directing work. We listened to staff concerns and started making the small changes they wanted as the beginning of what would become a continuing evolutionary process. Our strategic plan, adopted at the end of 2013, had a new vision and change at its core.

Eventually, we revised job descriptions to focus on responsibilities rather than lists of tasks. We rewrote our employee manual to describe the kind of experience we are trying to create for our community and the kind of work culture needed to foster that experience. We demonstrated staff value with raised salaries, improved benefits, greater flexibility in staff scheduling, and some sharing of unused sick time during family health emergencies. We quadrupled our professional development budget. And we rede ned the word “fair” to include the idea that any of us, at times, may need something extra, and a fair system—we call it “family fair”—allows for variances in human experience.

Developing Staff to Be Antifragile: The Feedback Loop

For the library to be antifragile, all of us on staff need to be learners who are accountable for our responsibilities, empowered to make decisions, allowed to make mistakes, and challenged to try new things. For a staff unused to this level of autonomy, feedback is vital.

Most organizations unload the bulk of their feedback on the employee in the annual performance review, as we were doing back in 2012. Recent management literature testifies to the shortcomings of this process. In a 2013 survey of 13,000 employees worldwide, management research firm CEB Global found that 65 percent of employees don’t believe performance reviews are relevant to their jobs, 95 percent of managers aren’t satisfied with their organization’s review process, and 90 percent of HR professionals don’t believe their organization’s performance reviews provide accurate information.² In an Adobe survey of 1,500 office workers, 22 percent of them admitted to crying following a review.³

About a third of U.S. companies have now moved away from the traditional annual performance review, because a process that is supposed to motivate good work is doing the opposite.⁴ Employees who are not conditioned to receive feedback have a hard time processing a year’s worth in one sitting. They find the feedback to be untimely, biased, top-down, and judgmental.⁵

Feedback is a stressor, whether delivered in little doses or big doses. But in an antifragile environment, we know that stressors are information and information makes us stronger. The key, we found, is finding a rhythm for it and putting the employee in control of it.

At our libraries, we have developed a feedback loop, which is a continuous cycling of feedback from employee to manager and manager to employee at regular one-on-one meetings and longer, triannual progress check-ins. The process has multiple antifragile goals:

• The employee develops skills of self-reflection, goal setting, decision making, and personal accountability.
• The employee retains a degree of autonomy over daily work.
• The employee is empowered by sharing control of the feedback process.
• The employee and manager develop a trusting relationship where it is safe to try new things, where challenges are addressed, and where mistakes and failures are lessons and opportunities.
• The manager is a partner in the employee’s work and professional development.
• The manager coaches the em- ployee in the direction laid out in the organization’s mission, the strategic plan, and team goals.
• Each employee’s unique role and talents are recognized.
• The meeting format is less important than the fact that they are held regularly, the employee is heard, feedback is shared, trust built, and goals established.

One-on-One Meetings

Most feedback in our libraries happens in the weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one meeting. The employee is encouraged to lead this meeting, reporting on progress from the week, any issues that have arisen, and priorities and plans for the coming week. The employee might ask for feedback on a particular project or raise new topics of concern or interest. The manager may ask questions, acknowledge accomplishments, offer constructive feedback or suggestions, assist with priorities, add new goals or tasks, or raise new topics of her own. The length and frequency of this meeting depends on the complexity of the employee’s job.

This conversation is where trust is developed. It’s where employees and managers learn to be work partners. Having a regular meeting time makes sure this meeting happens most weeks.

Progress Check-Ins

Progress check-ins at our libraries are longer meetings which follow a set of prescribed questions designed to promote a deeper conversation between the employee and the manager. These are two-way conversations with feedback owing both directions. Some of the questions will change from check-in to check-in, year to year. Held three times per year, check-ins focus on goal setting in January, job description review in May, and a year’s worth of accomplishments in September (we budget in October). These meetings typically take one to two hours.