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Atlassian ditches 'brilliant jerks' in performance review overhaul
Atlassian says it will no longer tolerate "brilliant jerks" who deliver results for the company but make life hell for their co-workers as part of a complete overhaul of how the tech firm conducts performance reviews.
The $47 billion Australian software company, which was founded in Sydney in 2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.
Instead, equal weighting will be given to how each of its 3000 employees impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values. Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work”.
“Basically over the last 18 to 24 months we have totally changed the way we do performance reviews at the company globally,” Atlassian global head of talent Bek Chee said.
“We recognise things are not the way they used to be, yet companies haven’t evolved (from) 30 years ago when they were primarily made up often of white men. Tech standards have evolved, we have new ways of working, new demographics and generational change.”
Ms Chee said most companies “haven’t looked at their performance systems in a new innovative way”. “We wanted to make sure we were rewarding the right behaviours,” she said.
“One of the things we wanted to make sure we accounted for was the ‘brilliant jerk’ — people who are extremely bright and talented with respect to the way they execute their role but aren’t necessarily concerned with the impact they have on others. We want to make sure our system prevented that.”
Ms Chee said it was “not about people being shuffled out” of the company, but “what it has allowed us to do is really de-bias the performance system” by taking into account an employee’s entire contribution.
[...] Ms Chee said appealing to the millennial and gen Y and Z crowd was “a huge part of this”. “We know the next generation are very socially conscious, they have a different set of expectations. They’re kind of no-bullshit. They don’t want to hear a company say, ‘You can bring your whole self to work, we’re diverse, we’re socially conscious’, and not have that backed up.”
But she stressed that it was not about coddling millennials with a participation-trophy mentality. “Fundamentally this does not change the way we think about high performers. Our top performers we know nail it in terms of living values and being part of the team and delivering in their role,” she said.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @04:18AM
He thought he was putting himself in the center of a multimillion dollar project that was going to be installed in millions of places.
I and the other senior guys would tell him all the time how he is screwing up the project and exactly how to fix the project. He would not listen at all. I and the other senior people practically begged him not to do it. His manager enabled it. I even showed him the exact path to make the project a real winner. He would have none of it. He kept re-writting because he did not really understand the customers and what they wanted. I kept telling him listen to your customers. They are telling you exactly what they want and they are throwing money at us to do it. But the naming convention was more important and sitting in hours long meetings telling everyone how he was right and they were hurting his feelings was more important. The cool blinking light demo was more important. The sales guys stopped working with him. The customers only would deal with me and another guy and would avoid him.
It's one thing to not keep relevant details secret
I have come to realize this is a major PITA for anyone involved including the hoarder. Share it, wiki it, doc it, involve the others. Or someone *will* bug you on your holiday. Unless you get off on the 'i am needed' rush...
quite another to spend work time making sure you're expendable
I strive for that. That way everyone can help each other. The 'hey I am going on vacation 'sure no problem I got you covered' and everyone can have a happy life. Or hoard data and end up on call all the time in the middle of the night. This 'info' is the companies. They paid for it. It needs to be available to everyone involved. Hell a few weeks ago I was on a team of 4 people. 3 were on vacation. I took care of it all. It was a bit rushed and the amount of other work was lower. But it was taken care of. They came back and then did the same for me. No one called in during vacation. Bringing in new people is a breeze and they come up to speed quickly.
Most of all keep it nice and fun and professional. Do not be a jerk. The sad bit is he probably does no think he is the problem. As he is a narcissist. That took me a bit to come to terms with as I had never dealt with one that bad before. Once I realized he was using narcissistic tricks on me and those around him it was easy to deal with him. Isolate and contain and make sure everything is properly documented around him. Most of all do not let him gaslight you or badmouth you in weird ways. A narcissist is 100% unable to internally take on the idea they are making things worse. His favorite trick was to bitch people out then BCC others to 'prove' how he was right and make you to look like you are irrational. All to create a zombie army of followers. That took some time to undo that damage. I even showed him how I was going to do it. He did not understand it. He could not understand why we ripped up his whole 'empire'. Well dude you took something that was netting 250k a month and ran it down to costing us money every month. Thats why.
My instinct when we hiring him was something is not right. The rest of the group were iffy on him but he had the right qualifications. I should have leaned in on that and figured it out. I know what to ask in interviews now though!