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posted by janrinok on Friday July 19 2019, @03:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the meeting-expectations dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday July 20 2019, @02:56PM

    by toddestan (4982) on Saturday July 20 2019, @02:56PM (#869384)

    The other thing I've run into with brilliant jerks is that some of them are entirely ego driven. So yes, they may be very smart and have considerable technical knowledge, but their ego is always getting in the way. Someone may propose a solution, and it's the right thing to do and they know it, but they have to propose and push for something else because their inflated ego demands that the solution must their solution, and not just agree with what someone else proposes. In a decision making capacity, they'll can be quite contrarian - team proposes X, they'll say we're doing Y. Team proposes Y, they'll say we're doing X. Because their ego is more important that doing the right thing.

    Ask them a question they doing know the answer to, and their ego demands that they must have an answer so they'll just blurt something out. They won't say "I don't know, let me find out for you" or "Let me think about it and get back to you" or "Person X would be a good person to ask". Of course, once they've done that, their ego won't let them go back and change their what they said, so they'll just dig their heels in and argue with anyone who tries to correct them.

    This all really makes these kind of people really hard to work with, especially since they tend to take a view that anyone who doesn't agree with them as a personal attack. It's a bit of a shame because they can be brilliant, and quite often they can be completely correct, but it's the times where they are dead wrong but their ego can't and won't admit it and move on is where they do all the damage.

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