Episode 00: Why "Problem Performers?"
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“The term ‘problem performer’ can be used as a scapegoat to help a company evade accountability,” says host Rebecca Weaver, HRuprise Founder and CEO. As someone who has worked in HR for over twenty years, Rebecca didn’t fully understand the implications of the term “problem performer” until she was labeled as one. After being forced to quit her job while pregnant, Rebecca came to the unfortunate realization that as an HR insider, she had been complicit in reinforcing this harmful and toxic workplace culture without even knowing it.
According to Rebecca, the term “problem performer” is used by HR to describe an employee who isn’t meeting performance expectations. Because this label often reinforces manager bias, companies are regularly setting their employees up for failure. Rather than considering other factors such as incorrect job placements or poor management, companies rely on the “problem performer” label to excuse abuse in the workforce, particularly towards marginalized employees. That is why it is so crucial for people who have been labeled as “problem performers” to share their stories and fight for change.
Tune into the premiere episode of Problem Performers to learn what a problem performer is, and how you, like Rebecca, can challenge work environments to implement lasting and meaningful change.
QUOTES
“A ‘problem performer’ label can reinforce manager bias. It can set even high-potential employees up for failure, and it helps employers maintain a status quo that harms people. Most of the time, the people that it harms the most are marginalized employees.” (02:59-03:22)
“I had to tell my boss that my personal reputation was worth a lot more than any severance they could give me.” (15:12-15:20)
“The term ‘problem performer’ can be used as a scapegoat to help a company evade accountability.” (15:59-16:07)
“The concept of problem performer actually can deprive companies of their own high potential talent in the interest of maintaining the status quo.” (16:42-16:49)
“The label problem performer does not define you, your career, your potential, and certainly not your value.” (29:05-29:12)
“We [so-called problem performers] need to tell our stories because our perspective as outsiders and as people who present a problem to the company are really actually very valuable.” (29:35-29:45)
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TRANSCRIPT
Rebecca Weaver 00:00
I looked at my review score, and it was something like a 13 point drop, just barely in the “meeting expectations” category. It was the lowest review score I had gotten in my entire, I think at that point it was, like, 11 years with the company, like, by far. Oh, I can still feel how hot my ears got in that conversation. It was absolutely mortifying, first of all, that I gave myself a review score higher than he gave me. But I was also shocked and embarrassed that I, the person who had once been this high-potential rockstar, was now just barely meeting expectations.
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Welcome to Problem Performers, a podcast about professionals who challenge the status quo at work. I'm Rebecca Weaver. And yes, I too have been labeled a Problem Performer at least once or twice in my career. But looking back, I now wear it as a badge of honor. In fact, all the most interesting people I know have earned this label at some point. In reality, these are the people who challenge their workplaces to be better and do better. I think we should all aspire to be Problem Performers in our work lives. Because the only way to make real change is by shaking things up. So let's get started.
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Hi, and welcome. I'm so glad you're here.
So for this first episode, I figured we would dig into the question: why Problem Performers? Why would you name a podcast that? Why on earth? So let's dig into that question. And I think a good place to start is the background. What exactly is a Problem Performer? What does it mean?
So this is a term that's used in HR for an employee who's not meeting performance expectations. Typically, it is the first of maybe a series of events that happens for someone where the company really is putting their ducks in a row, and documenting the fact that this person is not meeting performance expectations. And most of the time, the path ends with that employee leaving the organization, whether they've decided to move on, or whether they get fired.
So for someone like me, who's been in HR for 20-plus years, and was in charge of leading the talent management process, which is essentially that process that HR and your leaders go through to determine, like, basically putting people into these boxes. Are they a high potential? Are they a strong contributor? Are they a Problem Performer?
Here's the problem with this label. The Problem Performer label can, number one, reinforce manager bias. It can set even high-potential employees up for failure. And it helps employers maintain a status quo that harms people. And most of the time, more often than not, the people that it harms the most are marginalized employees.
So as we all know, in 2017, the hashtag #MeToo, went viral. This was not the first time that that hashtag had ever been used. It was the first time that many of us had been aware of it. But back in 2006, Tarana Burke had used that hashtag, to bring awareness to sexual assault of black and brown women. Fast forward to 2017. And it was the actress Alyssa Milano who sent out a tweet. And essentially she asked other people to step forward and say, “Yes, me too.” And everywhere, women and men too, yes, but especially women everywhere started telling their stories. Standing up, telling stories about how they've been harassed, how they've been marginalized within their workplaces, how they have been sexually assaulted in many cases.
And so as this collective consciousness started to raise in all of these professional settings, it was certainly a conversation that I had never had to that degree before. But as I'm looking at all of these conversations, I started looking back with a couple of different lenses. The first was myself, my own experience. I had sat across the table from probably hundreds of women over the course of my career, and again, I say women because most of the time that was the case, and had heard their stories. And I thought, “I've been pretty fortunate.” And it wasn't until a little bit later, it was maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks, I don't know, but it wasn't right away, that I thought, “Wait a second, I left my last job because of a toxic work environment.” I left my last job when I was the primary breadwinner for our family, I was pregnant, and had a small child and preschool, without anything else lined up, because the environment had grown so toxic. And it was the fact that that didn't come up for me right away, that wasn't in the forefront of my mind, tt was a huge turning point for me.
I'm also looking at all of the stories that are being told sometimes for the very first time. And I'm thinking, how has HR been a part over and over again, this recurring theme of, “HR didn't do anything for me,” or, “I reported it to HR and it went nowhere.” “I was burned by HR.” That's a phrase I have heard countless times. And I started to wonder, how is HR failed employees so thoroughly? And how have I personally been a part of that? How have I personally been a part of this system that perpetuated this harassment and discrimination in the workplace?
So before I get too far ahead of myself, let me tell you the story about that company that I worked for, and the experience I had there. And let me preface this by saying that this episode is mostly going to be me telling my own personal stories. That's not the premise of this podcast. But for the first episode, I want to share how I personally learned how to recognize the problematic nature of traditional HR. Because I know I'm not alone in this. Many of you have your own stories of becoming disillusioned with your workplaces, and your own stories of how HR failed you.
And I want to acknowledge that as a white cisgender woman with a lot of privilege, my experiences don't even scratch the surface of what more marginalized employees have had to deal with. If it was bad for me, we know it is so much worse for people of color, LGBTQ employees, neurodivergent and disabled employees, and people without a financial cushion that allows them to leave a toxic situation like I did. But I wanted to share my story, because it led me to found HRuprise, and this podcast. And because my story is just a microcosm of a much bigger systemic problem that has hurt many of you too.
So if you want to skip ahead to future episodes, where I'm interviewing amazing experts about more specific topics, please feel free, no offense taken at all. But for this one, I'm going to step out of my comfort zone and share the nitty gritty of my own personal journey.
I had the opportunity to go work for this really experimental startup. And it was led by a founder who's really interesting, truly one of the smartest people you've ever met in your life, and one of the most creative thinkers in business. And they were doing some really cool things. For example, our company had roughly 300 employees and no people managers. And it was exactly as chaotic as you might imagine. But going into it as an HR professional, I thought, where else do you get the opportunity to see something like this from the inside out? And even though, when I interviewed, I asked what I thought were some fairly basic questions about, “By the way, how do we deal with problem performance?” Because it was so deeply ingrained in my head at that point. They sort of looked at me and went, “We don't know. That's kind of why you're here.” So I thought, well, this is either going to be the most fascinating experience I've ever had professionally, or it's going to be a complete and utter train wreck. And it turns out, it was both.
For a while, it was just kind of fascinating. It was like no other work experience I've ever had, for sure. We had really fascinating people coming through town all the time. Got the opportunity to interact with them. And it was the kind of environment where I think people just thought big. And there's something very intoxicating about being in an environment like that, where people are big thinkers, and if you come up with your own big ideas, it's just not that out of the ordinary. It's considered normal.
So it maybe took me a little longer than it should have to start to identify a pattern. So for example, there were a few women general managers in the restaurants that we owned and operated. And that was pretty unusual. And so we were pretty proud of that. But we couldn't keep any of them in role. And when they left, they would say, “The expectations are just so far out of whack, I cannot keep up.” Or, “There's a double standard for me.”
We had other employee relations issues that again, we sort of dealt with directly. And for a little while, I saw those as isolated. You know, it's a part of the job. And then I started to kind of see a pattern. You know I looked at the marketing that we were doing for our marquee property. And it was just overtly sexual in nature. In fact, some of it didn't even show women's faces. So it was just a series of body parts being advertised in the name of, you know, being edgy, I suppose. And I can't tell you how many arguments I had with our marketing manager. And I was told, “Stay in your lane. You do HR. You don't understand this market. You don't understand this industry.”
So after a little while, and more things happening internally, decisions being made, you know, women being denied preferable shifts because they were considered too small in stature for security roles, things like that, over and over again, I finally recognized, this is a distinct pattern. And so as the head of HR, I thought, “Well, this is my role.” It was my responsibility to sit down with our leadership and tell them.
And so like any good HR person, I had all the evidence, I had screenshots, I had documents, I had at all. And I sat down with leadership, and I laid it all out for them. I said, “This is a clear and distinct pattern.” And even though it was a little bit scary, I decided to take a risk and share my own personal experience as well. The fact that what they played off as good-natured ribbing about me keeping banker’s hours, was actually really, really harmful to my mental health. I would leave our office at the very last possible moment I could, and still get to the daycare and time to pick up my child. And I think any working parent who has ever experienced this will know exactly what this feels like. So I leave the office at the absolute last possible moment. I come screaming into the daycare parking lot. My child is the last one to be picked up. She's standing there holding the hand of the principal or the teacher, whomever it is. She's the last one there. Then she looks up at me and says, “Mommy, why are you always the last one here?” And yet, when I would leave it that last possible moment, I get the snide comments, walking out the door. “Oh, that must be nice. Oh, HR is taking off for the day.” Even though Mind you it had been a perfectly reasonable working day. And so I felt like I was failing everywhere. I was filling my child. I was failing at work. And so I shared my personal experience with that too.
So not only did absolutely none of that get through, and it did not have the emotional impact that I had hoped...it got much worse. I was all of a sudden pulled out of meetings that I was supposed to be a part of, as part of the leadership team. My tasks were taken from me and given to, you know, this kid in finance. We had said before we had this culture of working from whatever, wherever. And yet, now all of a sudden, where I'm spending every moment of my day is being questioned. And it was brutal. It was absolutely brutal.
And I think, you know, when I look back, I realized that I had without conversation thinking that I was doing the right thing for the organization, hoping for a moment of self reflection, deep introspection; all of a sudden it was clear that I had broken the unspoken trust of the HR organization. I was no longer there to clean up for the organization. I was no longer there to hide what they were doing, or to stand behind these bad decisions that were being made. I was challenging, I was questioning what had been done, and that was absolutely not acceptable.
So the kicker was that eight days after I told the CEO I was pregnant with our second child, he told me I was going to be part of this layoff that he was supposedly planning. I looked at my options, I spent a lot of time in deep reflection, I cried, I did all of the things. And I decided that that was the final straw for me. I mean, I couldn't, I just literally couldn't take it anymore. I was concerned that whatever layoff he thought he was planning was, of course, you know, unethical at best, and probably illegal, at worst. And I didn't want to be any part of it. I was afraid that people would assume that me being the head of HR, that I had something to do with it. And I felt like I had worked too hard for my professional reputation, to let it all fall apart for something that I didn't believe in.
So I quit. And when I went in to give my notice to the CEO, he did seem genuinely surprised. “Well, why wouldn't you wait, and at least get the severance as part of the layoff?” And I had to tell him that my personal reputation was worth a lot more than any severance they could give me.
So I left again, the primary breadwinner for our family. We lived off of savings for almost nine months. Because by the way, that's not a fantastic time, when you're pregnant, the sad reality is, it's not a great time to be looking for a job.
So I learned a number of lessons through this whole experience. And I've come to understand some things about this term “Problem Performer.” The first lesson that I want to talk about is this: Problem Performer, this term, this concept can be used as a scapegoat to help a company evade accountability. This company that I worked for could hear me, this pregnant woman HR specialist, telling them their work environment was toxic for women, and take action to fix it. Or they could label me the Problem Performer and begin their process of getting rid of me. Which option was likely to cost them more money, labor, accountability and time? From a company perspective, it's a no brainer. So “Problem Performer” actually can deprive companies of their own high potential talent in the interest of maintaining status quo.
So as I looked back at that whole experience, again, in the wake of #MeToo, I realized that I had already experienced it years before and hadn't realized it. Back when I was working my way up the corporate ladder.
Early in my career, I was on the high potential track. And this is another HR best practice, when we identify high potential talent and put them in new challenges. And sometimes the term is used, “corporate athlete.” And the company I was working for, had this theory that anybody who is considered “high potential,” anybody who is a true “high potential,” we could put them into any role within the company, because our training was so good on the technical parts of the job, that the leadership was pretty universal. And so we had this theory that high potential should be able to be successful in any role that they had.
So I was on this track. I got really used to being the youngest person in the room. I was promoted many times pretty early in my career. And you know, I really loved having to build credibility with my coworkers. And I had a pretty good run, to be honest. I really loved my job. I love the people I was working with. And I moved around a lot, bounced around the country and kept working my way up.
So then I had an opportunity to do something really different. And I moved from HR, where all of my career had been before that, to operations. And I thought, at best this will be a new career path and something else I hadn't considered. And at worst, I wouldn't regret the experience if I ever went back to HR.
So, at first this job went pretty well, there were parts of it that I absolutely loved. I had a really large team for the first time ever. I had probably, you know, ten or so supervisors, and a couple hundred employees in my department that I was responsible for. I loved getting to know my team members. In fact, this was in supply chain. And I even found a – I was known for my shoes at the time, wearing fantastic shoes, especially when we went to headquarters. I found a brand of heels that I was able to load trailers in. (LAUGH) And I gained a ton of respect for my team for doing that.
So of course, ranking is everything when you're in an operations environment. And so when I joined the department, we were ranked number 22 out of 25. And over the course of my time in that role, I worked us up to fourth.
So I don't know, maybe about a year and my boss was promoted to a new role at headquarters. And I got a new boss. And it's actually somebody I knew. You know, supply chain was a relatively small environment. Lots of people knew everybody. Especially since I had come from a regional role for supply chain, I knew a lot of people. Anyway, so I knew of him. And I thought at first it was going to go, okay. He had really strong personal relationships with a couple of people on my team. They had worked with him before. They would consider themselves to be good friends. And I was ready to make the most of it. You know, he had come from operations, a deep operations background. And so I was excited to learn a lot from him.
But it was pretty clear pretty quickly that things were not going to go very well. He would show up hours before I got there and take notes on everything that was going wrong in my department, and then have it waiting for me as I walked through the door. He talked to my peers about how poorly he felt like my team was doing, or that my department was performing. And I called him on it. And that didn't go very well either. He blamed me for equipment malfunctions that I literally couldn't fix. They did not even make the parts for the equipment that we were using anymore. But I was told, “No excuses.” That was all we always said. “No excuses. You just find a way.”
So the kiss of death was around annual review time. And as I mentioned before, I lead the performance review process for the entire supply chain, or my regions for many years. I learned it at this company. So I knew the process inside and out. I knew both the written and the unwritten rules. And one of the unwritten rules of talent management was that if a person's annual review score dropped by more than ten points from one year to the next, that was a big red flag, and that that person most likely belonged in the Problem Performer category.
So annual review time came around. And I had been pretty miserable for a little while. But I went into the annual review process hoping for at least some acknowledgement of how I had finally turned the team around. It had taken much longer than we planned. But it finally turned around and my team was performing number four out of 25 now.
The year before I'd been given the score of excellent. And I knew that again, our team has struggled a little bit. So when I gave myself a review score, I dropped myself an entire category. And I thought that was fair. You know, I don't remember exactly what the scores were. But I think it was somewhere around five or seven points. And I thought yeah, this is a pretty good, accurate reflection of, you know, I was in a different role the year before, and this was a brand new role and one that I was learning a lot in. But man, sometimes learning can be so, so painful.
So I went in for the review, and I sat down. And we went through the entire thing. I could tell he was a little nervous. And we finally got to the end. And I looked at my review score, and it was something like 13-point drop. Just barely in the meeting expectations category is the lowest review score I had gotten in my entire I think at that point, I was like, 11 years with the company, like by far.
Oh, I can still feel how hot my ears got in that conversation. It was absolutely mortifying, first of all, that I gave myself a review score higher than he gave me. But I was also shocked and embarrassed that I, the person who had once been this high-potential rockstar, was now just barely meeting expectations. And the kicker was like this is all coming from somebody who I barely respected.
So of course, I immediately started looking at my options. What could I do? I didn't want to stick around to be labeled a Problem Performer and get on the dreaded performance improvement plan. I thought, “Well, I could go back to HR,” which clearly was a much better fit for my skill set, and was where I was first identified as that high potential in the first place. But here's the problem: the company I was working for, like many, many companies, this is another HR best practice, that if you're considered or labeled a Problem Performer, you typically are not allowed to transfer to a new job until the performance is turned around.
So this brings us to lesson number two: Problem Performers sets even high-potential employees up to fail. So if you can't transfer to another department where you might be a better use for your talents, what are you to do? What about a person who may just be in a role that's not a good fit? I couldn't transfer back to HR in that setting, unless I could figure out how to turn things completely around in operations first. And it was clear that I was going to have a very, very difficult time doing that.
You lose whatever professional credibility you've built with superiors and other departments as well. So all of the regional teams, other people who would be involved in this decision, I was losing credibility in their eyes as well. And it was, again, it was just absolutely mortifying to me to know that they were all going to see my failure documented in this way. I really was shocked. I was embarrassed more than anything, knowing that my days were numbered at this company that, for all intents and purposes, I had grown up there.
So it wasn't until years later, that I could really see how my fall from grace had so much more to do with my boss's bias than my own shortcomings. So this brings me to, this isn’t one of the lessons I had written down, but I think it's another one that's important to recognize. And that's this: in the context of Problem Performers, if your boss, ‘cause that's typically who this comes down to, if they decide that they're not happy with your performance, they can always find something wrong with your performance. This is just human nature. If you are looking for something, confirmation bias will tell you, that's the fancy term for it, that essentially, if you're looking for something, if you're looking for evidence that somebody is a Problem Performer, you can always, always find it. You can always find something to nitpick. You can always find something to disagree with how they approached it. You can always find something to criticize. And two people, one who's been labeled a Problem Performer and one who's been labeled a high performer, can do the exact same thing, and yet that same person, that same manager, can come to completely different conclusions about what it means for each of those people.
So I realized that in the beginning, my tactic of trying not to rock the boat was really putting me at a pretty significant disadvantage. In the eyes of the review process, we were on pretty objective footing. You know, it was really his word against mine. So I did the only thing that I thought I could do, which was start looking for a new job. And I ended up going back to HR with a different company, with people I had worked with before, actually, who I absolutely adored. And I ended up working for one of the best bosses I've ever had.
And that whole experience changed my perspective on HR. Looking back, I can see how it started me on a path that would eventually lead me to start HRuprise. So this leads me to lesson number four: Problem Performer, the label, does not define you, your career, your potential, and certainly not your value. I know there are a lot of you who have experienced very similar situations to what I just told you about from my past. I know because you've told me, in direct messages and emails, when you wait to talk to me after talks, when we did those things in person. But we need to tell our stories, because our perspective as outsiders, as people who present a problem to the company, are really actually very valuable.
And in fact, possibly most importantly, lesson five: using the term Problem Performer actually deprives companies of an opportunity to make things better. This was one of the biggest realizations I had as I reframed my career path, and arc through the lens of #MeToo. If someone isn't doing well, in a particular job, we label them a Problem Performer. But that prevents us from considering all the ways that the job, the culture, and even the company might need to change.
So for me, I was a high-potential employee who was learning a new field. I was also a high-ranking woman in a company run by men. In both of those instances, I had an outsider perspective that, if it had been listened to, could have had huge potential to increase productivity and success. But my quote-unquote “failures” in both of these positions came when I failed to meet the status quo standards of success, which had been established by decades of insiders who historically have been white men.
I worked so hard to become an insider. I wanted to be a part of that club. It took a global women's movement to help me see how my career had been influenced by misogyny, toxicity, and a huge power imbalance between employers and employees. And it's an imbalance that I, as an HR insider, have been complicit in reinforcing.
So I decided to embrace life as an outsider, and as a Problem Performer, so I could share my years of insight or perspective with the people who need it most. And that's employees like you. We need to share our stories to help light the path for others, and maybe even for our future selves. We need to celebrate and seek out the Problem Performers among us for all the ways that they help us see the world of work in a new light. It is way past time to blow up all the things that we consider to be good company culture. And I founded HRuprise on this conviction.
So in future episodes, we're going to get into all of this. We're going to tell our stories, and make space for each other rather than elbowing each other out. We're gonna flip a few tables, and probably piss a few people off. At least I hope so. I am getting to talk to all kinds of really freaking smart people about this new world of work that we're all navigating. We’ll definitely tell some corporate and HR secrets, and we'll do our best to keep leveling the playing field for employees.
All the most interesting people I know are Problem Performers. I hope you'll join me.
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Problem Performers is the production of HRuprise Media, part of an organization built around a single question: what if you could have HR that works for you rather than your boss? Well, now you can with your own HRuprise Coach. Get affordable, confidential advice from an experienced HR pro who works only for you. Learn more at hruprise.com. That's H-R-U-P-R-I-S-E.com. And hey employers, we've got you covered too. HRuprise provides independent investigations, harassment prevention training, private employee coaching and much more. Find us online at HRuprise.com. Or email us at hello@hruprise.com. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.