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Know your cats. Using the types of cat to manage humans
What substituting a human being with a cat tells us about how we need to manage them
At some point in your career as a manager you need to make a decision about whether (or how) to reward someone in your team. You will also need to make a decision about how (and when) to intervene if they are struggling or, in some cases, harmful to the team. This article can give you an idea when you need to take action and how urgent that is. It’s biased towards the case where there’s a problem because it’s easy to tell someone they’re doing great (harder to get them promoted sometimes and I’ll write about that problem elsewhere). Telling someone they are not doing great (or in the worst case — needing to walk them to the exit) is hard. It will make you doubt and hate yourself in equal measure the first time you have to do it. You’ll find reasons to put it off and end up doing more harm in the long run.
First, some history. This whole spiel came about from a conversation I had with a colleague at Google who postulated that the simplest way to know whether someone is effective is to replace them with a cat and see what the net difference is to the team. Or as my colleague put it “this person is no better than a cat”. If the delivery stayed the same then the person is ineffective. This got me thinking and I came to the conclusion that there…
