This week for the 27th time, my son and I made the pilgrimage to Nashville for the country music festival. There was one big difference this year.

While we have met performers over the years, dozens of them, this year we knew a performer that took the stage at Fan Fair X, the convention center where artists meet with fans and rising stars perform.

AJ Kross, one of those rising country stars and an artist we have followed since he married Krista Angelluci from Massachusetts, appeared on the spotlight stage and wowed the crowd. You can learn more about this talented musician and songwriter here. AJ Kross

Back in the 70’s, the Ford Motor Company was between the Falcon and the Taurus with a car called the Granada. 

It was supposed to be a luxury car at a budget price and had a self-annointed label as a Mercedes-Benz equivalent. It wasn’t and it didn’t. And by 1985, it was gone with the ubiquitous Taurus becoming the car that drove Ford’s revenue. (Good pun there, eh?)

I was just beginning my management career during this time, and the Granada had an advertising slogan that I adopted and kept in practice for my entire leadership career. 

The slogan was ‘The closer you look, the better we look.’ 

I was just fascinated by the messaging, and committed to leading my teams so that we could always say that. Maybe unfortunately, ‘they’ didn’t always look that close, so the satisfaction of a job well done was enough most of the time.

I realized early on why ‘they’ didn’t look as close as I wanted them to.

I learned that supervisors didn’t know everything about what was going on, many had no desire to, and quite frankly, supervisors guessed at a lot of things. 

When I became a supervisor, I didn’t know everything about what was going on, and guessed at a lot of things, too.

In my current role, one of the lines I use regularly in training is that leaders are all ‘professional guessers.’ That’s because leaders need to act on limited information most of the time. Almost no decisions or evaluations are based on 100% knowledge.

And today, with more and more supervision done remotely, the ‘professional guesser’ is now a ‘remote professional guesser.’ More and more supervision is done by managers without a lot of supervisory (guessing) experience. More and more supervision is done with less and less time investment. These three factors, remoteness, inexperience, and less time, can lead to a host of problems, for both supervisors and those being supervised.

Let’s break down some numbers about supervision to validate the ‘guessing’ claim, to see exactly what the ‘guessing’ is built on.

1.      Time: There are 2080 work hours in a year when someone works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks. (OK, 2,000 hours with two weeks of vacation). No one does exactly that, but 2080 is considered a ‘work year’ for some human resources calculations. If someone works 50 hours a week or works 30 hours a week, it is not a standard year, but for the sake of this illustration, pretend everyone works the same amount.

2.      Attention: Of those 2080 hours, how many hours are direct reports with their supervisor? There could be a range that depends on how many individuals one person supervises, the nature of the job, and other factors. For our illustration, let’s say a direct report is with their supervisor (in person or virtual) 10% of the time or 208 hours or about 4 hours per week. A lot maybe, but this is an illustration. That time could be broken up into meetings, one on one conversations, email or text exchanges and so forth.

3.      Evaluation: In addition to the four hours per week that a supervisor, in this illustration, is with a direct report and observing performance, interactions, communications, behavior and more, how many hours do you think a supervisor spends simply thinking about or evaluating an individual’s performance or reviewing work product? Of course most spend a few hours around performance review time, but in general, you’d be damn lucky to have a supervisor spend 2 hours a week evaluating your work, or 104 hours per year.

4.      Focus: The math adds up to this: an individual supervisor probably spends a max of about 312 hours per year focused on anyone they supervise, or about 6 hours per week. If a supervisor has five direct reports, that’s about 75% of their work week focused on people. Most supervisors spend considerably less time. In fact, you could easily cut this number in half or cut by 75% because the time invested by a supervisor varies greatly and varies based on experience and talent (as we all know).

5.      Remote: And, if it is a remote work situation, the numbers may be cut in half again. A new manager, who doesn’t spend the time, supervising a remote employee and instead of 312 hours per year focused on an individual, it could be less than 50 hours per year. Not a close look.

What does this mean?

All supervisors are evaluating their charges based on clues and a smattering of data. Every individual knows more about how they are actually doing than their supervisor. That is a fact.

That’s one of the reasons that performance appraisals each year are not as accurate as they should be (in our minds). Supervisors sometimes form conclusions and then find the data to support them. Supervisors without a lot of experience don’t have as many clues and don’t dig very deep to find true performance factors. 

In other words, the statement ‘supervisors look closely at performance’ is almost an oxymoron. They look, but probably not very closely. This breeds a ‘get by’ culture among some employees.  They think ‘my supervisor thinks I’m doing ok, based on their limited investment in reviewing my work, so I’m getting by.’

The reality is that almost anyone can look good, or ok, when the look is cursory or superficial or random or occasional. 

If an individual lives by this standard, it also implies that if a supervisor spent enough time evaluating performance, or someone with a lot of experience evaluated performance, or someone with experience in remote supervision evaluated performance, the rating would suffer, and judgement day would arrive, but it would be too late to do anything about it.

If, on the other hand, an individual did their job, whatever it might be, with the idea that ‘the closer they look, the better I look’ they become immune somewhat to the lazy or undertrained supervisor. 

That person will still look good on the quick glance, but when there is a deeper dive into performance elements, they will look better, not worse.

If you are skeptical about this theory, think back to a time when a supervisor changed in your organization. It is likely that most people, or everyone within that person’s span of control, either moved up in performance ratings, or moved down. That’s because a different amount of time, attention, focus or evaluation criteria were introduced.

What Should You Do?

With the amount of change in business and companies, the best way to performance success that gives you the most security or comfort or stability is to have this ‘the closer you look…’ perspective.

You know you are not going to have the same supervisor forever unless you are in a family business. You may change jobs or jobs may change you.

If you adopt the standard or aspiration of ‘the closer they look, the better I look’ and conduct yourself that way, you are all set. 

This ‘mantra’ is based on the premises stated above. Your current supervisor doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about your performance (at least not as much as you do), and you can get away with a lot that they don’t see or don’t evaluate.

But you see it and you evaluate it. When judgement day comes, that day when someone new evaluates you or someone old looks more closely, the best way to be ready is to have been operating with the personal goal to look better when they look closer. 

What’s the alternative? To look worse when they look closer? Not a worthwhile goal. To look the same when they look closer? Possible, but rarely happens.

The same concept works for teams if you are the team leader. ‘The closer they look, the better we look,’ was a key cornerstone of my personal leadership style. A former direct report who was recently promoted to vice-president at her organization reminded me of this during an informal conversation when she said the words as if they were her own, and they are now.

There may be better ways to do your job, and when I find one, I will share it, although I am doubtful. The reason is that this approach is about the highest standard you can have because if you don’t lower your standards to the supervisor’s standards, and you use those 2080 hours, or however many there might be, to do things that will be solidly rated with intense scrutiny, you will last longer than the Ford Granada.