Domain
People Practices
How hiring, performance, promotion, recognition, and exit work — and what they teach the rest of the team about whether good work is seen.
People Practices is the domain in which a frustration almost always traces back to a story the team tells itself about whether effort is noticed. Performance reviews that arrive months after the work, promotions that pass over the most reliable person, recognition that goes to whoever was nearest the leader at the right moment.
The architecture is rarely "the manager is bad." The architecture is that the practice for noticing good work has decayed into a ritual, and the ritual no longer maps to the work. The team can tell. They stop investing in the parts of their job that the ritual doesn't see.
Fixing this domain is unglamorous. It is mostly about closing feedback loops faster, naming the trade-off when a high-performer is passed over, and refusing to let recognition become a popularity contest. None of that lives in an HR system. All of it lives in the manager's calendar.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →
Diagnostic
Ask three of your most reliable people to describe how their work is evaluated. If you get three different answers — or three uncomfortable shrugs — your People Practices have stopped being a practice and started being a story.
Run the diagnostic
Explore this domain in depth once you have a workspace.
Deep link: /field-guide/people-practices
Source: Why Your Best People Stop Trying. Dr. Tim Hough.