As a leader, I am often asking managers who report to me to assess their people. Quite often, the first words are something like “he’s a good guy.” I am ignoring the fact that many of them are women of course, just for the sake of illustration.
What does “he’s a good guy” mean, anyway? nothing.
When someone says that “he’s a good guy” it tells me very little. Maybe it means that he’s a nice person? Maybe it means that he is loyal and that this manager likes working with him? Mostly it tells me that the manager is unwilling or unable to tell me more clearly how to evaluate this employee’s performance. It usually leads to me asking why this “good guy” is not making his numbers, or not making an impact in some measurable way. It then descends into “he’s a good guy, but…”
When someone asks me to assess someone on my team, I try very hard NOT to say “he’s a good guy.” I try to answer with some clear points of description, such as “he has an excellent track record of knowing his numbers,” or “he’s the most responsive person on the team,” or “he’s a strong sales leader, but doesn’t have enough experience at people management yet, but is highly coachable so is worth the investment of time.”
Comments like the last one tell the listener something more useful about this employee than “he’s a good guy.”
So how come when people say “he’s a good guy,” the answer is often “yeah, i’ve heard that about him?” So meaningless – neither party to the conversation has learned anything from that exchange!
Okay I guess that was not much more than a pet peeve, but you get what I mean? I’m a good guy, after all.
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