The Mistaken Shoulds of Performance Reviews
Performance Reviews: What Most Well-Intentioned Leaders Get Wrong
It’s PERFORMANCE REVIEW TIME!
Rarely do those words solicit joy and excitement.
Oftentimes these ignite a feeling of dread, fear, anger or even perhaps indifference.
In our collective 30+ years of performance reviews, organizational behavior research and high-performance team creation, here are all the “should’s” that seem to be pervasive in the modern day performance reviews and how leaders can take steps to change. Here are five performance review myths and missteps that effective teams avoid.
Myth #1: Performance Reviews can just be done once a year
Imagine you think everything in a relationship is going right and them bam! You get some feedback that it’s opposite of what you thought. You’ll probably feel surprised, even blindsided. On top of that though, how are you allowed the time and space to change if the next time you get feedback that you’re on the right track is a year later? On a relationship level, it doesn’t make sense. So why would it make sense between an employer and employee?
Think about professional sports. A basketball coach is right there on the sidelines observing the game the entire time. An American football team has an entire staff sitting at the top level of the stadium observing the game and radioing down adjustments to the coaches on the field. We don’t need or want someone constantly looking over our shoulder at work - but what we do want is feedback to happen more in real-time. When we receive timely feedback we are able to make adjustments to our performance.
First Step: When something you want to see more often happens, say it. Get into the practice of providing that feedback with specificity and impact in mind. There’s no need to wait for the end of the year or even end of the quarter.
Long Term: Effective feedback is timely - ideally you have a business process that helps it happen continuously in as close to real time as possible. People can make adjustments more quickly and begin to practice successful behaviors the sooner they know about them. Develop a culture around having effective 1:1 meetings weekly or every other week in your company. This enables you to also provide constructive criticism where needed, alongside a plan to develop it. Constructive criticism itself sits in the “complaint” category but enabling a plan to develop or fix it, sets a different tone of growth. You can use software like GoMobi.work to help managers lead these meetings and collect insights into how your team is performing.
Myth #2: Reviews are for leaders to tell employees what’s missing.
One of the key reasons employees think of performance reviews with dread is that it mainly feels one-sided, like when you were a teenager and your parents sat you down to “talk” and you knew it was really they wanted to say something and your thoughts were secondary if not non-essential to the discussion. This is the setting and expectation our past experiences have created. As leaders, we need to approach this fully as a two way conversation and we can start with simple actions.
First Step: Create an invitation to the conversation. Start off with an invitation to participate in the conversations. In this conversation and in every performance conversation, adopt a stance of collaborative problem solving ie. “I’m here to help you figure this out”.
Long Term: Forming a high-performing culture has a great deal to do with empowering people to take ownership and make decisions on their own. By engaging in an inquiry-based approach to feedback that makes it a two-way conversation, you are setting the stage for the employee to connect the dots themselves and have a firsthand understanding of what they might do better next time.
Myth #3: Just state the problem
No. You, as a leader, need to actually offer specific suggestions or resources for improvement and before you can even effectively do that, you do need to understand a deeper level of the circumstances that require this to be a full two-way conversation.
First Step: Work with your team to define what success looks like. We call these your Guiding Principles. The objective of this exercise is to create a set of shared agreements about what high-performance looks like. Your guiding principles may differ from role to role, department to department, and you will want a set that is linked to your core values that apply for the entire company. Developing these is a collaborative process - ask people what they think and have everyone sign off on it together.
Long Term: Great performance management is a process of refinement. In order to refine, we can diagnose a situation by asking “what is this a case of?” and using our guiding principles to evaluate the best path forward from where you’re standing. Shift your perspective as a leader from identifying problems, tracking problems, and even solving problems to one primary responsibility: asking your people questions that will help them realize what they need to do to solve the problem and empower them to take the steps to do it.
Myth #4: Broad reviews of performance themes are enough - no real need for specifics or examples
Imagine this, you are told that when there are potlucks, you aren’t cooking the right things and it’s causing people not to enjoy the occasion. You might try cooking something else, but next time you bring a dish it’s similarly unpopular. You feel at best confused and at worst hopeless. However, if someone pulls you aside and says “thanks for bringing a cake, but here’s the thing. People really prefer savory dishes to sweet, and they really like hot food. Also, they prefer to use their fingers instead of having to use a form and a knife like with cake. Could you keep those key things in mind for next time?” Guess what - most likely your next dish will be much closer to the mark.
Great feedback enables what is called Deliberate Practice. Deliberate Practice, a term coined by human motivation & performance researcher Dr. Anders Ericsson, is defined as being “effortful in nature, with the main goal of personal improvement of performance rather than enjoyment, and is often performed without immediate reward.” (Psychology Today, 2011). According to Ericsson’s research, Deliberate Practice is intently focused on one specific thing, for example a free throw on the basketball court, or a specific kind of coding problem. By narrowing their focus, the person practicing is able to rehearse specifically what success looks like in that one small area and address any small weaknesses they may have. By doing so, they can become exceptional at doing this thing. You want your feedback to help the people on your team become exceptional.
First Step: Another case for developing a set of Guiding Principles for effective performance reviews. Work with your team to define the critical drivers (hint: these are behaviors like persistence not KPIs like calls completed) for each role and what excellent performance looks like for each of them. In every conversation about performance, these should be specifically referred to with examples. The more specific, the better - it can help you create a deliberate practice strategy for the person you’re leading.
Long Term: As your team progresses, collect examples of excellent performance with as much detail as possible. Work samples, detailed customer stories, sales scripts, anything that demonstrates the ideal representation of what you’re looking for. We call these your “artifacts”. If someone is struggling, help them analyze their work using the ideal as a reference. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE is it acceptable to frame this conversation as judgment - it should be treated neutrally like a science experiment. What is similar between these two things? What is different? What’s preventing one from having the results the other is getting?
Myth #5: Everyone should be ready for feedback anytime.
In the typical workplace culture, Performance Reviews can carry a stigma. We are often afraid of doing something wrong, facing the judgment of our superiors, and how we might measure up to our peers. We may also feel disappointed when we have been giving our all and it doesn’t seem like our leadership is recognizing it.
It becomes much harder for us to grow when we do not feel safe to be vulnerable. The need to avoid mistakes or looking bad to superiors often leads to people playing it safe and that can breed dramatic underperformance. An effective culture of performance management can create is one where the conversations we have with each other about performance are fueled by a genuinely supportive attitude to help each other grow. It takes courage to admit when we are wrong or that there is a better way we might have done something. It is the leader’s responsibility to create an environment where it is safe to be vulnerable if they are truly interested in helping people achieve their best.
First Step: One way to create a safe environment for vulnerability is to establish an operating procedure for performance conversations. At GoMobi.work, we call this your Coaching Protocol. Having a procedure in place that clearly defines the goals of a performance conversation, plus the behavioral agreements for how the conversation will be conducted, is a great way to help managers create the space for people to open up. If the conversation goes off course, the protocol helps bring it back.
Long Term: Ideally this way of doing performance development becomes so culturally ingrained in your organization that your coaching protocol becomes a training tool for new hires and everyone that’s been in the company no longer needs to look at it for guidance. Then you can begin the ultimate process of collecting data and looking for insights that can help you identify performance gaps and strengths to build the best team you possibly can.
These five myths are the biggest pitfalls for leaders, and it’s not too late. Many of your best employees put a lot of their own personal worth into the work they do every day, and their review is more meaningful and impactful than leaders may understand. The way a review is done is actually a critical moment for an employee to feel even more empowered and loyal vs. disengaged and toxic, and when leaders can effectively share the behaviors they want more of and those they may not, empowered growth can happen.
About GoMobi.work
GoMobi.work helps growing companies adopt performance management and employee development approaches that foster better teamwork and growth in the areas that matter most. GoMobi.work’s proprietary software helps managers facilitate better development conversations and gives executives clear insight into where their teams are doing well, and where further support is needed. To learn more, contact our team at www.gomobi.work.
About HelloJoy Consulting
HelloJoy is a modern consulting firm integrating the neuroscience of play into high-performance team creation and management. One organization at a time, HelloJoy is helping organizations solve challenging problems and bring a little more joy into the workplace. Learn more about how HelloJoy can empower your teams at www.hellojoyconsulting.com.
Media Contact
Elaine Chung
team@hellojoyconsulting.com
