Tag: people development

Surprises Are for Parties, Not Performance Reviews

Posted on by Rachel Burr

The dreaded annual performance reviews: Employees fear them, or at best are indifferent. Managers view them as check-the box HR processes to (begrudgingly) complete. Ultimately, it’s not even clear how useful the information really is. Why do we continue to torture ourselves?

Intention vs. Reality

Why do leaders require annual performance reviews? Humans are a superstitious lot. We often protect the traditions of our predecessors without questioning current relevance. The intention of annual reviews is to evaluate the performance of all employees against common metrics. Comparison of those metrics ostensibly determines raises, promotions, etc. It all sounds very logical, but this “fair-and-square” approach has a number of fatal flaws. Here are just a few–

  • Complex work is not easily quantifiable.
  • Not all managers give effective performance feedback.
  • Comparisons are not always meaningful.

Complex Work is Not Easily Quantifiable.  Frederick Taylor was an efficiency whiz kid of the Industrial Revolution. Revered in some circles, reviled in others, an “-ism” was named after him, “Taylorism.”  Taylorism evaluated performance by the efficiency of all the minute measurable aspects required to build a widget. If you couldn’t measure it, it didn’t matter. Taylorism strove to eliminate anything hindering efficiency, like thinking. Thinking was very bad for business; it distracted employees from the efficiency of predictable repetitive piecework. The value of employees was determined purely by the number of widgets/hour they produced. (Talk about a great place to work!)

Taylor died in 1915, but echoes of his “ism” linger. We measure what is most quantifiable, not necessarily what is most important regarding performance. Work today is far more complex. Rather than just efficiently following a process, the need to think, adjust, pivot, and innovate is critical. Efficiency is important, but efficiency and creativity are a balance. How do we capture that balance in a check-the-box performance review?

Not All Managers Give Effective Performance Feedback. Feedback is key to help people improve their performance and grow their career. Some managers are excellent at engaging their employees, providing regular feedback, and coaching people to help them grow. Other managers save up their big feedback discussions for annual performance reviews. Waiting until the end of the year to provide feedback is not helpful. First, feedback is most effective when given close to the time of a person’s actions. If we wait too long to give feedback, the impact of that feedback is lost, along with important details. Second, the year is long, memories are short, and time clouds our judgment. We are more likely to remember performance early in the year (primacy bias) and performance toward the end of the year (recency bias), but we forget a lot of that “in between stuff.” We also tend to remember BIG performance moments, especially when those big moments were BIG MISTAKES connected to strong negative emotions. When we only have feedback conversations once a year, performance factors that were at the beginning, the end, or were negative have a disproportionate impact on our overall assessment.

Comparisons Are Not Always Meaningful. Just because we can compare two things (or people), does not ensure the comparison will be meaningful. What does it mean to rank someone in marketing as a 5/5 on their performance review compared with someone in engineering, operations, finance, or HR? Does it mean–

  • They’re all doing equally well in their jobs at their respective levels? 
  • They’re all making an equal contribution to the success of the company? 
  • One or two of them demonstrated exceptional performance, while others did an “okay” job, but their managers gave them a 5/5 to avoid a difficult conversation? 

When the 5/5 data are fed into the ERP system, how does this problematic comparison distort impacts on salaries, bonuses, ESPs, and RSUs?  I haven’t the slightest idea. Have you?

Making Performance Feedback More Impactful 

How do we change our approach? I don’t have a perfect solution, but here are some places to start:

Summarize, Don’t Surprise. Communicate no new feedback during an annual performance review. The word “review” is meant to be a “summary” of performance discussions, feedback, and coaching throughout the year. If a manager hasn’t had these conversations, then the manager and employee need to talk about the lack of discussion and how together they can improve communication. 

Increase Frequency of Meaningful Feedback. Provide feedback early and often. Don’t wait for the annual performance summary. Make feedback meaningful. Specify the behaviors observed (e.g., actions, lack of actions, tone of voice, body language, etc.). Then, communicate specifics to the person about the impact of these behaviors.

Focus on the Humans in the Process. Too often we focus on getting the process “right” and getting it over with. We can easily forget the objective is to have conversations with human beings about performance. When we stop seeing people as human beings, and instead see them as performance widgets to be assessed via assembly line, that’s when people disconnect from the company machine and take their strengths and talents elsewhere. 

Is That Your Final Answer?

Should we revamp the annual performance “summary” or completely blow it up? I don’t know. What I do know is a check-the-box process for annual performance reviews is not effective. It’s long past time we step back, challenge traditions, and innovate a new approach that will enhance people’s growth and improve results.

What Makes Delegation So Difficult?

Posted on by Rachel Burr

The art of delegation has never been more important. Organizations are larger, more complex, and have distributed workforces that span the globe. Individual leaders are not scalable, and that makes delegation essential.  So why is delegation still so challenging?

What gets in the way of delegation?

Three of the biggest challenges to effective delegation are time, trust, and history.

Time – VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) no longer describes only short-term crises, it’s become a reality for doing business. To make effective decisions in a VUCA environment, employees need leaders to invest their time to–

  • Clarify their vision
  • Set expectations
  • Communicate their intent
  • Coach people to learn and adapt

Time is precious and leaders have very little to spare. However, the alternative to taking time is to delegate work by “throwing it over the wall,” without clear expectations or intent. Throwing work over the wall is a recipe for disastrous results, and it reinforces the bias: “It’s faster if I do it myself!” This reactive micromanagement is a great way to lose talented employees who won’t feel valued, and won’t see opportunities to grow.

Trust – Even with clarity, leaders may not trust people to execute to their standards. Ultimately, leaders are accountable for results, and when a leader’s neck is on the line, the impulse to “control” (vs. “coach”) easily rears its ugly head.

History – The old “What got you here, won’t get you there.”  Leaders often started out as talented individual contributors who were rewarded and promoted for their willingness to jump into action and swiftly solve problems. There’s no easy “off switch” for self-reliant behaviors. Just like there’s no easy “on switch” to immediately illuminate the “leadership light” that will refocus someone to coach and motivate others. We tend to hold on to what’s worked for us in the past, even when our role and environment have changed. It takes time, and often coaching, to help leaders make such a significant shift. 

What helps leaders delegate?

Build Trust – Leaders must invest their time and attention if they want to build trust with people.  We start by building a relationship with someone as a person, understanding their values, strengths, talents, and motivations. When we get to know the whole person, and they get to know us, it builds a deeper foundation for everything that follows. 

Invest in People’s Development – Talented people who see no growth path leave for better opportunities. During “The Great Resignation,” droves of talented people left organizations in search of greater purpose, growth opportunities, and a more meaningful connection with company culture.  When a leader invests in development, this investment is key to encouraging talented people to stay, grow, and continue to flourish.

Intentionally Create a Coaching Culture – The word “intentionally” may be overkill. Organizations don’t create a coaching culture “by accident.” Creating a coaching culture requires leaders to let go of “command and control” and, instead, develop their bench. Leaders who truly value a coaching culture require coaching as a core competency when they hire, develop, and promote people into leadership roles.

Keep a Finger on the Pulse – Doctors don’t control the details of how a human body works. They assess overall health and search for early warning signs that indicate problems. In the same vein, leaders don’t micromanage how work gets done, but they keep their finger on the pulse of progress. People will make mistakes as they learn. That’s part of growth. The key is to reinforce positive results and coach people to course-correct while mistakes and problems are small, rather than waiting for issues to build to a crisis.

Delegation is not easy. It’s a dynamic balance of knowing when & how to step in and when & how to step back.  Nevertheless, delegation is a skill that can be learned, and the only way to learn is to practice.

To Build Your Path, Start with You

Posted on by Rachel Burr

“Where do I even start?” Have you ever uttered those words when you thought about changing roles, shifting your career, or even just escaping the job you currently have?  I know I have.  My client, Jane (not her real name), felt frustrated and exhausted, like so many clients before her. She knew she wasn’t happy in her current role, but she also didn’t know what else she might do or how she would figure it out.  How do you build your path?

“There are things about this job I really enjoy,” Jane said. “I believe in the products, and I love working with my team. The people are wonderful.” Jane had interviewed with other companies in the area, but they all had their issues. “Any job or company is going to have drawbacks,” she rationalized. “How do I know any of them would be any better?” 

“So, you’re going to stick with ‘the devil you know,’” I said. It was a statement more than a question.

“I guess so,” she conceded. “Plus, the money is really good.”

“They wouldn’t call them golden handcuffs if it was easy to walk away,” I smiled. 

I would say I was surprised by the number of people with whom I have had this conversation, if I hadn’t also had this conversation with myself too many times to count.  How is it possible that so many of us are this frustrated or unhappy about our jobs, especially when we spend so much of our lives at work?

Tailor the Job to Fit You (Not the Other Way Around)

Maybe being unhappy at work is just the reality we’ve come to expect.  As humans, we adapt to our environments. The process is called “habituation.” The word sounds ominous, but it really means that we just stop noticing or even expecting something different when we experience the same thing over and over and over again.  (Come to think of it, that sounds more depressing than ominous.)  In some situations, adapting is a good thing. For example, when we’re in a noisy office environment (even if now that’s mostly our “home office”), we learn to tune out a lot of the repetitive ambient noise to concentrate on our work.  But what happens when we just continue to adapt to a situation or environment that really isn’t a good fit?  Why don’t more of us take the leap to get out of jobs or environments that aren’t working for us? 

One of the biggest problems is we’re going about the process all wrong. We start looking at the macro level of the situation and work from the outside in. We look at the companies and the job postings, and we try to determine our fit with what we see available. Then, we tailor ourselves (e.g., talents, skills, and experiences) to fit what we think the employers want. But before we start rearranging our resume and LinkedIn profile to look like the “perfect candidate” for 100 different roles, how do we know what we want and what would be a great fit for who we are?1 

We need to take a different approach and start at the micro level and focus on the inside first. We need to start by understanding our fundamental building blocks: values, strengths, interests, and motivations. Once we have better insight and understanding into who we are, what we’re good at, and what’s important to us, then you can use that information to build your path forward. Rather than the job becoming “the goal,” the job becomes the next step as part of our individual journey.

Start with What You Know

Sounds great, but (again), “Where do I even start?” How do we figure out our building blocks? There are great assessments to help us identify our strengths, weaknesses, values, etc. Whether we’re looking at our leadership style, individual strengths, or even how we operate as a team, I have used a number of tools with my clients based on their specific objectives. But even before we look at more formal assessments, take some time to really stop, reflect, and debrief, and focus first on what you already know about yourself. Try this exercise I call, “Best, Worst, & Better.”

Best, Worst, & Better

Take time to reflect on the following, and write down your answers:

Step 1 – Break Down Your Best: Think of at least 2-3 times when you felt the most engaged, energized, and excited about work you were doing. Maybe you were at your job, or maybe you were working in another area of your life (e.g., working around the house, coaching your kids’ game, engaging in a hobby, etc.). In each of these situations start to dig down into the building blocks of what made the experience so great. Ask yourself questions like the following:

  • What did I love most about what I was doing, and why?
  • What was important to me about what I was doing?
  • What strengths, skills, and talents did I use in the process?
  • What interested or motivated me most about what I was doing?
  • What was most satisfying to me about the work, the process, and/or the results?

Step 2 – Break Down Your Worst: Now think of at least 2-3 times when you felt the most miserable, disengaged, and/or deflated about work you were doing.  Again, break it down into the individual building blocks of what made it such a negative experience.  Ask yourself questions to look at the opposite of how you looked at your “Best” moments:

  • What did I hate most about what I was doing, and why?
  • What stood out as the most negative part of this experience? 
  • How did this work tap into my weaknesses (rather than my strengths)?
  • What was most boring, frustrating, and/or discouraging to me about this work?

Step 3- Break Down Your Better: Finally, take a look at your “Worst” list and now flip it 180 degrees by asking, “What would have made this better?” 

  • For example, let’s say you love working with numbers and solving problems from the ground up, but you were given a project with limited information.  As a result, you struggled to understand the objectives, and how the different parts of the project fit together to create a solution. If you ask yourself, “What would have made this better?”, you might come up with things like, “Having a clear high-level view of the problem, understanding how my work fit into the broader context, knowing the different stakeholders who were involved, and clearly understanding the objectives we needed to achieve.” 

The question, “What would have made this better?” may unearth some of the same factors that contributed to your “Best” situations, but it also may unearth new and important pieces that didn’t show up the first time around.

Step 4 – Find Your Themes. Once you’ve written out your answers, take a step back and start to look for themes:

  • When are you at your best?
  • What’s most important to you?
  • What are things you won’t tolerate?

Maybe you find you’re at your best when you’re working with people, or maybe you prefer to work with numbers.  Maybe you find you don’t like to work in isolation, or maybe you’re highly intolerant of too many interruptions. Maybe you prefer being strategic, hands-on, or some combination of the two. There are no right or wrong answers. There’s just you: who you are, what’s important to you, and what you really want.

Step 5 – Pile Up Your Building Blocks. Finally, create two columns on a document or a spreadsheet. The header of the first column is, “What I want.” The header of the second column is, “What I don’t want.” Congratulations! You’ve begun to identify your building blocks to build your path forward. 

This is not the end. In fact, it’s just the beginning, but you have answered the first very important question: “Where do I even start?” You start here. You start with what you know. You start with You.