5 Steps to Better Performance Reviews
There are plenty of good reasons to dread performance review season. Most of us have experienced reviews that went south, undermining our sense of achievement and sapping morale. As managers, we try to pick our way through the minefield, offering innocuous reviews, parroting rather than challenging the views of team members, just trying to get to the other side without incurring too much damage.
All of which is a shame, because the annual performance review can be an extraordinarily powerful management tool. A successful review can support both improved performance and a better relationship between team member and manager. Here are five steps to getting the most out of reviews:
1. Focus on the future.
The attempt, in a performance review, to establish a true and accurate accounting of the past year is generally a waste of time. It promotes defensiveness and shuts off learning. And really, who cares what happened back in March? Only the future can be managed, not the past.
That said, some inspection of past performance is indispensable. The past offers context and clues, demonstrations of patterns and formative experiences. The past year has shaped the current relationship between team member and manager—so any adjustments will have to incorporate that history. Specifically:
Discussing accomplishments is an opportunity to express appreciation for the work the team member has done, affirming that their efforts have been seen and valued. Valuing past performance reinforces that future performance will also highly valued.
Reviewing the past year’s performance goals in light of performance reinforces that goals matter and elevates the significance of goals to be set for the coming year.
Patterns apparent in the past are likely to repeat going forward. The opportunity to step back and reflect can lead to insights that are easily missed in the ongoing crush of crises and deadlines.
Understanding a team member’s frustrations and disappointments over the past year is critical if a manager is going to make effective adjustments.
Emphasis on the future does not mean ignoring the past but rather repurposing it to support future-focused objectives.
2. Prioritize the Relationship
Solid relationships—built on good communication, alignment, mutual understanding and respect—enable good work to be done. Relationships lacking these qualities impede performance, and take an emotional toll on everyone.
Each time a manager engages with a team member, their relationship is impacted—affirmed, improved, strained, tested, renewed. Effective managers try to be routinely attentive to the impact of interactions on relationships, but doing so competes with other pressing day to day priorities. The performance review is an outstanding opportunity to step back from the constant flow of interactions to focus on this relationship.
Talking about work relationships may be uncomfortable, particularly if it hasn’t been a regular conversation topic. Ease in by focusing on just one or two particular aspects. Ask about something that may be causing friction for the team member: “Sometimes I feel like you’re frustrated that I don’t give you enough time to do your best work. Is that right?” or “I’ve noticed that you sometimes seem reluctant to give me bad news.” Whatever the specific issues you decide to take on, introduce them in the written evaluation. Anticipate that discussions about improving relationships are likely to be fraught, so be intentional:
Acknowledge aspects of the relationship that are working well, particularly if they reflect intentional efforts by the team member
Take responsibility and don’t blame. While performance issues may have nothing to do with you, relationship problems are about how people interact, and you’re one of those people.
Despite your best efforts to frame the relationship challenge as a shared concern, your engagement may still be experienced as a criticism. Don’t be surprised if it prompts a defensive response. Listen carefully, validate it if you agree, and roll with it.
Be as specific as possible about what improvement you’d like to see. Identifying relationship goals for the coming year is entirely appropriate and can strengthen the likelihood of improvement.
3. Be curious.
Curiosity is a prerequisite to learning and the performance review is a great opportunity for managers to do just that. In addition, there can be a number of ancillary benefits:
Demonstrate that you care enough about the other person to ask questions.
Improve your responsiveness. At its most simple, “What can I do to help?”
Discover an area important to your team member where you can add value.
Dig below the surface of a challenge to engage with underlying challenges.
Model how you’d like the other person to engage with you.
Reinforce an expectation that you are interested when the person has something to tell you in the future.
Sometimes it can be challenging to be curious if the meeting is stressful. A simple step is to review the written evaluation and prepare some questions in advance.
4. Process Matters.
Performance reviews must be carefully structured to promote effective communication. They should include opportunities for reflection and dialogue both orally and in writing. This enables team members and managers to process information independently and then calibrate their responses to one another. A performance review should have a minimum of four elements:
Written self-evaluation
Written evaluation by the manager.
Meeting to discuss the written evaluation.
Follow up to establish of goals for the coming year.
The questions laid out in the written evaluations establish the agenda. They reflect organizational priorities and culture. For instance, questions about group accomplishments indicate an organization that cares about collaboration and emphasizes shared responsibility. Numerical rankings that summarize performance may be useful for organizations focused on accountability, while organizations that accentuate learning are more likely to ask open-ended questions that explore causes and contexts.
For most managers, the hardest part of the performance review is the face-to-face meeting. The other elements of the review can lower the stakes by spreading out the work of the performance reivew. Written evaluations allow information and impressions to be shared and processed prior to the meeting. Delaying goal setting until after the meeting allows additional processing before making commitments for the coming year.
A good meeting includes:
Verbal recognition and praise consistent with the written evaluations.
Development of shared views or clarifying differences around:
Perceptions of the past year, as evident from the written materials.
Expectations and assumptions for the year ahead.
Whether communication is effective in both directions and ideas about how it might be improved.
Weaknesses in the relationship and ideas about how to improve it.
A shared commitment to working together towards a better relationship and improved performance.
A really good meeting might also include some learning and adjusting of perspectives on either or both sides.
Emerging from the face to face meeting with a set of performance goals is not only asking a lot, it’s pointless. Better to reflect on the meeting before deciding what goals make the most sense. I’ve had success in the past asking the team member to draft written goals based on the meeting and proposing edits to these. This can go back and forth a few times before we finalize. The idea is to nurture shared ownership of the goals and to use this opportunity to reinforce agreements from the meeting about how to improve communication between us (clarity, timeliness, etc.). More on performance goals in Step 5.
Face-to-face meetings are a pleasure when everything is going great. But when there are challenges—when expectations or impressions are not aligned or difficult messages need to be conveyed—they can get emotional and result in hard feelings. It can be easy to forget the emphasis on the future and end up instead with blaming and defensiveness. Managers (or team members) who struggle with hard conversations will likely benefit from reviewing Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Granny, McMillan and Switzler. New managers in particular will struggle with these conversations, but should do so knowing that they get easier with practice.
5. Next steps.
Since the whole purpose of the performance review is to improve relationships and future performance, a shared set of goals for the coming year is absolutely essential.
Effective goals consists in a change of knowledge, skills, attitude or behavior. They can be closely related to job performance, focus on growth beyond current expectations, or identify hard or soft skills in need of improvement.
Limit the number of goals to between three and five. Too many goals appears ambitious, but can just as often reflect an inability to prioritize and a lack of commitment to actually meeting them. If the smaller number of goals are met early in the year, you can always add more at that point.
Create a brief plan to accomplish each goal. Identify specific steps to be taken by the team member and manager that are likely to result in the accomplishment of the goal. In the absence of a plan, you don’t really have a goal. More like a desire.
Set indicators to determine if progress is being made and how you’ll know if the goal has been reached. Progress indicators available during the year can inform necessary midcourse corrections.
Identify prerequisites. Performance improvement goals must compete with other work priorities. Consider how much time and effort is required to accomplish the goal. Will reaching a goal require spending? Compare what it will take to meet the goal with available resources before deciding if the plan is feasible.
Goals can be developed after the meeting, shared drafts back and forth until agreement is reached or clear disagreements are exposed. Finalizing goals shouldn’t take more than a few days, though coming up with a plan, indicators and constraints may take longer.
Additional Factors. Generally, a tool can serve only so many purposes well at the same time. Prioritizing professional development and the relationship between team member and manager means discounting other possible functions of the review. Among the functions that might usefully be cast aside:
Compensation decisions. If performance reviews are used to inform decisions around pay, reviews will be constructed to justify those decisions. Team members will be incentivized to be less transparent about their challenges and managers will have to balance supporting the financial and professional development of their team members. For more on this subject, please see Merit Pay—Just Say No.
Remediation. The performance review process is often the moment when performance deficiencies must be addressed. Sometimes a manager will intentionally wait for this moment and other times it will arise organically as the manager takes stock and realizes performance is not where it needs to be. In either case though, the remediation discussion is likely to be more adversarial, characterized by defensiveness and mistrust than on openness and mutual learning. Avoid the temptation to present an incontrovertible case for remediation and instead emphasize expectations for future performance. Those expectations likely arise from impressions from the past, but they have independent validity.
Creating a paper trail. Nonprofits often worry a great deal about the risk of firing a staff person without sufficient documentation to support that decision. Few managers can be expected to simultaneously lay out the path to future growth and success while also memorializing the path towards termination.
Reviewing the manager. From a variety of perspective—values, learning, efficiency, accountability—it makes perfect sense that the team member’s review of their manager should be part of the review process. Theoretically. In practice, I have never been able to successfully pull this off. Team members have to consider the impact of their comments on the review that they are simultaneously receiving, the likely impact on their ongoing relationship, and the challenge of messaging to two audiences—their manager and the manager’s manager. If any of you have succeeded with this, I’d love to hear about it.
Better performance reviews can strengthen relationships between team member and manager and lead to better performance. Getting there may take more than five steps, but they can at least be a start.