Lewis Hamilton commented recently that he stays motivated by post-race reviews – he always sees something to work on and improve. Work is no different. This is the start of a new financial year for many, and time for a ‘post-‘season’ performance review.

Performance Reviews may well be the most valuable activity in your business next to making a sale and increasing efficiencies. Yet people frequently dread them. When they tell me their experiences with reviews, I can’t blame them. It needn’t be that way.

Traditional performance reviews have been shown to “diminish employee engagement, productivity and ironically, performance”. Lisa Rubinstein, writing for InsideHR, backs this statement by quoting 2015 Deloitte research that shows 58% of executives believe their current performance management approach drives neither employee engagement nor high performance. Rubinstein refers to a lack of capability leading to a “management permafrost” stopping people, teams and the entire company from achieving its full potential.1
She describes it this way: “The traditional process of performance reviews leaves both manager and employee in a fear or threat state. Far from encouraging learning, the brain instead prepares for combat, movement and intuitive response, setting aside reflection for later when the threat passes.”

Hardly the setting for insight and re-invigoration.

The secret to reviews that are welcomed is to conduct them in the context of a performance partnership. This is consistent with what David Guazzarotto, CEO of Future Knowledge, describes as a shift from performance-led to engagement-led.2

Where you have a performance partnership, the reviewer is there to:
•    prompt a performer’s self- and team-awareness – a reality check on their actual contribution to success
•    accelerate their discovery of new and better ways to be more valuable
•    remind people what they are capable of and the role they play in the team’s purpose being achieved

Without this two-way exploration of insights to make individuals, teams and organisations smarter, reviews are a waste of time and frequently damaging.3

Performance Review Traps 

Problems occur when there is:
•    Fuzzy communication
•    Unrealistic expectations (a common failure mode)
•    Unclear demands4
•    Confusion about either role
•    Inappropriate dependency by one and/or control (over-reaching) by another
(Common failure modes?)

Organisations today value performance discussions that are open and exploratory in nature, consistent with Carol Dweck’s concept of cultivating a “growth’ (rather than ‘fixed”) mindset.5

Rubinstein outlines five guidelines for conducting Performance Reviews using the acronym CLEAR:

Collaborate – dissolve hierarchies to foster thinking and insight (and away from defensiveness and self-protection)
Listen – with an unbiased ear (and open mind)
Empathise – build bridges and a climate of safety
Ask – “According to Forbes magazine, asking the right question was four times more likely to have a positive effect on others and 2.7 times more likely to lead to actions that improved the organisation’s bottom line.”
Reflect – this helps the brain to join the dots and create ‘aha’ moments

Questions Stimulate Reflection And Insight

My advice to leaders is to develop employee-driven performance by limiting your input to questions, rather than advice (and certainly not dominance!) Questions stimulate insight, clarity, learning, commitment and accountability. Here are some:

  • What went according to plan?
  • What are you pleased with/disappointed about?
  • Why’s that? (What’s the lesson in that?)
  • What else could you have done? (What could you have done differently?)
  • Why didn’t you…………………….? (Curious tone, not judgemental)
  • What do you want to change next time?
  • What would be the impact of that?
  • What can you commit to, to fix that?
  • What about if you’d tried……………..?
  • What I think you could’ve done is……..(then: what do you think?)
  • What I’d like to see is……
    ……….and so on.

Contracting, Semi-Permanent Workforce

With the pace of change and new employment models, my clients often lament about the lack of commitment by contractors. My view is that contractors need to be as committed (if not more so) to the programme (or organisation) purpose than full-time staff. (After all, their reputation will surely be instrumental in securing their next contract.) But these days, everyone seems so focused on the next deliverable that engagement (which is instrumental in delivery quality) is too often neglected.

David Guazzarotto acknowledges the trend towards a higher proportion of the workforce being “contingent or freelancer” making traditional employee-centric performance approaches redundant.

“Within the next 5-10 years employees will bring their own master file and talent profile to be plugged into an organisation’s HRIS system of record during their tenure,” he said.

Performance Reviews As A Process Not An Event

David Guazzarotto, speaking specifically about tech businesses, says “Organisations are already evolving their performance approaches to encompass more informal and more frequent feedback opportunities between team leaders and team members. This trend will continue to be at the heart of the evolution of performance management in the future.”

This thinking is consistent with NASA space flight engineering. Charles Garfield (in Peak Performers) wrote: On their flights between Earth and the moon, the Apollo spacecraft were all off course 90% of the time. They got to the moon and they got home. They were not on a perfect path, but a critical path.6

Like high performing teams across a range of endeavours, they used performance tracking technology that gave immediate off-track signals for rapid course-correction. I’ve always maintained that the only negative feedback is late feedback (but not many share that view!)

As Lewis Hamilton’s success lies in a race-by-race review for lessons learnt and continuous, never-ending improvements, so are continuous retrospective practices (such as those consistent with Agile) essential for success.

You pay so handsomely for experience – as individuals, teams and organisations. Performance Reviews are an essential discipline to make experience pay you back – in insights and performance gains. This is how individual and organisational intelligence evolves – hopefully, more rapidly than your competition.

Sources:

1 “Performance reviews: how to melt the management permafrost” by Lisa Rubinstein. April 26, 2016 https://www.insidehr.com.au/performance-reviews-how-to-melt-the-management-permafrost/
2 “SaaS talent management 101 for HR: how to maximise ROI” by Craig Donaldson. September 24, 2015 https://www.insidehr.com.au/a-saas-talent-management-guide-for-hr/
3 “Kill your Performance Ratings” – How your brain responds to performance ratings video. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00275?pg=all
4 The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) – YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxG41aFl5Ns
5 Decades of Scientific Research that Started a Growth Mindset Revolution. https://www.mindsetworks.com/science/
6 Peak Performers: The New Heroes of American Business. Charles A. Garfield. New York: W. Morrow, 1986

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