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feedback

Managing Employee Performance – Assessing Performance Part 3

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feedback

This blog is part of a series of blogs focusing on the topic of “Managing Employee Performance”. Managing employee performance in the workplace is comprised of all of the interactions and activities that take place between an employer and an employee. These interactions and activities result in the achievement of goals and expectations. More importantly, they result in employee success and organizational success. The previous two blogs emphasized the importance of ongoing conversations and choosing an approach focused on “landing” the message vs. just sending the message. Managers of employee performance need to commit to providing meaningful and helpful feedback on a regular basis. This feedback must be authentic and clear. This blog will continue the topic of how to assesses performance through ongoing conversations with a focus on how to structure the actual feedback conversation so that it “lands”.

Four Step Framework

I have developed a four-step framework for providing feedback in an effective manner. As a way to remember each step of the process, the four steps are based on the word FEED. Connecting the concept to a story can be a great way to remember the concept, so let’s do that for our feedback framework.

In our story, a young woman with great potential joins an organization and is matched with an experienced executive who is entering the twilight of her career and has been asked to mentor the new employee. When they sit down at their first meeting, the experienced executive asks the young woman “what would you like from me – how can I help?” The young woman remarks that she prefers an environment where people are engaged, care about their work, relationships matter and employee success matters. She continues with an observation that all too often there is an environment where people are indifferent, relationships don’t seem to matter, and management appears to only care about how the company is doing. She then asks, “how do I build an atmosphere where relationships matter, and people feel supported?”

The wise executive answers “Relationships are a like a living being. They are alive and need sustenance. Like any living entity, the one you feed thrives. If the sustenance you deliver provides clarity, builds engagement and supports employee success, that is what will thrive.  Take a few days to think about that, and let’s meet again to talk about what I’ve said and what it means to you.”  With that, the meeting ends.

Feedback Process – FEED

The key concept from the story is “whatever you feed will thrive”. A framework for having great conversations with people is all about your ability to FEED. FEED stands for:

Step 1 – Facts, Focus and Framing

  • Facts – Describe the situation – the specific behaviours and outcomes.
  • Focus – What will be the focus of the conversation? Identify the message that you want to “land”.
  • Frame – How will you frame the conversation at the beginning – what context will be helpful for the message to “land” better?

Step 2 – Expectations

  • Revisit the expectations. Confirm the “target” expectations that have been communicated and discussed in the past.

Step 3 – Effect

  • Discuss the effect of the actions taken. Review the impact of the actions/outcomes. What difference does it make to the recipient of the feedback, to co-workers, to the customer, or to the organization? Connect the impact to outcomes that are important to the recipient (explain an example).

Step 4 – Dialogue

  • Invite the other person to share their perspective. Engage in dialogue – an exchange of thoughts.

If you do a good job FEEDing an employee when assessing their performance, success will grow. In the next blog, we will summarize the key elements of assessing performance.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, CHRL, ACC is a facilitator and coach of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.

Managing Employee Performance – Assessing Performance Part 2

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This blog is part of a series of blogs focusing on the topic of “Managing Employee Performance”. Managing employee performance in the workplace is comprised of all of the interactions and activities that take place between an employer and an employee. These interactions and activities result in the achievement of goals and expectations. More importantly, they result in employee success and organizational success. The previous blog emphasized the importance of ongoing conversations. Managers of employee performance need to commit to providing meaningful and helpful feedback on a regular basis as opposed to a few times a yea or only during an annual meeting. This blog will continue the topic of how to assesses performance through ongoing conversations with a focus on how to structure feedback conversations. We will now explore how to assess performance and provide employees with meaningful information on how they are doing.

Employee Assessments

The previous blog provided compelling evidence to support the assertion that assessments of employee performance take place on a continuing basis. When the performance assessment takes place, it is important for an employee to know where they are relative to where they’re supposed to be. When the performance indicates that the employee is on target, the manager should provide positive reinforcement to ensure the behavior continues. If an assessment of performance indicates that the employee is not on target, the manager should provide corrective feedback to enable the employee to get back on course. Although performance assessments take place on a regular basis, most managers are not able to spend all of their time constantly sharing feedback. There needs to be a balance.

How Frequently Should Managers Have Feedback Conversations with Employees?

Ideally, conversations on performance should take place anytime there is a behavior action that has a significant impact on the individual or the organization.  This ensures that the positive “on target” behaviours that have a significant impact will continue and the “off target” behaviours that to not meet expectations are corrected.

What Approach Should You Take to Lead to Success?

Once the decision has been made to share performance feedback with an employee, the next question is “What approach should I take in order to effectively share my assessment with the employee so that it will lead to success?” (aka “How do I give them my feedback?”). This is where the correct mindset is critically important. When giving an employee feedback, managers often define a good conversation as one where they have told the employee what was wrong (or right) with their behaviour. This does not capture the real objective of the conversation. In order for feedback to truly be integrated with the overall objective of performance management (which is helping employees succeed), the goal of the conversation is not just about sending the message. The ultimate goal of the conversation is to “land the message”.

Red Auerbach was a very effective coach in the national basketball Association. He was once quoted as saying; “It’s not what you tell your players that counts. It’s what they hear.” (Red Auerbach, Leadership Wired, Mar. 12, 2004). I believe this is a profound insight. When talking with managers regarding the struggles they have with employees who don’t seem to respond to their feedback, I often hear the managers defend their actions by explaining to me how many times they spoke to the employee to tell them how to correct behavior. As a manager, rather than measuring how many times you said something to an employee, you should be measuring if the message was received and understood. This is where the term “landing the message” becomes critically important.

Landing the Message

“Landing the message” means that the employee has fully understood the message and the implications of taking action as a response to the message. When we accept that “landing the message” is the goal we are trying to achieve when sharing performance assessments, it can offer great insights into the type of approach needed to achieve this goal. When we are able to land the message, we are on the right path to help the employee achieve success. With this in mind, the next blog will provide a framework for giving feedback in a way that encourages dialogue and builds understanding on how to achieve success.

As always, I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, CHRL, ACC is a facilitator and coach of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.

Managing Employee Performance – Assessing Performance

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This blog is part of a series of blogs focusing on the topic of “Managing Employee Performance”. Managing employee performance in the workplace is comprised of all of the interactions and activities that take place between an employer and an employee. These interactions and activities result in the achievement of goals and expectations, and more importantly, employee success and organizational success. The previous two blogs offered insights into how to set expectations. This blog will continue the topic of how to set expectations with a review of goal setting. We will now explore how to assess performance and provide employees with meaningful information on how they are doing.

Giving an Employee Feedback

The foundational purpose of feedback is to help modify a future action. In the case of employee performance in an organization, feedback is given to help a person succeed. This is accomplished by:

a) letting the employee know that they should continue a specific behavior. Doing so will enable them to continue meeting expectations (succeed). This can be called reinforcing feedback.

b) letting the employee know that a specific behavior is not meeting expectations. Dialogue with the employee to enable them to alter or modify future actions in order to meet expectations (succeed).

This concept seems straightforward. However, throughout my career I’ve encountered many managers who believe that if an employee is doing the job correctly there is no need to speak with them about their good performance because that’s what’s expected. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking can result in lowering the level of employee engagement and productivity.

What is the Value of Ongoing Progress Reports?

In their book “The Progress Principle”, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer1 share research into the value of giving ongoing progress reports (a.k.a. feedback) to employees. In the research, they reviewed the interactions that managers had with employees. They sorted the managers into two categories – those that provided ongoing progress reports and those that provided infrequent progress reports. The research results provided clear evidence that employees who reported to managers that provided regular progress reports experienced much higher levels of engagement and productivity. For the managers who chose not to provide regular progress reports, the levels of employee engagement and productivity were much lower. This research validates our intuitive assumption that employees have a desire to know how they are doing and would like to get feedback on how they’re doing on a regular basis.

Maintaining Dialogue

Many organizations seem to misunderstand the primary focus of managing employee performance. At the heart of this misunderstanding is the idea that the most important event in the performance management process is an annual meeting. This is where the manager spends most of the time talking about the past with supporting documentation to “fix” the person. In some cases the documents are sparse on facts and details. In some cases, there is back-and-forth dialogue. However, many employees experience a situation where the manager has already determined the employee’s rating.

The perception that can be created in this situation is that the employee’s point of view has little value in determining the overall outcome of how the employee is “rated”. In cases where there is significant underperformance, the organization introduces performance improvement plans (commonly referred to as PIPs) that are administered by the HR department. The lack of involvement and engagement with the employee’s perspective impedes the goal of achieving employee success and organizational success.

The most important event in assessing employee performance is the regular conversations you have when you observe their performance. This should be more of the primary focus than annual meetings where the emphasis is on tracking past performance.

The ongoing dialogue is the best way to help an employee succeed. Have intermittent meetings to review the conversations that have taken place in the past quarter or the past year. Developing a mindset and a system to manage employee performance that focuses on authentic, robust and helpful conversations will create better value for the organization. This is more beneficial than getting together once a year and filling out forms for the HR department.

Review

In summary, the first step in effectively managing employee performance is the process of setting expectations. Both the ongoing job accountabilities as well as the time framed goals. The second step is to assess employee performance. Subsequent blogs will offer insights on how to effectively manage conversations where the goal is to provide feedback to the employee that “lands”. We will also examine the importance of creating a motivating environment in order to help an employee succeed as part of an effective program for managing employee performance. As always, I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, CHRL, ACC is a facilitator and coach of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.
expectations

Managing Employee Performance – Setting Expectations

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expectations

This blog is the third in the series focusing on the topic of “Managing Employee Performance” that encompasses the interactions and activities that take place between an employer and an employee. The interactions result in the achievement of goals and expectations. The first two blogs emphasized the need for organizations to choose the most appropriate focus for performance management: the development of a relationship and work environment that enables the employee to achieve success. Many organizations struggle with performance management because the primary emphasis is on other purposes such as tracking performance on forms or establishing compensation. While these can be important benefits of managing performance, the most important objective is employee success. Performance management is not an event, it is an ongoing process.

4 Requirements for Being a Great Manager

Research by the Gallup Organization presented in the book “First Break All the Rules:  What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently”, identified four core activities that are a necessary part of being a great manager:

  • Select a person
  • Set expectations
  • Motivate the person
  • Develop the person

Hiring the Right People

If we assume an employer has hired the right employee with the appropriate set of competencies, the next step is to set expectations. Fixing a hiring mistake should not be the primary focus of performance management. When we start with the assumption that we hired the right person, the process of setting expectations will concentrate on helping the employee succeed by meeting the employer’s expectations, while partnering with the employee to enable them to achieve their won goals. This blog will outline the important elements in developing a solid set of employee expectations.

Job Descriptions for Employee Tasks

Outlining employee expectations involves identifying the tasks that need to be completed in order to achieve the goals and objectives of the organization. These tasks and accountabilities are most often captured in a job description and should ideally answer the following questions:

  • What is expected and why it is important – an outline of duties and tasks
  • How to meet the expectations – key behaviours
  • Results/outcomes – how success is measured

When establishing job descriptions, organizations often make the mistake of placing too much emphasis on activities and not placing enough emphasis on results/outcomes or boundaries of control. For example, cashiers in a retail store might be given the following duties and tasks as a list of job expectations:

  • Quality customer service
  • Processing customer orders through the point-of-sale cash system
  • Providing refunds

These bullet points provide a good start however, they lack the level of detail and clarity required to help an employee really achieve success. For example, there is no indication of what decision-making authority the employee has with respect to providing refunds. If the employee encounters a situation where customer wants a refund without a receipt for an amount that is less than $10, the employee should be given some guidance as to whether they can make that decision on their own or if they need approval from a supervisor or manager.

This is an important question as it defines the quality of service that the customer will experience. If the employee has to go get approval and delays the customer, this could be viewed as a negative experience. It would not be in line with the expectations of the first bullet point – providing quality customer service. Organizations need to be diligent in providing not only the duties and tasks of the job. They need to include other expectations such as decision-making authority and expected outcomes.

Maintain Your Expectations

It is also important to ensure that there is alignment of expectations at three key points of interaction with employees. The expectations that are outlined in a job posting that was used during the hiring process should be exactly the same as the expectations used during the on-boarding and orientation. They should be exactly the same as the expectations used during ongoing performance discussions and annual performance review meetings. Although this sounds like common sense, there is often a substantial disconnect between these three processes. This can result in significant misunderstanding with respect to what the employee thinks that the employer expects from them. This ambiguity with respect expectations does not help the employee succeed by meeting the employer’s expectations.

The next blog will continue the dialogue on building clear expectations by addressing the issues of how organization’s goal setting processes intersect with their permanent job descriptions and how they are used to help an employee succeed as part of an effective program for managing employee performance.

As always, I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, CHRL, ACC is a facilitator and coach of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.
References:
First Break All the Rules: Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman, Simon & Schuster 1999 Page 59.

Managing Employee Performance – Mindset & Ownership

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This blog is the second in a series focusing on the topic of “Managing Employee Performance”. This blog will explore the question of “who owns the management of employee performance” in an organization. It will also explore how this drives the mindset required to be more effective at the management of employee performance.

Ownership of Employee Performance Management

Throughout my career, I’ve had many conversations with managers about who owns the management of employee performance. I can recall a specific conversation I had with the Vice President in a division. I was the senior HR leader and had been recently promoted to the role. Within the first week, a fellow member of the executive team dropped into my office to tell me how happy he was that I was there.  He wanted me to make sure that all his managers completed and submitted their forms from the annual meeting.

The look on his face was priceless when I told him that the management of employee performance was not my responsibility. Rather, it was his. I suggested that he was responsible for ensuring that every employee received feedback.  It was also his responsibility to ensure that the managers reporting to him who had employees reporting to them were also having ongoing dialogue and completed an annual review with their direct reports.

Of course, my remarks were followed by an assurance that I was happy to help support him and his staff in any way I could in the achievement of fulfilling their responsibility to assess the performance of the employees who reported to them. This conversation ended with his assertion that I was responsible for making sure that the forms were collected and that the interviews took place. The Vice President then left my office so that he could speak to the head of the division to straighten things out.

It’s Simple: Ownership of Employee Performance Management Belongs to the Manager(s) Who the Employees Report to

My suspicions are that the conversation he had with the head of the division surprised him. I had already had a conversation with the head of the division regarding who owns performance management and our conversation confirmed that we agreed ownership of employee performance management belongs to the managers who the employees report to. He explained to the Vice President that what I had told him was correct. The Vice President returned to my office and asked “what do I do now?”

We had a really good conversation about the role of human resources management and how they are responsible for owning the administration of a performance process and for helping managers with performance management by coaching them on how to have good conversations with the employees regarding their performance.

My intention was to land a key message which is that people who manage the performance of others own the relationship between the manager and the employee. They are responsible for helping the employee succeed. It would be a mistake for the human resources practitioner to try to take over ownership of that relationship and responsibility for making it work. Certainly there is a responsibility for the HR practitioner to train and/or coach managers to assist them with the management of those relationships. However, the manager is responsible for making the relationship work and providing ongoing feedback to the employee.

Two Important Mindsets

Managers who understand that they own the relationship with employees who report to them and that they are responsible for helping the employees succeed are motivated to make the process work because of the benefits you can provide to the employee, to them as the manager, and to the whole team and organization. Managers who believe that this is a paper chase often don’t commit to the process because they don’t believe that they own it and/or they don’t see the benefits of doing it well.

As the first blog in the series states, the entire performance management process should be focused on helping employees succeed. So, when it comes to managing employee performance, managers that adopt an “ownership” mindset will be more committed to the process of setting expectations, observing performance/outcomes, providing regular, timely feedback and building the employee’s competence and confidence.

A second important mindset is to embrace the concept that people make their own choices. In order to maximize employee success, you need to tap into intrinsic motivation. This inspires great performance as opposed to relying solely on external motivation. Performance is better when people act out of inspiration versus responding to consequences. As a manager, you want to light the fire inside as opposed to light the fire behind. Employees will achieve greater success where there is commitment as opposed to compliance. We will tackle this topic further in future blogs.

As always, I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, CHRL, ACC is a facilitator and coach of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.
employee performance evaluation

Managing Employee Performance – It’s Not About the Forms

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employee performance evaluation

This blog is the first in a series focusing on the topic of “Managing Employee Performance”. This is a hot topic with many organizations because for many organizations, the process often creates more problems than it solves.

Research indicates that many organizations have chosen to abandon what they describe as the “annual performance appraisal” process because of the problems it seems to create. This blog will address some of the key challenges faced by organizations in managing employee performance.

Understand the purpose of managing employee performance

The first step in organization’s need to better manage employee performance is to understand the purpose of the process. The primary purpose should not be focused on filling out forms or creating a perception that a documented, numerical rating is the main driver of compensation. Rather, it should be focused on helping employees succeed in delivering on accountabilities that are aligned with organizational objectives. When the process focuses on the completion of forms, it becomes a paper chase where managers often do not feel responsible or accountable for the process and the potential value it can bring.

Similarly, if the process focuses on compensation, it often devolves into a focus on the “annual performance appraisal” meeting. This is where managers and employees seem to debate a performance rating because it is so closely connected to how much of a pay increase an employee will receive. Even the language of describing the annual meeting as a “performance appraisal” is problematic because managers should not be “appraising” performance on an annual basis. They should be appraising performance on an ongoing basis – every day or at least every week. To get the most value out of a performance management process, organizations need to ensure that it’s not about the forms, it’s about the conversations that help an employee succeed.

Employee Success

The entire performance management process should be focused on helping employees succeed. The definition of employee success combines achievement of the organization’s expectations that have been communicated to them as well as the achievement of the goals and expectations that employees have set for themselves. It is important to note that documentation of performance is important and there is nothing wrong with connecting pay with performance. Having said that, the key is to focus on conversations that help success.

The documentation and compensation are by-products of quality conversations and quality performance assessments as opposed to being the main focus. A key opportunity for many organizations is to shift the internal mindset and the focus of the system and language relating to managing employee performance. For some organizations, the first step in shifting the mindset may be as simple as changing their language from “annual performance appraisals” to “annual performance reviews”. This ensures that managers understand that feedback is an ongoing process and the annual meeting is a review – sort of like a highlight reel – that focuses on performance feedback that has already been shared with the employee.

These review meetings can take place more frequently than once a year, however the purpose is still to review the collective dialogue that is taken place during the performance review period.

It’s Not About the Forms

If an organization focuses its attention on equipping managers to engage in regular dialogue with employees, they will be much more likely to achieve the objective of helping employees succeed. Also, by focusing on regular dialogue, the organization will reinforce that the process is not about the forms.

The forms that organizations use as part of their employee performance management process should assist the manager in capturing an overview of the ongoing performance feedback discussions that the manager has had with the employee. These discussions will focus on the employee achieving their full potential by offering reinforcement of desired behaviours and constructive analysis of what needs to be corrected. The forms can offer a process for capturing performance feedback throughout the year in order to avoid issues such as the recency bias. The forms can also be used to hold managers accountable for their performance assessments in order to reduce or eliminate other forms of rater bias.

Once the organization has embraced that the purpose of managing employee performance is to help employees succeed in meeting their accountabilities, the execution of the process will improve. Subsequent blogs will address each of the component parts of an effective program for managing employee performance.

As always, I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via email or telephone or leave a comment right here on the site.

Until next time,

Dave

David Town, CHRL, is a facilitator and coach of leadership and management principles that enable individuals and organizations to build greater leadership competency, resulting in higher performance and higher employee engagement. David has a particular focus on effectively managing conversations involving confrontation or conflict. As well, he provides insights and assessment strategies for integrating character competencies into leadership skills resulting in increased trust and reduced risk for leaders. David is a member of the International Coaching Federation and is President of Your Leadership Matters Inc.

Leadership & Character – Courage

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Courage sign with road background

This blog is part of a series focusing on the attributes that lead to a positive assessment of a leader’s character.  Each of the positive character attributes contribute in their own way to the ability of the leader to make good, character-based decisions with respect to the actions they take as a leader.  The focus for this blog is on courage. Read more

Leadership & Character – Humility

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Top View of Business Shoes on the floor with the text: Stay Humble

Leaders who act with character have a variety of virtues and values that contribute to their ability to make positive character-based decisions.  One of the key attributes of character-based leadership, which seems to get less attention, is humility.  Humility is generally defined as “a modest view of one’s own importance”. Individuals who demonstrate humility focus more on others than they do on themselves which is why humility can be such a great character-based leadership attribute. Read more

Leadership & Character – Integrity

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integrity word cloud on digital tablet

The past two blogs have focused on the assessment of character using the methodology Fred Kiel introduced in his book entitled “Return on Character”.  In the book, character in leadership is based on an assessment of the presence of four universally-accepted moral principles: integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion.  We’ve reviewed the impact of responsibility and forgiveness on character.  In this blog, we will look at the importance of integrity as it relates to character-based leadership. Read more

Clarity of Purpose Enables Decisive Action

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leadership coach and facilitator OntarioIn my last blog post, I talked about the importance of nurturing positive character attributes to prepare for moments when our character will be tested. In this blog post we discuss the attribute of clarity of purpose and its ability to enable decisive action.

I remember visiting the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on a vacation trip to Boston a few years ago. One of the exhibits that was particularly interesting was the exhibit dedicated to the 1960 televised Presidential election debate that saw John F. Kennedy squaring off against his opponent Richard Nixon. This debate was apparently the first election debate ever televised (television was relatively new in 1960) and it enabled the public to see the immediate reactions of each candidate to the questions they were being asked and the challenges they faced from their opponent. Read more