[acb-hsp] Why Year-End Reviews Are a Waste of Time

[peter altschul]

Why Year-End Reviews Are A Big Fat Waste Of Time
  By Denis Wilson December 20, 2012
  The standard-model performance review is an unhelpful barrage 
of built-up criticism.  Instead, give feedback consistently so 
that your employees hear the good with the bad and make 
improvement a matter of routine.
  Let's cut to the chase: If the only feedback your employees get 
from you is in the form of a 6- or 12-month performance review, 
it's time to change your approach to feedback.  Dropping bombs on 
employees once or twice a year only serves to build up pressure 
and make feedback sessions feel like indictments.  And most 
importantly, it does little to alter behaviour and improve 
performance and productivity, which should be your goal.
  For feedback to be effective, it can't be a special occasion, 
says Bruce Tulgan, author of stX's Okay to Be the Boss: The 
Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming the Manager Your Employees Need.  
"My view is that feedback is much too often given when things are 
going wrong.  I call that `bad-news management` because every 
time they hear from you, it means something's gone wrong.  You 
should always give feedback when things are going wrong, but you 
should also give feedback when things are going right, when 
things are going average."
  So instead of waiting for the obligatory performance reviews to 
come around, you should have a built-in feedback loop with your 
reports.  "The best approach is to be giving people feedback on 
an ongoing basis about how their performance is lining up with 
expectations, and giving them, guidance, support, and helping 
them make adjustments," says Tulgan.
  With this kind of ongoing dialogue, and by encouraging 
transparency and candid truth-telling company-wide, everyone 
stands to benefit through improved performance and enhanced 
working relationships.
  ininUp Your Frequencyinin There are a litany of reasons 
managers give for why they don't provide feedback more 
frequently, says Tulgan.  They don't have the time.  They think 
that empowering people means letting them figure everything out 
for themselves, including what they're doing right and wrong.  
Some feel they aren't any good at coaching, while others are 
conflict avoidant or afraid of spoiling the collegial work 
culture.  "All of these things contribute to managers being 
either unwilling or unable to engage in sufficiently detailed and 
consistent dialogue with their people," says Tulgan.
  The problem is that when conversations providing feedback 
happen infrequently, they have a tendency to cause more harm than 
good.  Tulgan makes an analogy to working out: If you go out and 
try to do a five mile run without working out regularly, that's 
when injuries occur.  "Part of why the ongoing dialogue works so 
well is it lowers the stakes in each of the conversations.  Think 
about what happens in the 6 and 12 month reviews.  You're talking 
to people about stuff they did 6 or 12 months ago, for one thing.  
And they're like, `Wow, I wish you would have told me that at the 
time.`"
  Not that performance reviews should be tossed out altogether.  
But instead of bringing new feedback to the table, they should 
summarize the ongoing dialogue and how the employee can take his 
performance to the next level.  Big picture stuff.  Meanwhile, 
the ongoing discussions should provide clear goals, concrete 
expectations, a timeline, and requirements within which to meet 
agreed upon goals.
  ininGet Your Motives and Your Facts Straightinin Much of the 
work that goes into providing effective feedback should actually 
take place well before you sit down with an employee.  Having 
clear intentions for the conversation will help set an 
appropriate tone, says Joseph Grenny, co-author of stCrucial 
Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High If you come 
from a place of anger or revenge, it will hamper progress.  "We 
know that coming at people with that kind of motivation is going 
to shut them down," says Grenny.  "They're going to get 
defensive, they're not going to be interested."
  Before offering feedback, Grenny suggests asking yourself three 
questions: What do I want for me? What do I want for the other 
person? What do I want for the relationship? "The people that are 
really good at creating a non-defensive, open conversation with 
people tend to talk to people from a perspective of, `I care 
about you and I want you to be able to achieve the results that 
are important to you, and I want to be able to get my results.` 
When you are coming from that place, people sense it and it 
colors the entire conversation."
  The other homework you need to do before a feedback session is 
gather facts so you can provide substantive evidence of the 
points you want to make.  "You need to write down what 
conclusions you want to share with this person about their 
performance and what supporting facts you have to dredge up to 
help illustrate the points you're trying to make," says Grenny.  
"You have to do that work.  If you don't, what you're going to be 
having an abusive conversation where you insult somebody without 
informing them"b
  ininStay On Trackinin It's important to make sure the feedback 
sessions stay on track, both in terms of the topic at hand, as 
well as the emotional balance.  "You need to be clear on the 
points you're trying to make and if people are moving off topic, 
you've got to be good at bringing it back to the central point," 
says Grenny.
  The emotional aspect of a conversation can be a bit more 
difficult to negotiate.  "Oftentimes, if someone is getting loud 
or argumentative or defensive we think `Oh boy, they can't handle 
this,` so we start being apologetic and watering down our 
message, and sugar coating it very often."
  This is the wrong approach.  The way to handle defensiveness is 
not to minimize your message, but to make the person feel safe, 
says Grenny.  So when you sense someone starting to bristle, set 
aside the feedback for a moment, and show them that you have 
their best interest at heart.  "The first thing you have to say 
is, `Look, I want you to know that I want you to win here.  I'm 
not giving you this feedback because I'm trying to tear you down.  
In fact, I need to talk with you about this because I think you 
got potential here and I want to make sure you achieve your 
potential.`"
  ininCreate a Candid Culture * Many organizations suffer from a 
dearth of candor, says Grenny.  He suggests creating a culture 
where most performance issues aren't handled by you as the boss, 
but by the person's peers.  "Let's be honest, in today's world we 
don't interact with our bosses the way we used to when they were 
standing there with a clipboard on the factory floor observing 
us."
  Grenny says it's key to empower peers to provide each other 
with feedback and teach them the skills to do so effectively so 
performance problems are handled on the spot and between the 
people with which they occur.  "You need to be actively teaching 
skills they ought to use for delivering feedback and sharing 
things because people don't come into your organization with 
these types of soft skills.  If leaders aren't fostering the 
kinds of competencies needed to a create a positive cultural 
operating system, then what you're getting is the path of least 
resistance, and that's obfuscating, that's politicing, it's 
gunnysacking, it's withholding, it's all of that negative stuff 
that creates cancer."
  ininFeedback as Transparencyinin To that point, encouraging 
feedback has its operational benefits, but it also contributes to 
an overall healthy, open culture.  Rand Fishkin, founder of SEO 
software firm SEO-MOZ has a notorious proclivity for 
transparency.  He's blogged about the company's ups and downs: 
the trials and tribulations of venture funding his own 
performance, and an insiderbs view of mistakes the company has 
made.  "It's expected when you say that your company believes in 
transparency, that what you really mean is `We will write about 
things we do well and we'll share when we've been successful.` 
And it's actually far more interesting and far more challenging, 
but also much more authentic when you write about failure."
  Transparency and authenticity have already been written into 
SEO-MOZ's core values--which Fishkin takes very seriously--but 
his outward transparency has also been a good model for internal 
culture, says Fishkin.  "That's definitely something that over 
the years, I've become conscious of.  And it's very refreshing.  
I think it takes a little while for someone whobs new to the 
company to get into that mode of thinking."
  Fishkin continues, "In much of the corporate world, what I hear 
is that a lot of people have this fear around sharing their 
insecurities or sharing things that have gone badly.  At SEO-MOZ, 
we're working very hard to make it the opposite."
  Copyright B) 2012 Mansueto Ventures LLC.  All rights reserved.