Let’s Dump the Annual Performance Review
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“Coaching is very different than accountability and feedback. Coaching is not about me, the coach or me the leader or me the manager. Coaching is about the person I'm coaching, the coachee. It's their agenda.”
– Mike Goldman
First Meeting - Accountability And Feedback
Accountability and feedback meetings should be done once a month with the purpose of holding one-on-one sessions with team members
This first meeting focuses on accountability for tasks, goals, success measures, and KPIs
Provides feedback on productivity and alignment with organizational culture
This first meeting offers recommendations, tips, and techniques to address weaknesses and guides individuals on leveraging their strengths effectively
Second Meeting - Coaching
Coaching is not about you, the coach, the leader or manager. Coaching is about the person you're coaching, the coachee.
Coachees bring their challenges, areas requiring support, or areas needing more focus
Emphasize asking questions rather than giving advice. For example: "What's the real challenge here for you?" and "How can I help?"
This second meeting facilitates modeling a way of thinking and problem-solving for the coachee
Ask Questions, Don't Give Advice
The agenda is brought to you, and you assist the person through it.
The coaching meeting should focus on helping the other person reach their own conclusions and determine the right action for themselves.
Questions such as "What's the real challenge here for you?" and "How can I help?" should be used to understand and address their challenges.
By asking questions, you are guiding them to find their own answers and modeling a thinking process for them.
Prioritize One On One Meetings
This meeting should happen at least twice a month to prioritize advancing team member’s skills and progress
Accountability as a leader includes making time for one-on-one sessions
Prioritize talent development over other tasks and commitments
Evaluate workload and consider addressing excessive direct reports
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I hate annual performance reviews. We need to dump the whole idea of annual performance reviews. So many companies still do it, and by the way, if you're listening, you're saying, ah, we're better. We do semi-annual performance reviews. It's just as bad, or at least almost as bad. We need to stop that horrible
process. I wanna talk about why, and I don't wanna talk about what we need to replace it with. Few reasons why annual or even semi-annual performance evaluation performance reviews are just horrible, is the most obvious one is why would you wait that long to give someone critical feedback on their performance.
I mean, it makes no sense that you would have this once a year or twice a year occasion where you're getting together with someone to tell them how they're doing. Why are you waiting six or 12 months to tell someone how they're doing? Number two is what a lot of organizations do is they give someone a score.
Not only am I gonna give you feedback six months too late, but I'm gonna rank you on a scale of one to five. Five is the best, one is I don't know why you're still here. I can't for the life of me, figure out a reason why we need to give someone a ranking. What happens when we give someone a ranking?
You're a four out of five and they thought they should have been a five out of five the whole time you're trying to give them constructive feedback. All they're doing is seething about the fact that you gave them a four instead of a five or a three instead of a four. There's no reason to inject that into the conversation.
Why can't you just say, you're doing a great job. Here's some things I'd like to see you improve. Why do you need a number? So I wanna see us do away with the annual performance reviews, do away with the these number rankings or letter rankings. It's harmful to what you're really trying to do, which is develop talent.
The other thing people do during the annual performance review that in my mind, kills the whole purpose of the review, is they pair very closely or even in the same meeting, the new salary discussion. Here's the raise you got or didn't get with your annual performance review. Well, now, kind of similar to the number ranking.
You are sitting there as a recipient of this review and this raise. Good or bad, and you're not listening to the constructive feedback. What you're doing is you're getting defensive because any piece of negative feedback you believe probably is gonna impact your raise. So why would you pair those two up?
This whole process is just, it's just a mess. It doesn't work. We need to stop doing it. We need to replace it with something better. And by the way, I understand why some companies believe they need to do it. It's cause they're combining two things that shouldn't be combined. They're saying, well, we need to do the annual performance review.
We need to have rankings because we use that, the rankings and the annual performance review. We use that to figure out promotions and figure out our new salaries. We need those rankings. It helps us figure out new salaries. Well, great. If you wanna do that behind the scenes. If you need a promotion and salary process.
Rank people all day long if you want, put 'em on a bell-shaped curve, do whatever you need to do. You do not need to share the ranking with the people. They're just gonna get defensive. So we try to combine the idea of developing our talent and the idea of figuring out promotions and salaries. We need to decouple that.
If you're gonna have salary discussions once a year, that's great. Do that. We need to decouple that from the review process, from the talent development process, if the goal is moving people from performing at a B level to an A level from performing at a C level to a B level, from performing at an A level to knocking it outta the part park at an even higher level, if the goal is moving, I'd say people up into the right on the talent assessment chart.
And if you don't know what that is, I did a whole podcast on the quarterly talent assessment. The goal is to develop talent. I want to propose a very different process instead of the annual performance review. And it's the idea of at the very least, twice a month, one-on-one meetings with each of your direct reports.
And I say twice a month, but each meeting has a very different focus. And I'll start with the first meeting when this one should happen once a month, and that's the account, what I'll call the feedback and accountability meeting. That meeting is where you are one-on-one, holding a team member accountable.
For getting their tasks done. Hitting their goals, hitting their success measures, their KPIs. You may do that in a weekly accountability meeting as well with the entire team, but this is a chance in this accountability and feedback meeting, it's a chance to talk one-on-one about how people are doing.
Give them feedback on productivity, give them feedback on their fit within culture and how they're living the core values. Give them recommendations, tips, and techniques to fix weaknesses, tips and techniques to better leverage their strengths in the accountability and feedback meeting.
It may be a time to do some goal setting with the other person. Now, this is not meant to replace in the moment feedback. If you have feedback for someone, don't wait two weeks to give it to them. Give it to them in the moment, and I'm sure I will do a whole other podcast episode on feedback, but this is not to replace giving it to them in the moment.
It's just to formalize and structure a little bit of time once a month when you're sitting down for the sole purpose of giving people that feedback and holding them accountable to the things they've committed to. So once a month accountability and feedback meeting.
The second meeting, which I think is also once a month or at least once a month, is the coaching meeting. Coaching is very different than accountability and feedback in the way I look at coaching. Coaching is not about me, the coach or me the leader or me the manager. Coaching is about the person I'm coaching, the coachee. It's their agenda. Coaching is a time for your direct reports to bring something to you and say, here's where I need help.
Here's where I need support, here's where I need more focus. Their bringing the agenda to you. And you are helping them through that. There's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book I hope to get 'em on the podcast one day by a gentleman named Michael Bunge Stanier, a book called The Coaching Habit, which is all about not giving advice, but asking questions.
Now in the accountability and feedback meeting, you may give advice, you may give recommendations in the once a month, at least, coaching meeting. It's not about giving advice. It is about helping the other person come to their own conclusion, helping them what my coach used to call, come up with the right action.
The right action for them may be, may not be the right action for you. So you're asking them questions like, what's the real challenge here for you? You're trying to get to the heart of their challenge. You know, how can I help? What's most important? You're asking them questions to have them come up with the answers, you're modeling a way of thinking for them.
So in these twice a month meetings you're having with people, one is more your agenda, where it's about accountability and feedback. And the second one is the coachee's agenda. Your team member's agenda, what do they want to talk about? With my coaching clients, what I do is I actually have them fill out what I call a coaching month in review form, where they're answering, I forget four or five questions to prepare for the coaching session.
What's happened since we talked last? What are you most proud of? Where are you stuck? What opportunities are in front of you right now? How can I best coach you today? The power of having someone do that kind of pre-work before your coaching session. Not the accountability and feedback session, but before your coaching session.
The power of that is they're not gonna come to a coaching section. You say, hey, what do you want to talk about today? And they say, I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. What do you want to talk about? By having them do that pre-work, number one, you are able to read through it. So when you get together with them for their 30 minute or 45 minute coaching session, and these sessions should not be two hours long.
When you get together with them, you can cut the BS at the beginning of the coach. You go, hey, how are things going? No, you read it in their pre-work. And then you've challenged them to think about what they wanna be coached on. So they're more likely to come to you, say, hey, what I really need help on is I'm having trouble working with my co-lead on the project.
Could you help me work through that? You know, I'm having trouble hitting this target, this kpi you wanted me hit. I've tried so many things. Could you help me figure it out? It's their agenda. So, at least twice a month meetings instead of the annual or semi-annual performance review. And in addition to accounting and feedback on the spot, you know, giving feedback when things happen, giving coaching when someone comes to you with a challenge.
So you've got all that in the moment stuff, but at the very least, two meetings a month. One accountability and feedback meeting. One coaching meeting. Now if you're hearing this and your challenge, your pushback is that you don't have enough time. You've got 10 direct reports, and how are you gonna meet with them all one-on-one every week or every other week?
Man, how am I gonna do that? Well, if you don't believe you have time to have quality one-on-one meetings with your folks, at least twice a month, you may have too many people reporting to you. Because that is part of your accountability. Accountability at least, should be part of your accountability and being a leader and leading others is making time to have one-on-one sessions with them.
So if you literally don't have the time, you may have too many people reporting to you and you need to do something about that. If, when you say you don't have the time, and I think this is more likely the case, if when you say you don't have the time. You don't mean literally you don't have the time. You mean you are not willing to prioritize those one-on-one meetings over a whole bunch of other stuff you're doing.
And if that's the case, my coaching is you are not prioritizing talent development high enough. What in the world could be more important? Than developing your talent. What in the world could be more important than working with your people to help move them up into the right on that talent assessment chart?
Have the A's get even better, the B'S turn into a's the C's, turn into Bs, all that stuff. You need to prioritize that high enough to have at least two, one-on-ones with each of your direct reports every month, if not every week. But at the very least two a month. So that may not be the be all, end all.
That's a process I recommend that I've seen work. Let's once and for all get rid of horrible annual or semi-annual performance evaluation process. It is hurtful. Replace it with a combination of in the moment feedback. And the one-on-one coaching every single month. Go do that. Let's start a trend. So a year from now, maybe the annual performance review is gone.
I will now get off of my soapbox. Go have a great day.