Appraisal Time & Agile Teams

Being a manager in a hybrid organization

It is the time of the year, you are a manager working in a hybrid organization and you need to assess your team. Appraisal time as usual you would tend to say, there is just one difficulty… You need to assess the agile skills of your team and let it be the case that you are not yet there, you understand agility, however you can't call yourself an agilist or an agile manager at this point. 

Your mind starts to go in all the different directions, and you start asking yourself questions: 'What is the fuzz about agility again?', 'How can I see if the agile skills of the team are improving?', 'And WHAT traits exactly am I looking for?!'. You start reading blogs and articles explaining Agility in performance management, now you remember again, it is about being able to adapt, about continuous feedback; and about the new ways to reward people on a more regular basis on a team or even organizational level. 

Ok clear, there is only one but... in your organization it is not the case yet: HR processes are still one size fits all, agile and non-agile people are assessed the exact same way, appraisals are done once or twice a year maximum… you start questioning the agility of your HR structure, you ask yourself the question “Is the current process allowing the agile culture to emerge and to reward the employee in a right way?” Then, you organize a quick Video Conference with your HRBP to ask him/her the questions. The answer? Your HRBP will investigate and come back to you as soon as possible. Arrgghhh… 

If this situation sounds familiar to you, this article is for you!

Having the best possible posture to assess agile people

With the changes agility brings to the workplace, your role as manager is changing. You are no longer managing the people, your role is to help them grow, develop their skills, to be a coach that is guiding them. Indeed, studies show that managers who develop their employees get better results and better performance. Hehe, easy to say, but you do have difficulties to figure it out as you are lacking a role model within your direct peers. 

More than having a better performing team, you will also decrease the attrition and increase the talent retention, if you succeed to develop a posture in line with the new employee generation expectations. The expectations are clear, they need managers to be more involved and to help them. Employees may have high technical skills but undeveloped behaviours to succeed in the workplace (ex: collaboration, communication, humility etc.). 

Speaking of expectations, thank you Covid-19, all organizations are now asking their employees to become more and more adaptable while the environment and skills are ever-changing. They need you as a coach to help the team going forward as they cannot afford and do not desire an hire/fire approach towards loyal and highly dedicated employees.

Do you feel a kind of positive pressure? It almost starts to feel like you are the one being assessed. :-) Breathe in and breathe out, slowly, a couple of times. Relax. Start simply by focusing on them as people, human beings - social animals having work, friends and families - start by showing that you care about them. 

Keep it mind the good news: as a coach you don't have to be better than your employee, you simply need to empower your employee to become better! You can thus develop agile people, with a good mindset and behaviours, without being an agilist yourself yet. That must feel like a relief! 

Now what are exactly the specific traits & behaviours that an agile person should exhibit?

The 5 traits of an agile person

As the list could go on and on when searching for the different terms to describe an agile mindset, we want to avoid getting into theory, our goal is to help you with a more practical approach that you can use during the appraisals. Based on the values and principles of Agile, we can recognise five main traits everyone on the team should develop:

• customer centricity
• collaboration
• constructive communication
• ownership
• adaptability

The behavioural level

In order to assess the above mentioned characteristics, we should look for specific behaviours that embody them. Please find here below the definition of the 5 traits:  

• Customer Centricity: The ability to empathize with your customer's needs, pains and expected gains; and the habit to co-create solutions with your customers. People especially talented in this area have the way of living that is about gathering information during and outside the ceremonies. They demonstrate an ability to ask for feedback, not to make it personal and to act on it.
• Collaboration: The ability to proactively work with others and caring about collective results (team, department, tribe level). People with these skills are capable of finding the right balance, in any context, to know when to ask help from others and when to be supportive with others. Working with them brings better quality outcomes.
• Constructive Communication: The ability to listen to the opinions of others, and to stay open minded when people give input that is not matching with their point of view. People extremely talented in this area will show respect towards others, even when they disagree with them. When they have developed constructive communication skills, they are capable of seeing conflicts as an opportunity to achieve the most relevant outcome for the different stakeholders.
• Ownership: Being empowered to really be accountable and to be held accountable. People especially talented in this area are taking responsibility for the delivery of their work and they will make sure the delivery is predictable. They will be comfortable escalating with a clear reasoning on why something can not be done. In front of a failure, they do not hide but act on it.
• Adaptability: The ability of slicing and prioritizing your work in such a way that you keep delivering continuous value to your customers, while being able to change priorities based on new emerging needs. People especially talented in this area have an eagerness to learn new skills outside their expertise when it brings value to the organization. When facing an issue they are looking for alternative solutions.

When your team becomes more mature, you can do the same assessment at different levels: team, department or tribe level!

Skillset, Mindset & Context

There are common practices during an appraisal, collecting feedback from other employees about perceived behaviors, making sure the person feels secure enough to talk, asking her or him to talk first, using specific examples of behavior when giving feedback, sticking to the behavioral level and not the identity one; leave enough space for the employee to share his/her opinion when there is a disagreement; establish together the next steps and goals for improvement. It is key to ensure communication clarity in both directions. So far so good. 

We can go a level deeper when it comes to agility, it is not only about skills. The traits or characteristics of an agile person are the mindset and skills combined. It is not one or the other. When assessing the team, as a manager you can only assess behaviors. The behaviors are traits put in practice in a specific context and therefore visible. Important to keep in mind is the fact that if nobody can't see certain behaviors it does not necessarily mean they are not there. And yes, it is the responsibility of an employee to show and develop the desired traits (mindset and skills), but there lies also the responsibility of the company to facilitate the right context for the employee to achieve this. Remember that the appraisal conversation is a great moment to collect data on improvement points which need to happen at another level in your organization. It will help the organization take more people centric and data driven decisions in future!

Individual Scale & Team Board 

A simple tool that can help you to assess the traits is a scale from 0 to 5. 

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0. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Remember the time when you were a scout - if you were. You did start your journey without any badges. You could only win some after achieving something (best cook, best whatever). It is the same kind of mindset we suggest you get when you need to assess your team. People start, by default with 0 and they can only improve skills and abilities during the years. A question you will ask them as a manager is: “What do you need from me in order to go to the next step?”. A question you can ask them as a coach is “What will you do to go to the next step?”.

If you want to act agile, make a board out of it. With all the people in your team and their development level. People will then be able to look for somebody extremely talented in one of the areas if they want to have a mentor, or simply to peer with somebody making them grow. As a side note, this is of course only possible if the culture of your organization allows such a level of transparency.

We as a team, HR Agilist at Wemanity, can help you with this by organizing workshops, training and dedicated coaching as well to ensure your team is going to the next step! Lucky you.

What's next? Becoming an agile people manager? 

In this article we took you on a little journey, starting with your challenges in a hybrid organization and the changing role of a manager. We hope to have you inspired with a new posture that you could adopt. Closing the journey with five traits that agile people should develop, a method on how to assess the traits and a tool to make it happen.

So what’s next? … and if… If you decided to see this new appraisal process as an opportunity to improve your mindset, making it more agile? And if today instead of doing agile, you decided to become agile... Being over Doing. ... and if…

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About Us:

Dagmara Wojtczak and Thibault Beuken are passionate HR Agilists with more than 16 years of combined experience within Leadership Roles and in HR departments. At Wemanity they are specialized in Change Management, Digital Transformation, and the Design of Agile HR processes for teams & organizations. All about empowering people in their career development & taking HR a step further.