Elevate Your Performance Review Conversations with these 12 Expert Tips

Welcome to “A Closer Review,” a new monthly newsletter from the team at First Round Review. Each month, we’ll highlight practical advice from the digital pages of The Review on a particular topic that tends to give folks headaches — like annual planning, hiring well, or (in the case of this inaugural installment) performance reviews. As a subscriber, you can expect each newsletter will leave you with at least one tip or tactic that you can put to use right away.

When was the last time you looked forward to performance reviews? It’s probably been a while.

For managers and reports alike, there’s plenty of anxiety and stress that comes along with this regular exercise. There’s a mountain of work that comes with filling out the evaluations, trying to summarize months of work into a few splashy bullets — plus the worry of what surprises await when the feedback floodgates open from management and peers.

And more often than not, by the time you sit down to actually hold these conversations, they end up more ho-hum than high-impact. A few common pitfalls include:

• Not providing enough substantial feedback, or sidestepping thornier topics.
• Focusing too much on the short-term — what folks need to do to get promoted to the next level — rather than taking a longer-tail view at their larger career goals.
• Having a one-sided conversation where the manager does almost all of the talking, rather than treating this time as an opportunity for open, transparent dialogue between manager and report.
• Failing to have a follow-up plan, that holds both the report and the manager accountable to taking tangible steps in the right direction.

As Lenny Rachitsky told us a few years ago: “Done well, performance reviews improve performance, align expectations and accelerate your report’s career. Done poorly, they accelerate their departure.”

But they don’t have to be such a slog.

So we combed the archives of the Review for tested tactics (and reached out to folks in the First Round community for fresh new advice) to make your next round of performance reviews more effective. Plus, we assembled a question bank to bookmark for opening up fruitful conversations and digging deeper. There are plenty of frameworks in here for both sides of the table, whether you’re a manager or a report looking to punch things up.

Here’s a sneak peek at 3 of the 12 tips for making your next review count:

• Don't give a sh*t sandwich.?There’s frequently-touted advice out there to soften the blow of negative feedback with the Oreo cookie method, sandwiching harsher critiques between layers of phrase. But Kim Scott (of Radical Candor? fame), gives this approach a much less appetizing moniker: a ‘sh*t sandwich.’?“I find it helpful to reassure the person that the critical feedback comes from a good place, to try to damper the ‘fight or flight’ instinct. But otherwise, be as direct as possible: ‘I care a lot about your success here, and part of that means that I have to give you some critical feedback. When you did X, Y, Z it ended up being ineffective and even destructive,” says ?? Greg Ratner , co-founder and CTO of Troops.ai (acquired by Salesforce).?
• Spend more time than you think you need to with your high performers.?“You should be spending the majority of your time with the people who are moving the needle — the folks who are your highest performers and have the potential to change the company,” says Molly Graham . “It's really easy to think, ‘That person is so strong, they just take care of themselves. I'll go focus on the rest of my team.’ But I firmly believe that the majority of my time and coaching energy should actually go into people who are high-performing. They are the rocket ships that could end up running parts of the company someday.” Make sure you're giving your high performers stretch goals and big challenges where they might fail — or soar.
• Ask questions to avoid getting defensive about feedback.?“You can’t trust your initial reaction to feedback. Defensive responses are driven by common fears about our own competence, and fear is a powerful distorter of the messages we hear,” says Arise Leadership founder and CEO Shivani Berry . Here’s what that distortion looks like in practice: When colleagues say “This one part of the design isn’t solving the customer problem in scope,” we hear it as “I’m a terrible designer.” When they say, “You need to strategically prioritize which initiatives your team should focus on,” we hear it as “I’m dropping all the balls. My manager thinks I’m incompetent.”?Asking good questions breaks through fear’s distortion field and enables you to process the message in a more accurate and insightful way.

Read the full article.