Feeding back on performance – a handy guide

Feeding back on performance – a handy guide

With a new year comes a renewed positivity about the use of performance management to improve performance. If your performance management process doesn’t do that, then what really is it for?

I will avoid the usual tropes – ratings, forced distribution, technology and the like.?I hesitate to say its all been said before, but most of it is fairly clear and may be summed up with the following two platitudes:

• We are obsessed with the wrong population – we focus on the top 15% and the bottom 5%.?The key to performance improvement rests clearly with the 80% who sit somewhere in between.
• Your system will be a compromise – you should focus on what you are happy to compromise on, rather than what you want.?What does this mean??It is just not possible for you to have a performance management system that enables you to develop your people to the fullest extent, and enables you to manage reward outcomes in a governance framed way, and that drives performance of your people.?You really need to make some decisions about what you are happy to let go of.?

So you will have some enabling technology.?And maybe have some ratings from time to time (they come and go).?Forcing distribution will happen, but not always.?For at the end of the day, there is simply no way that someone can prove that, across the board, performance ratings are “old hat”.?Or that linking pay to performance management outcomes prejudices the process.?Or that forced distribution curves are wrong.?All have their place.?And different businesses will use or discard them dependent upon where they sit in their cycle.?It’s quite possible for all these approaches to be optimal – on their own fact pattern.

But what I think we can all agree on, whatever the business, ?is that improvement in the quality of feedback is one thing that can make a real difference to the performance delivered by every organisation.?And if we all agree on it, then getting it right can’t be that hard.

It’s really hard

In reality, it’s perfectly possible for us all to agree that something both important and valuable can also be hard to achieve.?We focus on the system we use to manage performance rather than the content we put in it because it’s easier to fix.

Five features of really good feedback

• It needs to be descriptive:?I don’t mean using more colourful adjectives (although feel free).?I mean it needs to describe a circumstance or provide an example which some feedback may be related to.?End of year performance reviews are a shocker for this.?People think their feedback needs to provide a general review of how someone has performed over a period of 12 months (“Julie has had a good year, generally”).?This doesn’t count as feedback.?It’s a school report.
• It needs to be short:?We are interested in feedback based on a clear example.?If the person giving feedback has more than three sentences to say about it, that would suggest the feedback is more about them than the recipient.?Less is always more.
• It needs to be first hand:?Never start your feedback with, “I have been hearing good things about you”.?That’s not feedback.?It’s gossip.?If you have no first-hand experience of the fact or circumstance being fed back on it then you can’t give any feedback on it.
• The intent must be clear: For a high performing organisation, the giving of positive feedback will outweigh anything negative by a considerable multiple.?But that doesn’t mean that all feedback needs to contain both positive and negative aspects.?If you have something difficult to say, best not to dress it up with two positive statements either side.?No one will have clue what you’re talking about.
• It must be frequent: Recognising strong performance is really the only effective way you have to influence the performance of your team. If you do it once a year, you’ll get nowhere.?

What does this all mean in practice?

It's tempting to teach people how to give (and receive) feedback and sit back waiting for the performance bump.??But this is not the tricky bit.?You can achieve the teach-in via the adoption of ?a sensible framework and some practice.?Time consuming and a tiny bit awkward – but certainly within the capability of most.

No.?The tricky bit is to work out how you get your team members to seek more feedback and deliver more feedback outside of your formal process.?In effect, how comfortable are your people offering and seeking feedback when no one has required they do it and no one is ticking off its receipt? It’s an interesting cultural test.?It is often said that culture is “what happens when the lights are off”, or “what happens when no one is looking”.?A good feedback culture needs to work all the time – not just in little observed chunks over the year.

Giving and receiving feedback in such circumstances requires a different set of skills – for both the person giving and receiving feedback.?And the focus on a real acid test of purpose.?At the end of day, the only reason you should give feedback outside of a formal process is to help the person receiving it improve.?Meaning the framework you adopt and the practice you undertake needs to land this imperative.?

Creating a an effective feedback culture requires no capex, investment case or product testing.?It does, however, require leadership and (more accurately) management effort and buy-in. And these things are not easy to come by.?But its worth ending by repeating a point made above – “recognising strong performance is really the only effective way you have to influence the performance of your team”.?

Which makes it a worthwhile investment, all round.