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:
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.
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Five features of really good feedback
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.
Executive Head of HR
2 年Another insightful and timely read, thanks David… and hope you’re well ????
David Ellis - brilliant guide! It captures the essence of feedback rather than 'performance systems'. You're absolutely right, most people focus on 'performance systems' because that's easier to do. The 'secret sauce' to performance is to embed giving or receiving feedback as a cultural norm to help someone 'when no one is looking'. This enables real change, rather than box ticking.
Simple and clear as always David. Thanks. If I may add one more point that helps building a feedback culture in my experience - people need to have be clear as to why they should spend time seeking & giving feedback (good or bad!). If it’s just process compliance, it’ll be patchy and superficial. But if people understand how it helps them (both provider and seeker) they are likely to be more inclined to do it on their own. For one of my clients, we made a few changes - first we called it developmental ‘advice’ not feedback (language matters and sets the tone), we created a simple tech that allowed people to provide anytime anonymized advice (we found people were more open when it wasn’t direct - perhaps cultural), we created 3 clear categories of advice so it’s focused not personal (behavior, skills, results), we linked progression decisions to these 3 categories as well and this record was a good reference point (so individuals need to seek advice to develop/validate if they want to grow and progress in the organization), we made 3 ratings where bonus for 80% depended on how we did as team & not individually (need to give advice to help improve each other or we all fail) with some flexibility. And some other stuff.
Performance and Reward
2 年Excellent read as always. Even if it's been said before you say it well! Meghla Roy Chowdhury one to reference
Partner - Authorisations, Governance and Prudential Regulation
2 年Frequent feedback provided with clear intend; so important. Thanks for sharing this David