From Performance Appraisals’ swamp to Snow White’s kingdom

Once upon a time, actually only four years ago, we were still living with a very traditional and, of course, very complex performance management process. 

Year after year in this faraway land, Performance Management was unleashed and it wondered in the dark forest just like this:

HR started to prepare for the annual campaign at the end of each year. The entire organization was mobilized starting January into undergoing the process: trainings, communication, follow-ups, always delays and pushes for managers to get it done. HR centralized the grades, performed qualitative analysis, told managers that there are too many “shinning stars” and too little “problem childs” and so on ....back and forth.  After this first round, the Career Committees phase started: a long series of store, regional and eventually national career committee. We were done with it all around June. We could then file everything, report some great KPIs about the spread of our talent pipeline across the organization, send the succession plans to central head-office and take some rest and then go to another project. The entire organization forgot almost instantly about the outputs of the performance management process and lived its life as if it never happened, not needing the outputs all year long. 

At some point in time, I realized that everybody was doing it because it was mandatory and not only found it useless but also time consuming and not at all enjoying and taking any benefit from it. I guess HR was seen as the Wicked Queen of the “Snow White and the seven dwarfs” story. We lured people with the bad apple pushing them to perform a huge work load for almost nothing in return. You know the drill!

All of a sudden in the great dark forest, with trees growing so close to each other hiding the sunshine, a tinny idea full of energy started to wonder around announcing spring might be close. 

In 2016 we were preparing the National Career Committee: the board members were supposed to finalize the overall picture of the entire organization high potentials, successions, key people. I had a strong wish to do it differently, collaboratively, co-creating the key competencies to appraise people to start with and much more. I pitched my idea to Jean Baptiste, our CEO at that time: in 5 minutes while we climbed the stairs to our 6th floor office. He just said “yes, do it” and I had two weeks to work something out. 

In a nutshell, I designed something new, experiential, announced it as being a trial prototype which I called “The Popeye Adventure”. It was about co-creating 3 competencies sets, placing people from our own teams in a simplified competency & potential matrix and then voting in order to be sure that people are placed in the right case of the matrix. We gave up the top confidentiality around the HIPO topic. We invited all of them at a lunch, we congratulated them, we shared about the way we identified them and told them there will be an interesting development plan, partially to be constructed together with them as a community. They received as a gift a Popeye T-shirt and a jar of spinach seeds. The amazing part was that all the actors described above had very positive feelings about what we had done together.

Of course, I sensed a new door had open, a door to a new kingdom with no more bad apples and Wicked Queens. The trees seemed to whisper to each other, still scaring Snow White who began to run. She ran over sharp stones and through thorns. She ran as far as her feet could carry her, and just as evening was about to fall she saw a little house and went inside in order to rest and think things over.

I started to work with my team towards a bigger change regarding the entire performance management process. We were imagining a kind of “Carrefour’s got talent” process where people could be assessed not only from their current job perspective, but from a complete human being perspective. We were in the middle of a cultural turnaround within the organization and we wanted to recognize people for their cross-department, volunteer contributions to Carrefour’s community, for their willingness to learn and practice learning just to name a few. We were building all this with the organization, co-creating with different colleagues, testing our ideas, asking people to vote on our social platform and choose from a range of several topics, being bold and getting inspired by what we read, learned about innovative and empowerment based companies we admired.

In one of the co-creation workshops with board members and other people who were deeply involved in the cultural turnaround I was mentioning earlier, we got challenged on: why keep the performance appraisals followed by the career committees, why not transform them in “two in one”? Another strong challenge emerged: let people themselves collectively choose the high potentials of the company.

All in all, we gently but for good killed the Wicked Queen, we worked with all the dwarfs of the kingdom and we have a new story to tell about the Talent Process we have today, called “360 Development” or Snow White. 

Snow White is innocent, kind, gentle, sweet, cheerful, generous, trusting, has a helpful nature, she is sensitive and soft-spoken but can be also energetic. With her kindness, but also great resilience and an inner strength against adversity, Snow White charms every creature in the kingdom except the Queen. I loved this description of Snow White because it resembles to “360 Development”.

As far as the Talent Process construction journey, for me it all started when I was mentally and emotionally prepared to say it out loud to myself and my team: “Guys, we don’t believe in the process we have, we do it only because we have to and we do not find it useful. WHY do we do it then?! WHY don’t we build something that people, us included, will love?!”

We totally ditched the former performance appraisals, we don’t have career committees and succession plans anymore. What we do have instead is a Talent Process where the team is central and the managers are secondary, where HR’s only role is to create the context for things to happen as they are meant to happen and I can tell you magic happens.

The process is 100% digital taking place on our professional social platform. 

• I can choose my feedback givers network of minimum 10 from a diverse range: direct manager (the only mandatory one to be included), peers, people from own team, people from other teams, outside partners. I seek advice within my team if my choice is balanced and complete. I then send invitations to my feedback givers wishlist.
• I have to dedicate some time only to myself and write an auto-evaluation which will be very helpful later on when I’ll be able to compare the way I see myself matches with the how others perceive me.
• I also am a feedback giver to other colleagues who invite me. In case I do not know the person enough, I can kindly decline the invitation. On the other hand, I can spontaneously offer feedback to somebody who has not requested it.
• I give feedback on 5 dimensions which are important to us: strategic & client priorities, servant leadership, peer accountability, practice learning and way of working in line with today’s and tomorrow’s trends. The feedback is given on two dimensions: what I appreciate in you is ..... and what I encourage you to do is....  
• When all the above is done I am able to receive a gift: to download my personal report, gathering all the feedbacks received. NO grades, no ratings, a report only for ME! Yes, you got it right: nor the direct manager, nor HR receive my report. 
• The one-to-one boss-subordinate discussion doesn’t take place anymore. We replaced it with a team sharing reunion recommended to take place outside the office, in a cosy, non-formal spot. All teams have their own way of facilitating the team sharing gathering and one thing is sure: all team members share about their reports, the manager included, connect one to each other, take some time off to talk about their team dynamics and hopefully they have some fun around it also. 
• What about the high potential dwarfs of the kingdom? Every two years the HIPOs are identified collaboratively, not top-down. There are two filters we use in order to arrive to the final choice of our “tomorrow’s leaders, Popeyes”. The entire organization knows who these people are, we do not hide them, on the contrary, we are proud to put a recognition spotlight on them. No secrecy, no doubts, as we all chose the people we believe worth developing even more.
• After having them selected, we offer them a two years development journey based on a strong principle: TakeGiveGrow. Year 1 consists of a “Take” phase for the tomorrow’s leaders: experiential learning, bootcamps, servant leadership programs, exposure to business conferences, Carrefour University courses, etc. Year 2 consists of a “Give” phase during which they will give back to the community the things they’ve learned in ways we customize each time. And there is the “Grow” phase which is there all along the way, as people grow their competencies, their knowledge, their skills, they grow in communities which enhances collaboration during and after.
• What about succession planning or promoting the right people?! How is that dealt with? The succession planning should be taken care by the managers as it is the way to get promoted yourself. A true leader is someone who grows other leaders, who grow other leaders and so on. Promotions happen based on an internal job fair and a sort of an internal linkedin with an automatic digital connection to the job vacancies posts on our social platform. 

“Is the Talent Process perfect now?”, one might ask. Of course not, but we do improve each year’s campaign based on the feedbacks people give us, we improve for them and with them. Last year somebody asked me: “But still, how do you control it? How do you know people are not being disrespectful to each other, how can you assess the quality of the feedbacks, what KPIs do you look at?”

The answer was: we don’t look at it that way, we look at it as to a totally collaborative, peer accountable, team based experience which will grow in maturity with the years going by. Another answer I have in mind is that the traditional processes just give us the illusion of control but they leave people with a sour taste and disengagement around the process. There are studies showing that people, both managers and subordinates, feel exhausted, disappointed, frustrated by the traditional processes. It is a clear sign that they should by now belong to the past. Just like the Wicked Queen of the kingdom: she has to disappear at some point from the story.

The entire Talent Process is focused on colleagues’ feedback and aims to give people the answers to the following question: “How can I become my better self version?”. But there’s more to it. It builds up a trust climate, based on no control whatsoever from the direct hierarchy and HR. All this contributes immensely to creating more autonomy, agility, more responsible and committed people, to a “no silos” work environment, etc. Could we dare say it has anything to do with the company’s culture?

Culture is not something that is firstly written and then applied and believed in. It is something that is alive, something you have to work on hard and protect it at all times: you put the right nutrients, you listen and involve people, you co-create letting go control and trusting people, you are not afraid to fail or to start all over again. You will see the culture emerge, create its own shape. If you do have a company credibility bucket that is full, it means that you have filled it with small or big profs of “walking the talk”, bold decisions to give up old stuff and allow yourself to see an empty space which will be filled up by something brand new. 

The sooner you say “no more!” to the bad apples you have in your company, other doors will open to new kingdoms which can be co-created with the teams. Don’t you want happy dwarfs in the kingdom?! Of course, that’s what we all preach, write on walls, as company values.

But first of all, you and your company have to get rid of the Wicked Queens and create your own Snow White! Let Snow White be part of the story you write on your own, no recipes book, along with all your colleagues, getting inspired by the outside world and future predictions. And just observe how she will live happily ever after with the dwarfs!