Introducing Performance Dialogue

Part I: Feedback is Dead

Long live feedback! Here's some feedback for you: feedback is a fallacy. Feedback is so 20th Century! The companies designed by the industrial barons didn't care much what people thought of them, so they gave them feedback the same way an amp gives you feedback when you point a mike at it. It certainly makes you jump! Henry Ford is attributed with the quip, "Check your brain at the gate." because he wanted people to do as they were told and not mess up the assembly line. In that management paradigm, feedback is a screeching noise of supervisors yelling at workers when they don’t do work as prescribed. People either quickly adapt or get kicked out. This might work to get consistency, scale, and efficiency (back then) but has some serious downsides for organizations that depend on knowledge, creativity, and communication (now).

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Fast forward, about 100 years. We're beyond the Industrial Age and smack in the middle of the Idea Economy. When you are dealing with people (not machines) to generate value, it's a good idea to adjust your language and adopt better terms to describe how humans behave while working together.

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According to Marshall Goldsmith, the eminent guru of executive coaching, there are only two problems with negative feedback: 1.) People don't want to hear it, and 2.) People don't want to give it. I think he's totally right, and you should check out his book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, for more simple tips that improve your performance. I think there's a small (okay, really big) other problem in the feedback equation. Feedback is not a human word, it's a machine word. Even Marshall Goldsmith thinks the word should be different, so he coined, "Feed Forward" (I don’t think that’s going to catch on).

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Here's another analysis of feedback… There's only one problem with feedback: it doesn't describe what successful people do. Successful people are curious. In fact, they are addicted to curiosity. They never stop asking questions and they use what they find out to learn and grow in a positive success cycle. It’s not painful. It’s not boring. It’s not a waste of time. It’s essential.

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Here's what curious people ask:? What do you think?? How can we make these things happen? Do you have any suggestions for how I could adjust my approach? Curiosity is an attitude, a mindset, a drive. Curiosity is innate to all of us, but there are skills to develop to become good at it. Being effective at asking good questions that illicit good advice from others might take some practice... but it's fun because you discover a pile of cool ideas and make new friends along the way.

First, recognize that you can be curious along a time spectrum from immediate to distant situations and the type of questions you might ask are different for each end of the spectrum. Immediate curiosity is "in the moment" and emergent while long-term curiosity is more periodic and reflective.? In the moment, you ask very specific questions and explore options for immediate next steps in a current situation. Occasionally, you step back to see if you are making progress toward a longer-term goal by asking questions about patterns in your experience and exploring ideas and options for future behavior.

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Second, when you ask a question, express a desired state, goal, or intent to cue those around you to your intent. It helps your collaborators know how to narrow their suggestions and give you more valuable input. It also ensures that the advice you get is aligned with your intentions.? As the saying goes, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”? Without some intention, you tend to get such a broad array of input from others that it dilutes your direction and may get you way off track.

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Finally, recognize that sometimes people are quite shy about sharing their thoughts because they aren't sure why you need their advice, and there’s social risk in their sharing critical opinions. What if you get offended by their input and your relationship is damaged by their critique? Perhaps they haven't noticed anything special about your efforts and they can't think of anything to say. It’s a cognitive drain to reflect on someone else’s behavior and select something useful to say about it. Make it easier for others to help you with an invitation that contains reassurance and narrows the focus, and you’ll get more than a platitude like "Looks good!" when you ask, “How am I doing?”

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If you really want to know how you are doing, help someone share their opinion with these steps:

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1. Express intent (I'm trying to...)
2. Disclose a concern (but I'm concerned that...)
3. Invite input (can you help with this?)
4. Explore with curiosity (what could I adjust?)

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Do this with several people and you'll have ideas and perspectives to help you make good decisions and accomplish your goals.

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PART II: Let’s Kill Performance Reviews!

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There’s plenty of research on performance appraisals showing satisfaction levels are well below an acceptable level we’d apply to any other business process. Can you imagine if you accepted a 65% CSAT score in your customer contact center? We seem to be stuck with “something is better than nothing” and willing to absorb the excessive costs and negative energy to avoid the risk of feeling completely blind and out of control. As a business-driven HR executive, I think it’s unacceptable that such an expensive investment would be “okay” at anything less than 90% satisfaction for participants.

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Maybe we should kill performance reviews, but maybe we just do them poorly. I can say that I’ve attempted to renovate performance review systems at more than a handful of companies including Citibank, Levi’s, and Mercury Interactive, and I don’t think our current “best practice” is good enough to make traditional performance reviews worthwhile. Even when done with as much care and diligence as possible, it’s still a very time-consuming, expensive, and unsatisfying process for most participants. Even when it’s done well, it’s still a dreaded, necessary evil that people must suffer through to be considered for a raise.

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The real problem with performance reviews is more fundamental than the issues of gathering unbiased perspectives, lack of pay transparency, and administrative drag. Fixing workflows, simplifying forms, adjusting cycle timing, changing labels, and training managers assumes a paradigm about people and work that is functionally out of date and misaligned with what high-performance people do (see Part I).

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Solving the problems with performance reviews is not about how to deliver them better, it’s about taking a step back to wonder, “What’s the best way to help people perform at their best?” This might seem like a tangent, but to truly fix performance reviews, we need to dig deeper into the human dynamics involved and start with a new design paradigm. Here are some warm-up questions to stretch your thinking and start looking at this problem from other angles:

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• How do we know if people are doing good work?
• How do we know if people are doing the right work?
• Why do we care about the answers to those questions?
• Why do entrepreneurs achieve so much without ever getting a performance review?
• Why do entrepreneurs succeed without having a boss?
• Why do some sports teams overachieve while others don’t?
• Outside of business, what are other situations where work quality matters?
• What do we know about evaluation in school versus evaluation at work?
• What do we know about evaluation in families?
• What motivates people to do good work?
• How do you measure human output?
• Who should measure human output?
• What information do people need to perform at their best?
• How do salaries get set?
• Do bonuses motivate people?
• What is performance? How do you know when it’s effective?
• When have you experienced a moment of performance insight? How did you get it?
• When have you done your best work? What makes you call that “your best work”?
• What’s the difference between effort and output? Do both matter?
• Where have you observed “high performance” in action?
• What are the conditions that create high performance? What kinds of relationships exist in high-performance situations?
• What kinds of relationships exist in low-performance situations?
• Are relationships an important factor in high performance?
• How does the human brain react to threats? What does it do to our body?
• How does the human brain react to challenges? To rewards? To compliments?
• What is the language of high performance? Are some words better than others?
• Where did the term feedback originate?
• What’s different about work today versus work 25-50-100-1000 years ago?

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I’ll cut to the chase and share that my design work led me to recognize that the person who benefits most from a review is the person receiving it. Sounds simple, but with closer consideration, it reverses the dynamic from giving to gathering. Most performance management systems are designed from the perspective of the manager or the company to “manage” limited financial resources. The goal is to differentiate people based on performance which corrupts the value of any feedback from the get-go.

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If instead, we start with the perspective of the individual, the problem statement becomes “How can I find out if I’m doing my work properly?” or something along those lines; and a separate question of “Am I getting paid fairly for the work I produce?” Over time, I’ve clarified this into 2 separate conversations people need to conduct at work, each with 2 driving questions. I call this Performance Dialogue.

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Conversation 1: Evaluating my performance:

• Is this the right work for me to do?
• Is the work I’m doing good enough?

Conversation 2: Navigating my career:

• Do I have the capabilities necessary to succeed in this job?
• What capabilities do I need to progress in my career?

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Once divided into these 2 conversations and 4 questions, building a process, system, tool, or procedure to help answer them looks much different than a performance review and associated trappings we all know and hate. The associated design questions in the new paradigm might look like this:

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• Who can help me answer this question? (Satisfies a need to identify key stakeholders like managers, peers, and clients)
• What are good ways to gather input from others? (Based on a deep understanding of predictable human/interpersonal dynamics)
• How can I make giving input/perspective easy for my stakeholders? (Places the burden on me not them)
• How do I make sense of their answers? (Provides tools like a survey I can use to increase my skill/efficiency)
• How often should I ask these questions? ?(Helps me define the nature of my work and when feedback would be useful to me)

So yes, let’s kill performance reviews and replace them with performance dialogue!

PART III: Okay, so how do I get a raise then?

Compensation is an agreement between an organization and an individual to pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount/type/scope of work. Performance Dialogue has no direct connection to compensation. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Performance Dialogue ensures work focus and work quality because it is a discussion about work, not an economic evaluation. If you want to have high performance, creativity, or innovation in your organization then people need to take risks. If you tie performance conversations to compensation, they get corrupted because nobody will share a mistake or challenge, or they’ll get dinged in their rating.

To determine someone’s compensation you need to evaluate their capabilities against the market. It is a completely different process that you have once or twice a year and is essentially the same process you use when you interview someone for a job in the first place. What does their experience indicate they are able to do? What job responsibilities can they reliably accomplish? What is the evidence of these capabilities?

People with more capabilities generally earn more, so if someone grows in their capabilities, they should get a raise in accordance with what the market would pay them. The fundamental switch here is moving from evaluating performance against goals over time to evaluating growth in capabilities against a market.

How do you get a raise? Get curious and adjust your behavior based on the advice and input you gather from those you work with (see Part I).

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What about poor performers?

Basic performance is a binary problem. Either someone is putting in the effort and making progress or they are not. If you determine that someone is no longer interested in putting in the effort or is substantially unable to do the work, it’s time to part ways.

This should be discovered over time via Performance Dialogue and handled long before you engage in Compensation or Career Navigation discussions. Keeping someone on your team who is not able to do the work is a disservice to everyone involved. Act with care and compassion, but follow through, nonetheless.