Hi all,
Forgive me for the holiday themed subject line…. I know it maybe feels a touch too soon to yammer on about the holidays on here, but please know that in private, I’ve been blasting Christmas music and watching all kinds of terrible Christmas programming. Recommendation: “Love Hard” on Netflix, starring Nina Dobrev, as well as the incomparable Jimmy O. Yang and Darren Barnet as not one, but TWO awesome Asian male romantic leads. It’s v cute.
Who else feels 2021’s year-end haze more profoundly than any other year prior? There’s certainly no shortage of work to do, but motivation and energy feel at all-time lows. Not a scientific claim…. but I *think* we can blame the idiocy of daylight saving which makes every day feel like it has 4 total productive working hours.
Before we sign off from this incredibly weird year (yes, another one), many of us in the corporate world are likely due for a year-end review or performance check in with our managers and our direct reports.
This week’s newsletter is a short one, a quick roundup of thoughts on annual reviews (If you’re a stickler for routine, you’ll note this week’s newsletter is a day late to your inboxes… but it’s here nonetheless.)
Now, of course, no annual review system is perfect. In fact, there are many articles and schools of thought that disavow the very nature of annual reviews. (Adobe famously denounced the whole concept in this paper: “Death to the Annual Review”).
The key takeaways were that annual reviews ended up being demoralizing, time-consuming and frankly too slow affect change in an organization, and the company instead replaced it with a more frequent, less formal check-in system.
Unfortunately, for many of us in more traditional corporate structures, the annual review isn’t something we can simply overhaul or skip over. It’s a massively entrenched way of doing things that spans many industries.
Back when I was in traditional financial services, year-end scenarios ranged from a tepid, slightly anxious time of year, to an all out exuberant whirlwind of partying, depending on which part of the economic cycle we happened to be in.
Note: to those reading this who are young and fortunate enough to have missed the GFC in your professional lives, you’ve probably only lived through steadily exuberant year ends… but once upon a time, according to ancient folklore… the stock market actually went *down*… for a sustained period of time….
In financial services, “reviews” were rarely a full conversation. Instead they usually went something like this:
“[Pleasantry.]”
“[Pleasantry.]”
“[If mega negative feedback, insert here, otherwise insert small talk about the performance of the business overall.]”
“Polite acknowledgement that it’s been a busy year, [mentally checks watch].”
“Filler filler filler filler …..[Finally reads bonus number].”
“Recipient immediately computes entire self-worth, identity, future mood for the next 6 months based on said number, which is almost always 20-50% perceived as too low.”
Nothing further is discussed about goals, development, or other feedback. The sun rises and sets on a bonus number.
Only when I left banking and entered the startup world, did I experience performance reviews were not entirely centered around a bonus number. To be fair, there was still mention of full year performance, and usually some commensurate compensation impact, but reviews ended up being considerably more holistic in nature, yet being more concise in some ways. Somehow, reviews outside of financial services managed to say more, while saying less (probably less of that filler mentioned above).
Two frameworks that worked well (sometimes used together)
“Do More. Do Less. Keep Doing”
How’s that for concise? Three categories that provided prescriptive, actionable feedback in an unemotional way.
Do more: the employee is doing certain things well, and you want them to take on more responsibility (do more of the same thing with a larger scope), or do more repetitions to build experience and expertise.
Do less: this is a hinderance to the employee’s success. Perhaps it’s a communication style, perhaps its a time management thing. Perhaps it’s simply a misallocation of time to something lower priority that the employee needs some re-direction on.
Keep doing: Feedback that the employee is doing many of the right things, and on track for what you’ve both determined their ‘track’ to be.
“Values-Based Assessment”
The fundamental basis of this assessment framework is that your company’s values are public, your employees know what they are, and they have a desire to work and live in line with them. Also, regardless of actual job function or level, all employees have a way to express these values in their day to day work (this also makes it easier to calibrate across functions and lines of business)
The assessment looks at each value, and measures how the employee is performing against that value, and sometime values are meant to be interpreted in tandem. For example, a firm that values both “expertise” and “collaboration” measures employees on how much they know, but also how much they are willing to share with each other. If the company’s value systems are well understood, feedback systems like this can remove some of the personal/emotional side of reviews. The feedback isn’t “Employee B thinks Employee A is territorial”, rather, “In order to effectualize our core value of collaboration, Employee A should work on sharing meeting notes, or customer feedback sooner in the process”
Few more quick tips, which I also shared on Instagram:
Be forward looking: even if you have a long list of things to improve from the year prior, it’s demoralizing to focus on past behavior (that can’t actually be changed) to make a point. This ties in with #2 below - if you are having feedback conversations more frequently than 1x/year, there isn’t time to accumulate a long list of grievances. The hope is you’ve aired those out periodically throughout the year
Continuous feedback vs buildup to a single annual conversation: Anything that is preceded by 365 days of buildup is anxiety inducing, even it there’s nothing overtly negative or concerning in the feedback being delivered. A work culture that encourages feedback is transparent and empowering. It doesn’t need to be brutally direct or overly frequent (Bridgewater is a hedgefund that encourages individuals to judge each other’s performance almost daily… not for the faint of heart), but there are going to be certain logical points throughout the year that it makes sense to deliver or ask for feedback, and those points are likely be more frequent than once per year. Unless you happen to be an elf. Or the Easter bunny. Or something else that is hyper seasonal.
Also, if you are going to ask for more (compensation, responsibility, title), give your manager some head’s up so that they can suitably prepare. Whether they can, or want to, deliver on these requests is irrelevant if they feel ambushed or unprepared for the ask.
Focusing on yours (or your report’s) holistic career goals, progression, balance, happiness vs compensation alone: Here is a radical idea, that most people will likely balk at and respond with “what’s the point?”. What if the annual review conversation was entirely separate from the compensation conversation? Of course, the two are correlated, and most of us are not out here working for free.. we want to know how well we are doing so that we can get paid an adequate amount. BUT. like the example I gave in the financial services review, when we tie the two in a year end conversation, alllllll the focus goes to the number. It is hard to listen for feedback and foster a conversation about other (equally important) measures of career progression when the focus is on the number revealed at the end of the conversation.
Focusing about non-monetary measurements can form the basis of a positive review conversation:
Do you feel like you have balance?
Do you feel sufficiently motivated?
Do you feel like you have autonomy vs structure?
Do you feel like you have enough responsibility?
Bilateral communication and collaborative action: the last set of questions touches on another important point. Reviews shouldn’t be a one-way delivery mechanism for feedback. It should be a two-party conversation, and the takeaways, or action items should be cooperative as well. If the feedback is for the employee to collaborate more, the takeaway should be “the employee will work on this, and the manager will do x, y, z to support it”… where x, y, z in this case could be “set up collaborative communication channels” or “communicate it across the team so the expectation for collaboration is clear”
Resources/Links
Performance review preparation tips (Wall Street Journal)
Decoupling reviews and compensation; separating pay from performance (Medium)
The Performance Management Revolution You’ll likely read this and be like…. why do we even do annual reviews at all anymore. Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter anyway 😉(HBR)
Cool ladies doing cool things: Faduma Farah (who suffered a near-fatal case of meningitis in 2011 that left her paralyzed from the neck down) is a tireless advocate for inclusive fashion. She recently collaborated with independent designer hub Oxford Fashion Studio, to launch a design competition that culminated in a runway show, featuring the first collection created specifically for wheelchair users ever to show at London Fashion Week. (Vogue)