I’ve been pretty clear that I think performance reviews — as we have them built now — are a terrible idea. Everyone hates them with the passion of a thousand suns, and they add almost zero value to the organization, particularly from a proactive standpoint. (I understand they are sometimes used as a defense / covering one’s ass / paper trail. While this does add value in a twisted kind of way, it’s just not very noble.)
The goal here isn’t to destroy a touchpoint, however. We don’t want to leave a performance review shaped-hole.
That time can be made very useful… if we reclaim that space.
First, we must get rid of the weakness-focused mentality that drives reviews now. Then, we can repurpose that conversation time and expand it into something that is proactive, adds real value, and — gasp! — can be an enjoyable experience for both sides.
To that end, here are two suggestions to start making your review process better:
First, switch the direction.
Instead of being the one evaluating, let your organization evaluate you.
This is called measuring engagement, and it’s one of the most important things an organization can do. (By the way, my partners and I have a great way to measure this; please get in touch if we can help you.)
Most of the way we work isn’t taught, it’s caught. Model the behavior that’s desired, and it will trickle down. (For more on this point and why it’s so essential, please check out a great post from Bruce Johnson.)
Second, pretend you’re a coach.
Imagine you are coaching a basketball team. On the first day, you come in to welcome the players. You then let them go about their business (practicing, or whatever it is teams do) and check back in a year later to give them their performance review — being sure to inform them of all the things they’ve been doing wrong the whole time.
Terrible idea, right?
Do I really need to explain the analogy here?
It would be ludicrous to coach this way. Why do we think this method would create great performance in our organizations?
Engagement is about creating space for regular conversations — they don’t necessarily need to be long, drawn-out, epic talks. Just ways to check in. After a play, during a play, tips, tricks, constant feedback, continual improvement.
If you are a coach, not a “manager,” it’s the most natural behavior in the world.
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Over a decade ago, two authors by the names of Marcus Buckingham and Don Clifton wrote an amazing book called Now, Discover Your Strengths.
At the very end of this book, hidden behind the database of strengths themes, there is a small section devoted to providing structural ideas for how to design a better organization. In this chapter, the authors mention something I’ve never forgotten—the idea of “building more ladders.”
Right now in our companies, we have essentially one ladder. One path up.
While we inherently understand that this doesn’t make any sense—not everyone wants to be a CEO—we persist in structuring our companies like everyone does.
Much better, I think, to design an organizational structure that provides many ladders.
In fact, what’s stopping us from having as many ladders as we need?
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A good friend was in town over the weekend, and as we were sitting around my living room drinking our morning tea, the conversation shifted to our work. Her organization is looking to hire a position, which isn’t abnormal, but she said that this time, her team has put out a few ads in targeted locations so they can get the resumes to come back to them instead of going through HR. “After all,” she said, “We know what we need and they don’t.”
We batted around a few more ideas orbiting this topic and as I talked about it, I felt my face getting flushed and my voice becoming more intense. I was noticeably upset by this topic; my friend had zeroed in on a key frustration I have with business.
Right now our organizations are structured to treat everyone the same. They act as if we can give a set of tasks to one person and the same set of tasks to another person and those two unique people will perform those same tasks in the same manner.
This is, in business terms, bullshit.
No two people can EVER perform the same tasks in the same way, because we are all hopelessly, unequivocally unique.
But we persist in ignoring this truth, in almost every facet of our businesses.
The truth is, all hiring should happen at the local, team level. The fact that we’ve outsourced this process to some disconnected HR group is ridiculous at best and downright destructive to our organizations at worst. And this “recapturing the hires” process is going to keep happening in our organizations, because people within local teams are increasingly realizing that a job is made up of WAY more “non-task” things than “task things.” For the most part, the tasks a person performs are actually the smallest part of their job — positively dwarfed by things like personality, culture fit, value-alignment, intrinsic motivation, likability, etc.
What will it take for our organizations to start leveraging the unique strengths of individuals instead of fighting them?
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Copyright © 2005-2012 Josh Allan Dykstra
