4 Keys To Effective Performance Management

Today I’d like to talk about managing performance. I’ll share four things that I’ve learned to do to make sure my team is performing at its potential. Let’s get into it!

#1 Set Clear Expectations

Early in my leadership journey there was a person on my team who was newer and seemed to be struggling. After looking into their work I grew concerned and a bit frustrated as I worried I would need to turn this person’s performance around quickly. I shared my initial concerns with some more experienced leads and the question I got in return was “What expectations did you set?” At the time, I was allowing myself to be busy with other aspects of my role and hadn’t prioritized setting expectations but I somehow expected this new person to perform. I mean, how can I fairly assess the performance of someone who had no idea what I expected? Poorly, is the answer to that question and the result was a breakdown in trust.

Growing from this moment I take a different approach now. I prioritize the time at the start of a working relationship to make sure that my reports and I collaborate on understanding expectations. We assess where they are in terms of performance and make a plan to move forward; getting aligned on what positive progress looks like for the short and medium term. To build and maintain strong trust, I have found that it’s important my reports understand what I expect in terms of performance as well as what they can expect in terms of support along their journey. This paints a picture where success is defined, measured and supported making it much more likely to be achieved.

#2 Document & Follow-up

Once the plan has been made, I write it all down and make it accessible to both of us so that we can follow up. I like to check-in on the goal at least at the halfway point from when it’s set and when it’s due. However, I make myself available for support whenever there are questions. The benefits of this setup are increased accountability, timely feedback to address detrimental behavior before the goal ends, opportunities to give recognition for positive progress and a clear path to success for all parties involved.

I encourage you to use my experience to save you from future headaches and heartaches. With unclear expectations and incomplete documentation, it is more difficult to follow up when performance goes off track. It’s also quite hard to give recognition if the effort my reports are putting in don’t align with the role’s expectations. Failure to follow these steps have caused me to break the trust of the people of led and that’s a hard place to come back from.

#3 Give Timely And Valuable Feedback

I had several experiences that transformed my perspective on feedback and helped me see how to give it as the gift it is. To give effective feedback the two key things I suggest keeping in mind are as follows:

• To effectively give feedback you need to know why you’re doing it. It should only ever be to encourage a positive behavior or change a detrimental one. If your feedback does neither, keep it to yourself for the moment and use the resources I share below to get clear on what the message is and whether it needs to be delivered.
• Once you realize the need to give feedback, do it as soon as possible, ideally within 24 hours of the observation you made so the person can make any necessary changes as soon as possible.

When I’m giving feedback I like to use the Mckinsey Feedback Model and you can learn more about this particular style here. I would also suggest watching this great video on how to give feedback in some common but uncomfortable real life situations.

#4 Be Honest About Performance Concerns

This last point also relates to feedback but this topic is so important that it had to come up a few times. Getting this right made me a lot more effective at leading people and the lesson is, don’t hold back the bad stuff. I think this honesty is the best thing that you can do for the person, your team and your company. As a new lead I was constantly afraid of being the bearer of bad news, especially when it seems like there’s a lot of it. I was genuinely concerned but held back. When I absolutely had to say something, I tried to hide how badly it made me feel. This created a weird tension as I came off as cold and unfeeling in those pivotal conversations. I eroded the trust between myself and my reports and had to work very hard to regain it. I had to grow from here and I learned to lean into my own discomfort.

My initial discomfort with giving feedback caught me off guard but thinking back it was the likely outcome. At the time my rapport was weak and expectations were unclear. That uncomfortable feeling was my care and hiding it prevented me from connecting with my team in a very human way. Now, when I have concerns, I speak up. I show where my concern is coming from and I stay open to being wrong and working to better understand. This change allows me to share information quickly and address potential challenges before they become too detrimental. I find it’s a lot easier to speak up than it is to beat myself up about seeing something that’s incorrect and doing nothing about it. I learned that my team appreciates my honesty and when I get vulnerable, speaking my truth with curiosity they are encouraged to do the same. This deepens our trust and has led dramatic improvements in performance over short periods of time.

If this is something you want to work on, the best resource I can suggest is Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott. You don’t have to be a boss or want to be a boss to get value from it.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.