Hey, this is Chris with Hacking your Leadership on today's discussion on employee engagement. I want to go over something that was brought to my attention by one of our listeners after our Monday episode that we just published three
days ago. We talked a lot about performance reviews and about the tendency for some leaders to use a lot of personality traits in performance reviews as opposed to talking about actual observable behaviors and outcomes that are more objective, as opposed to just based on the feeling the leader has about a person. And I had a listener reach out and say that they felt like they owned it.
They felt like they were pretty bad at doing this, and they wanted to get better, but they didn't really where to start, and they felt like this was impacting the engagement of their team. That they've been given feedback from their team after delivering a performance review that they didn't like that review, or they didn't understand it, or they just felt lost after receiving the review and didn't know how to move how to move forward, or how
to make sure that it was better next time. And I like this because I think you know when you're talking about what to put in place or what to do to get better at this if you're not good, or even if you are good, the idea of being able to level check and kind of verify that you are still good at this, because it can it can get very easy to start writing reviews incorrectly based on personality traits, especially if you're writing a lot of good reviews.
I think some leaders really you know, dive into the evidence based reviews when it comes to writing performance reviews that require a change in behavior from from employees because they need to have kind of their their their t's
crossed and their eyes dotted. But when you're writing a very positive review, it can be assumed sometimes that employees won't have a problem with that review that they're getting because it's positive anyway, and so the leader is less likely to have a lot of evidence based reasons of why the review is positive, and again that short change
the employee. And so I want to kind of, you know, talk to this individual and anybody else might be feeling the same questions around, you know, the things they can do right now to get better at this and to you know, make sure that they're you know, doing right by their employees.
Yeah, I think it's great, and I think it's awesome that people are kind of thinking about this and talking about it. And again, the realization is that almost all of us need some help here to get better at
this over time. And the reason why I think it's also so important is because this is a practice that as you continue to do it will help you to observe things differently and even in the informal conversations like I know, right now we're talking about the formality of like a performance review and why this is important as you write it on paper and it stays with the person.
But I also think about, you know, the informal times of conversations that you're having when you're when you're actually observing the behavior in the moments, right, are you saying something like oh, Chris, like hey man, I really appreciate it your positive ata to today in the meeting and just you know, the way that you you know, allowed everybody to have a voice. Sure, I mean that sounds good,
right like, oh, yeah, you got no problem anytime? Absolutely, or right am I going to say, hey, Chris, you know one of the things that I appreciated about your impact to the meeting this morning and the fact that we were able to really align on the strategy was that you created a space where you allowed everyone to share their ideas, and you even took a step back at one point as you saw that somebody was sharing and then we jumped into something else and you paused
the whole team and you went back said, well, hold on, let me let me make sure that you get to finish your thought here, because because I want to, I want to be sure that we've all had the opportunity to talk through this and share what we're thinking as
we get to this point. And that type of leadership in the moment and the op like observing where people are at, body language and conversations that are happening, that really allowed this to be a space wherever one was very attuned to everyone else and everyone had a chance to talk through their ideas, and that really was extremely
helpful in that process. Yeah, big, big difference between there's a lot more, write a lot more, but very specific based on the behavior and and and doing my best right in the moment, even to avoid the personality things because like it's just kind of what we do. But I but I think that's why this is such an important topic, and I think that you know, I'm sure
you'll share a couple things. I'll share a couple of things around ways that we can go about sharpening this skill and in ways that we have gone personally around sharpening the skill for ourselves.
I'm not sure if that segue was intentional, but uh, it's a it's a great one to say. We're going to go over that. I want to talk about the things that people can do to actually sharpen this skill, or to if you're if you're starting from a blunt stick on the ground and you and you and you have some a lot of sharpening to do then, or or if you just want to kind of fine tune
some things. I want to go over some of those things that you can do right now with your coworkers to get better at this do and do right by your people. But first I want to get upward from one of our sponsors. All right, one of the things that I like to do when it comes to honing this skill and making sure that it's in the right space, especially as I'm approaching you know, performance review season, and you know some organizations you write them year round because
it's based on the anniversary of the employee. Other organizations have a time of year that you write them for all employees. If this is something you do throughout the year, because it's based on an employee anniversary, you might argue be better at this skill because you it's in the
front of your mind all the time. If you're in an organization that does this, you know, once a year for every employee, then it sometimes it might be harder to get back in the mindset of it and you have kind of like relearned this a little bit each time.
But one of the things that I love doing is I'll pull old performance reviews out that I've written for people or that were written for me, and I will partner with a coworker that doesn't know the names of these people or doesn't know who they are, pull the names out, and have that person read a review back to me that I wrote. And am I left with the feeling that I know a what behaviors I should start doing right away that I'm not doing, and what
behaviors I should stop doing that I am doing. And lastly, am I clear on why those behaviors led to the outcomes being measured on the performance review? So the company has the goals. These are the goals we're getting towards. This is how I met this goal or didn't meet this goal. And these are the behaviors that I exhibited throughout the year that led to meeting or not meeting this goal. If I'm clear on those things, then it's
a good performance review. If I'm not clear on what I need to do going forward and I just know how that person feels about me, it's not a good performance review.
Yeah, I think it's great. I would almost do something of like when you're in the practice for writing a self review. I think we get pretty good at this over time. But also sometimes and I'll be guilty as well. Sometimes you write a self review and it's just like here's the data, here's the thing, here's what went well. You know, basically, just here's some information, right and then and then I'm just waiting to get my review from my direct leader. Like that's kind of a lot of
times what we can do here. But this is a great space to say, Okay, you know, what are two or three things, and just let's keep it. Let's keep it like timely in the last maybe you know, three months or six months, what are two or three things that were outcomes that you felt really good about. They maybe got recognized for they were you know, they exceeded the expectation. Maybe they were done you know, on time or early. But like two or three things that you
feel really good about from a body of work. Write those three things down and then take the time to say, Okay, specifically, what behaviors did you do that had the impact on that outcome? What did you do and just even if you have to list them, you don't have to make it all pretty, but then list those behaviors down. Now write the review for yourself as if you were your boss. Right, use that information and write yourself a review as if you were the boss. And what does that look like?
How does that feel? What's different? Now that you have that, go back and review both review your own self reviews and review previous reviews that maybe you've received and look to see what the differences are.
Right.
And I think if you go about doing it that way, you're going to build in some practice with some things, some behaviors that are really easy for you to remember, things that are personal, things that are you know that
you clearly know that you did. But I think just the act of writing them out this way will be helpful as you start to think about others, and it's probably going to have you think about when you write reviews, how you get information from people in that review, because that's the first thing I'm thinking of, is, like, what questions am I asking my leaders to get the specific details of behaviors that maybe they did or that were a part of this that maybe I didn't even observe
or that I wasn't aware of, but are definitely a part of you know, why they either had success or maybe they struggled.
Right, I like this a lot. There's there's there's something that someone said to me once, almost like an exercise, and it had nothing to do with leadership, but I thought it was I thought it was kind of a fun exercise. They asked me to describe the color blue without giving examples of things that are blue. And I thought that's interesting, and it's interesting how some things are really hard, if not impossible, to describe without just giving
examples of it. And if you're thinking about the things you're writing about people on a performance review specifically, you need to go into it with that mindset of if you can't describe it, then you shouldn't write it. It's the difference between telling somebody that they're nice versus telling them that they made their team feel appreciated by giving them credit publicly on the hard work that they did
and complimenting them in that way. One leaves a person feeling complimented, but the other leaves a person knowing exactly what they did so they can replicate it in the future because it had a positive outcome on what the
team was looking for. And if you're doing it in this way, if you if you think about it from a standpoint of can a person actually replicate the behaviors because they know what they were, or can they stop the behaviors because they know what they were they didn't get them the outcomes, then that is a good performance review. And if they can't do those things, then you need to rewrite the performance review until they are able to
do those things very clearly. They can look back on the review throughout the year to kind of level set themselves on the things they should be focusing on and working on when the review is not clear in their mind because you just gave it to them. Thank you for joining us in this episode about employee engagement. We'll see you next Thursday. For the next one, you have a great day.