Building momentum for your purpose-driven culture
Providing effective feedback can be one of the most challenging things to do well when it comes to developing a purpose-driven culture.
In all my years of management, I don’t think I have ever heard a colleague get excited about conducting annual reviews or preparing for a crucial feedback conversation. Many of the reasons seem to revolve around anxiety about potential conflict or upsetting the person receiving the feedback, a lack of time, or a lack of appreciation for how effective feedback helps create a purpose-driven culture. Whatever may give you cause to shy away from providing timely and clear feedback, this article will provide you with some considerations and tools for leaning into this critically important activity.
So far in the Purpose-Driven Culture Series, I have outlined tips, concrete actions, and tools for engaging the team you already have as well as how to target, attract, and retain the kind of talent that will help promote the purpose-driven culture you are building. This article focuses on pulling all of this together by providing insights, tools, and tactics you can employ immediately to integrate the practice of providing timely and impactful feedback to help you build and enhance the type of culture that will help your company excel.
A Quick Recap of What a Purpose-Driven Culture Is and Why It’s Important
As noted in previous EverSparq articles, purpose-driven culture promotes connection, high engagement, and meaningful productivity gains by making work resonate on a personal level. (In the EverSparq article Connecting to Purpose: Creating a Purpose-Driven Culture, I outlined the Purpose-Driven Strategic Framework (Figure 1) and provided 5 tips for how to connect employees’ personal sense of purpose to the specific elements of the framework to support a purpose-driven culture.)
We may not always realize it but there is almost always something deep within each of us that motivates and drives us even during the most challenging times. Our true North. Helping individuals identify what that is and then determining how that applies in their daily work creates a level of meaning that is incredibly profound. This increases a personal sense of ownership and accountability for the success of the company and manifests in ways such as higher productivity, better quality work, and achievement of goals that, when aligned properly using the Purpose-Driven Strategic Framework, can propel companies forward in successful strategy execution.
The Annual Performance Review
The goal of the annual performance review, at its core, is to encourage and cultivate the efficient and effective generation of sustainable organizational results. Here are some guiding principles when evaluating your existing performance review tools and practices or for developing new ones.
- Anchor Yourself to the Why. While performance reviews require time and may be uncomfortable, those are not valid reasons to avoid or “cheap out” on completing this valuable exercise. When you feel like procrastinating, remind yourself that the performance review is a highly impactful opportunity to cultivate the type of purpose-driven culture that will help propel your company to success.
- Balance Outcomes and Behaviors. Behaviors and outcomes define a company’s brand and ability to succeed. There tends to be an emphasis on outcomes, which are more tangible and easier to measure. Behaviors are often left to organically evolve at the peril of the company’s long-term success. Being intentional about balancing outcomes and behaviors is not as elusive as you may think.
- Create Consistency. One way to build a consistent foundation of organization-wide performance expectations is to have a straightforward set of tools that all employees, from the CEO to the front line, use to guide feedback discussions during the year as well as to summarize overall performance on an annual basis. Having a consistent approach reduces conflicting messages on performance expectations both across the workforce as well as the feedback employees receive from multiple sources.
- Maximize Your ROI. The benefits of investing some time in developing a straightforward company performance management review template include (i) setting the tone and expectations for what you want your company to be known for, (ii) developing talent so people perform at the top of their game individually and together, and (iii) aligning intentional incentives with strategic goals while monitoring for unintended perverse incentives that can steer your team off the mark.
- Avoid Over-Engineering. It can be tempting for the more analytically inclined to create a cumbersome and data-heavy performance review template. I have found that there is a diminishing return with this approach since performance (especially behaviors) is highly subjective. Drafting and conducting performance reviews need not be overly time-consuming and those that are tend to be associated with a lower rate of completion.
Two Dimensions of Performance
Being clear on the components of your purpose-driven strategic framework (Figure 1) is critical to your company’s success. While it is important to attend to all five components of the framework, I will focus on Values (how team members conduct themselves) and Strategic Objectives (what actions are taken to realize the company vision) for the purposes of designing or optimizing your performance review process.
Have you ever worked with someone that is a lot of fun and you enjoy seeing but you wonder what exactly they are doing to contribute to the success of the company? Or conversely, the person who always hits their targets but leaves a swathe of bodies in their wake? Some organizations emphasize either behaviors or results, but it’s important to value both, in balanced measure, as a basis for a successful performance management system.
The Performance Review Template
Consider creating an annual review form that includes the following components of the “how” and “what” as well as a section focused on professional development:
Values-Based Behaviors (How)
List each of the company values and evaluate on a scale of consistent demonstration (e.g., Always, Most of the Time, Some of the Time, Not at All). Include a comment section to elaborate by documenting specific examples or situations that support the associated performance level. I typically will have the individual complete their own self-assessment while I gather feedback from others to complete my own independent assessment. This comparison will help you and the employee calibrate your respective interpretations of the behaviors and scoring system and is often a much more interesting way to frame the conversation.
Organizational Results (What)
Outline the company strategic objectives and provide a place to describe whether those were achieved and how the employee tangibly contributed. Ideally, the employee will be able to see how they supported (or impeded) the accomplishment of the company objectives (line of sight) but you made need to help them draw the connection between their individual outcomes and the goals of the organization. Depending on your organization, you may need to deconstruct the company objectives into more practical and resonant outcomes over which the employee has influence and control.
Professional Development
I like to simplify this into four questions:
- What should the employee KEEP doing?
- What should the employee STOP doing?
- What should the employee do MORE/LESS of?
- What are the employee’s longer term professional goals and what can you do as a supervisor to support them in developing the skills and experience necessary to accomplish those goals?
Having the employee complete their own self-assessment can provide you with some valuable clues about the employee’s degree of personal insight. Comparing their perceptions with those of their colleagues can be very illuminating.
Engaging in the Feedback Discussion
If you dread performance reviews, ask yourself why until you get to the root cause. Is it because you shy away from potential conflict? Are you too busy to adequately prepare? Do you feel you lack the words or experience to effectively provide feedback? Or is it some other reason? Once you know what is at the core of what stands in your way, you can take appropriate steps to address it. Whether you integrate them into your routine practice or promote them with your employees, Figure 2 outlines examples of countermeasures for some of the most common impediments to completing performance reviews that I have seen.
Structuring Feedback to Be Clear & Concise
Whether providing positive or constructive feedback, the SBI structure has never let me down. I have also added a fourth step to round out the discussion with commitments to tangibly improve.
- Situation. A specific event or moment when the behavior was observed
- Behavior. A brief description of the behavior(s) that was/were observed
- Impact. A clear outline of the impact you observed the behavior to have
- Next Steps. Solicit the employee’s personal insights and define a concrete plan of action to improve and monitor
If you are new to the SBI tool, consider taking a moment to jot down your notes before engaging in the conversation so you do not get sidetracked or distracted. This approach to providing feedback can be very powerful and leaves little room for ambiguity. Here is an example:
- Situation. When I observed you in the meeting with the client last month,
- Behavior. I noticed that you interrupted the client several times. This did not seem consistent with our company value of Respect.
- Impact. I also noticed that the client stopped contributing to the discussion. I am concerned that they do not feel their issues are being heard or effectively addressed. As a result, they are at risk for not renewing their contract with us, which is contrary to our company objective of growing the number of clients we serve.
- Next Steps. What thoughts do you have about what I’ve shared? Is this a surprise? How can I best support you in improving in this area? What is your plan to improve as a result of this feedback?
Translating the Review into Action
Once you have a somewhat structured evaluation tool with which to organize your thoughts, you can start to hone in on the specific needs of the incumbent and customize your feedback and development plan accordingly. Figure 3 and Figure 4 represent one way of beginning to diagnose the employee’s performance.
Quadrant A The employee who hits targets and deadlines but alienates and damages relationships along the way to achieve their results
Quadrant B The employee who consistently demonstrates and role models company values while delivering results
Quadrant C The employee who exhibits company values with little tangible evidence of their direct contributions to achieving results
Quadrant D The employee who neither demonstrates the company values nor delivers results
Maintain a Consistent Cadence after the Review
Now that you have engaged in a conversation that is both customized to the employee’s learning style and specific to their performance (positive and negative), it will be critically important to continuously reference what you’ve both agreed to in the documented review. (I typically include a signature block for both the reviewer and the employee. The signature simply denotes that the employee acknowledges that the conversation took place regardless of whether they agreed with the content. This tends to help serve as a common touchstone for the employee and supervisor to reference as context for performance feedback discussions.) Here are some additional tips to help make annual review season more manageable:
- Keep a file of ongoing SBI (positive and constructive) examples for each employee throughout the year so you can quickly cull from them when populating their annual review form.
- Make a habit of providing timely feedback as a matter of routine throughout the year. This includes providing positive feedback and affirmation (which we don’t do enough) as well as constructive feedback in-the-moment.
- Tie in-the-moment feedback to any specific development goals reviewed during the annual review.
Diagnosing the Chronic Underperformer
As referenced above, from time-to-time, there will be the need to do some deeper work in diagnosing and managing underperformers. Applying the somewhat structured performance review template and the interpretation tools described earlier can help you hone in on root causes of underperformance rather than just guessing. Essentially, this invariably boils down to will versus skill (Figure 5):
One caution is to resist the temptation to delegate performance improvement oversight to someone else. While an employee may benefit from designated feedback partners and mentors, the responsibility for partnering with the employee in their professional development journey starts with and solidly resides with the supervisor. I have seen many supervisors pull the trigger on referring the underperforming employee to coaching/mentoring resources to “fix” the problem. Part of the challenge with this approach is that if motivation is lacking or if they do not possess any insight into the causes of their underperformance, it is highly unlikely the employee can be coached out of the situation.
Conclusion
Building a purpose-driven culture relies upon effective and consistent ways of providing performance feedback, both positive and constructive. While pulling punches or skirting concerns should be avoided, the same is true of ruthless and brutal judgmental feedback without any regard or respect for the individual you are managing. Anchoring yourself and your team in a standard performance review framework relays consistent expectations across the organization and creates a blueprint for diagnosing and effectively addressing performance. Understanding what holds you back from providing timely, candid, and constructive feedback will enable you to lean into the important conversations that will help you build your purpose-driven culture and accelerate the achievement of sustainable company success.
For questions or to find out how EverSparq can help you design any of the tools described in this article or the right fit process for your company, please contact info@eversparq.com.
