As you can see in my self-portrait above, I sometimes like to look upon my gardens and have a good think about my work. Why do we do what we do? No, but really why do we do what we do?
It being performance review season, I thought about reviews as I slogged through them. Writing and re-writing drafts. Almost hitting submit, only to delete everything and start over.
I had started getting better responses to my reviews over the past few years (about time, too, because I’ve been managing people since… let’s just say the Mughal era). As I thought about why, I came to the conclusion that from the reviewee’s perspective:
All useless reviews are alike. Every useful review is useful in its own way.
Tolstoy (see for yourself) might be turning in his grave as I write this. Fine, I’m willing to live with that. The point is, I think I’ve landed on the critical thing:
Insights are what make or break a review.
I posit that most reviews are useless pretty much because they don’t generate any insights, whereas useful reviews are useful pretty much because they tell us something new about the particular manager-employee relationship, or something new about the particular employee.
Insights
Ok, what are these insights of which we speak? Let’s start with this: they don’t have to be profound, radical, or surprising. They just have to add useful information.
Insights == useful information
Here are some real-life examples where reviewees (you know who you are) told me that feedback I delivered gave them a useful insight:
“You’re generally a really good project manager but your highly differentiated skill is in managing projects with many moving parts across multiple teams, not projects with deep technical complexity, massive scope, or some other attribute.”
“Be careful about relying too much on rapport and inter-personal relationships to build consensus. Many issues that demand team-level consensus or consensus on culture need other tools, like written expectations and explicit tradeoffs.”
“You are too quick to share your opinion, and your seniority means conversations often end once you’ve said your piece. Hold back and encourage more discussion so we can be confident that the best ideas are emerging.”
“Maybe its odd for a manager to say but most things we do aren’t so important they couldn’t survive a delay of a day or two. Your sense of accountability is so strong that you’re unable to give junior folks time to experiment, rescue themselves from their mistakes, and learn. Push back occasionally when they ask for help and use that time to make the kind of impact only you can make.”
The evaluator
Taking a long step back to early in my management career, I understood — and no one disabused me of the understanding — that performance reviews were an exercise in evaluation. To the extent that useful feedback was a part of it, it was focused on negative feedback. A manager would rate me on various dimensions, judge my outcome and attitudes and aptitudes, and boil down my complex individuality and contributions to… eh, say 3.2 stars. Like I was a donut shop or a Starbucks location. I took that at face value all the years that I was an individual contributor and did much the same when I first became a manager. (To those who were on my team in the early years, I offer my genuine apologies!)
Taking the “boss” part of the manager equation much more seriously than I should have, I was confident in my pronouncements. I’m quite sure they provided no value to the receiver, but I guess they all had the same expectations of reviews that I did, so no one complained or demanded I do a better job.
The proud good-feedback generator
Phase 2 was a long, fuzzy part of my career where I’d build some intuition on people and then share insights that popped into my mind in flashbulb moments. Every once in a while, something useful would occur to me and I’d share it with people and be very happy with myself. Hey look ma, I discovered something interesting about so-and-so that they can use to further their career! See how appreciative they are for this insight!
I can’t recall having discovered anything negative, though. I guess my unconscious processes weren’t exactly dwelling on problems, they were only thinking about ways to generate the manager dopamine hit of giving someone a legitimate compliment.
The feedback artisan
Eventually I got to wondering: could I create more opportunity for those flashbulb moments to hit me? Or maybe I was thinking about it wrong — maybe these ideas didn’t need to be flashbulb moments at all? So I just started spending more time on it:
by making a serious effort to have an ongoing conversation about performance (like all the books tell you) rather than a once-or-twice a year thing
by flat out spending time
This improved my odds of making a review useful.
The insight about insights
Coming back now to my thinking time in my amazing Mughal-era residence.
It struck me that these insightful reviews come from a fundamentally different mindset. Rather than being a wonderful occasional bonus, insights were the point. The way to generate them was to — doh! — put in the time, put in the work. And critically, staying humble.
Approaching the exercise of a performance review with humility means recognizing my limited perspective, avoiding sweeping judgements, and approaching the exercise and the conversation with genuine curiosity. Importantly, I now recognize that some reviews will be perfunctory — maybe even mostly useless — and that’s ok. Because coming up with new insights is damn hard! Hey, if even Michael Jordan lost games, I better not get my hopes up too high.
Some things I try to methodically do now:
Reflect carefully on the reviewee’s experience from their point of view
Aim to surface observations that they (or I!) may have overlooked in the daily rush
During the review conversation, share whether I’m confident or uncertain about any given observation
Aim to exit the conversation having built or reinforced a foundation for mutual trust based on insights that are
Correct
Fair
Relevant
This approach has definitely helped me get better at adding some meaningful value to the performance review, and its helped me get comfortable with the idea that I won’t always succeed.
A performance review has value only if it delivers useful insights. Finding useful insights is difficult. To make it easier — Ever. So. Slightly. Easier. — minimize the focus on evaluation and stay humble.
Thanks for an insightful and timely post, Ashwin!
This describes my experience of receiving and giving performance reviews.
And I still remember a few "flashbulb moments" receiving useful feedback from you (almost 20 years ago now :)), which helped me grow.
Re-shared with my EMs.