One of the most difficult parts of being a leader is evaluating employees’ performance: How can you really tell if your team members are hitting the mark or are falling up short? How can you make sure you’re giving the right feedback, and enough of it? And, most importantly, how can you connect the dots between individual performance and organizational success?
To find out the answers to the questions above and more, we spoke with Dr. Paul Leone, an author, course instructor for Training Industry’s measurement certificate course and founder of MeasureUp consulting, and Michael Ventura, founder and former chief executive officer of Sub Rosa, a strategy and design consultancy, and author of “Applied Empathy.”
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Additional Resources:
- Course: Measuring the Impact of L&D Certificate
- Infographic: The Essentials of Assessing Employee Performance
- Magazine: Performance Improvement
- Article: Bias in Performance Reviews – 3 Ways to Stop it in its Tracks
- Podcast: Effective Performance Reviews
To learn more about Training Industry’s Measuring the Impact of L&D Certificate course, download the program brochure below.
The transcript for this episode follows:
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Business of Learning, the Learning Leaders podcast from Training Industry.
Sarah Gallo:
Hi there. Welcome back to the Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, senior editor at Training Industry here with my co-host Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editorial director.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Welcome. This episode of the Business of Learning is brought to us by Training Industry’s Measurement Certificate Course.
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Measuring the impact of L&D Certificate Program offers the tools you need to measure and elevate the business impact of training. Rooted in the research based training manager competency model, you’ll leave this elite training industry course with actionable strategies and best practices that you can immediately apply in your role to better measure and assess training programs of all kinds. To learn more about the program, visit trainingindustry.com or check out the show notes for today’s episode. Where will training measurement take you?
Sarah Gallo:
One of the most difficult parts of being a leader is evaluating employees performance. How can you really tell if your team members are hitting the mark or are falling up short? And how can you make sure you’re giving the right feedback and enough of it? Most importantly, how can we connect the dots between individual performance and the organization’s success? To find out the answers to these questions and more, we’re speaking with Dr. Paul Leone, an author, course instructor for Training Industry’s Measurement Certificate course and founder of MeasureUp Consulting, and Michael Ventura, founder and former CEO of Sub Rosa, a strategy and design consultancy and author of Applied Empathy. Michael and Paul. Welcome to the podcast.
Michael Ventura:
Thank you.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Happy to be here.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Yes. Welcome. So take kick things off and I’d be interested. Why don’t you both share some of the common challenges managers face when assessing and measuring employee performance. Paul, why don’t you get us started?
Dr. Paul Leone:
Okay. So unless you’re a frontline supervisor, I think the biggest challenge is there are no hard objective metrics to hold onto or to look for. So managers are left, typically, asking direct reports about their metrics or asking them to list their accomplishments over the past performance period. And without those objective measures, asking someone to list performance, their own kind of performance tasks and how they would rate themselves, that is wildly subjective, which is exactly where you don’t want to be when you’re objectively trying to rate performance measures.
Michael Ventura:
Yeah, I agree with that and I would add, first of all, having a lot of empathy for the manager. The manager’s role is one of the trickiest ones, because you’ve got to manage up, you’ve got to manage down, you’ve got to manage laterally. So there’s a lot of cooks in a manager’s kitchen that they have to be aware of. And in light of that, there’s also not a lot of way to assess that all… Not, not all managers are created equal, is maybe a better way of saying that. And there are different tactics and different ways you as a manager can get a pulse check, but everyone’s culture, everyone’s employee base are comprised of different aspects. So, you could use surveys, but surveys, not everyone puts the time into a survey to give you the right information. You can do one-on-one interviews or discussions. Those are great, but super hard to scale. You can do 360s and peer reviews, and those are meaningful but they also put strain on team members who are sometimes already over resourced to now make time to give you six 360s over the next week or whatever it is. So the answer is that it’s imperfect, and you’ve probably got to assume that you’ve got to ultimately close the gaps as a manager by taking that data in, but not using it exclusively to inform your decisions and closing the gaps wherever you can through conversations and one-on-ones to hopefully get a better perspective.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Yeah. I also see so many organizations using their competency model to assess against performance. And I love that idea. It’s just, logistically, how do you write? So they have the, let’s say it’s communicating effectively. It doesn’t cater that with more specific behavior anchors to certain roles. So say they’re putting a competency out there and then yet they don’t have those specific skills and behaviors that’s supposed to demonstrate, nail down at the manager level, at the director level, at the analyst level. So it just becomes challenging trying to write these performance appraisals against those competencies, without those kind of specific skills underneath there.
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah. Super important points. [It’s] definitely not easy. And like you said, Michael, too many cooks in the kitchen is not a good thing. At least in my house I’ve found that to be the case, but with all these challenges in mind, I’m interested to hear, you mentioned, Paul, about the skills and why those skills are so important. What are those skills that leaders really need to have in order to evaluate performance and how can training help develop them? Do you want to start us off?
Dr. Paul Leone:
Sure. So I’m going to go off the competencies on the list for a second. I’m just going to be a little bit bolder, show some more courage. So I think leaders need more courage to talk about these performance measures with their directs. I think they need to be more authentic and transparent. I think they need to just jump right in and tell people what they’re… We call them opportunities for development. If you tell people, frankly, what they’re doing wrong, or some of the red flags, I think they appreciate that. Especially if you’re authentic, again, and transparent, and you’re not trying to sugar coat anything, because ultimately at the end of the day, your employees want to know how to move to that next level. And if there’s something that’s preventing them from doing that, I think managers should just jump right in and be frank with them and tell them, “This is how you get to the next level.” And not sugar coat it too much. So in terms of training to help those managers, it’s about how to have those more constructive conversations, being a little bit more authentic and just letting your employees know that you’re an advocate for them, you’re on their side. You want to see them move to the next level. I think that’s important, because then you could speak more frankly. You have to meet this person almost every week so you want to make sure you have a great relationship. And I think helping them develop in that way would help.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Definitely. I like what you said there, it really takes courage to be authentic and give that candid feedback so necessary for employees to improve their performance. So that’s definitely a necessary skill to have. So with that, I like to dig a little deeper, and talk about why leaders need to measure and find these key performance indicators upfront and why that’s so critical in the measurement process. So I’d be interested to hear, Michael, do you have any thoughts there on why it’s important to measure and identify KPIs early on?
Michael Ventura:
Yeah, I think KPIs, to Paul’s earlier point, are so valuable because it takes things out of the subjective and into a tighter quantitative space where you can be a little more clear with measurement. And, I grew up in the brand world and my businesses have always been very much focused on how to blend business and brand objectives. And so, one of the things I’ve often liked to recommend, particularly when helping leaders figure out what to measure is to start by going back to the fundamentals of both the brand and the business. So making sure your KPIs are tied to things like your company’s mission and values. For example, if you’ve made a big deal about one of the key values of your business being innovation, and it shows up in your mission statement and it shows up in your brand books and you’ve got it painted on your wall somewhere. No one cares if you’re not measuring it. So it can’t just be a nice word on the page. And so what are you doing to measure innovation? I’ve often told clients, if you can’t value it, it shouldn’t be a value. So where are you going to put it in the system? Are you going to make it a part of 360s? are you going to ask people, “In what ways have you been successful in innovation over the past year? In what ways have you seen your directs exhibit innovation? How are you helping them understand how innovation plays a role in our product development?” Whatever it is. Really kind of tying it back to some of those fundamentals so that they don’t sit off in one corner of the business as language that seems nice from a marketing standpoint, but doesn’t actually mean anything to the culture, and instead weaving them together so that by making an impact to the culture, you also have a knock on effect to the success of the brand.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Yeah, I would just add to that there. So if you are rating people, especially one better than the other, you know how touchy and sensitive people can be. So you need to be able to point to metrics, hard metrics or objective metrics within the organization that you’d be able to justify as you would anything. You should agree upon these early so there’s no surprises. So during formal appraisal, in general, employees should know where they stand to their peers. Again, if you leave it up to employees to just kind of list what they’re good at and what they need development in, then it becomes a matter of who’s better at selling themselves or getting the most visible projects if you’re really depending on those things. And then it becomes less about performance against business metrics and KPIs and more about how you could snuggle up next to your manager and/or sell yourself as a high performer.
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for breaking that down for us. Another challenge we haven’t really touched on yet, but I think is definitely worth mentioning is around really unconscious bias and how that can impact performance evaluations and other performance management efforts. For example, studies show that women are 1.4 times more likely to receive critical subjective feedback as opposed to positive feedback or critical objective feedback than men. And data also shows that black employees receive more scrutiny from bosses, which can, of course, lead to think like worse performance reviews and even job loss down the line. Kind of connecting those dots, Paul, Michael, what are your thoughts here on how unconscious bias can really impact how we evaluate performance and how can we make sure that we’re evaluating performance from an inclusive and equitable standpoint?
Michael Ventura:
Everybody has biases. And to think that it might not have an influence in how performance management efforts are executed is delusional, frankly. It absolutely has a role to play. And so it’s important for managers to undergo unconscious bias training, to get a better perspective on where they might be missing the mark. At minimum, I think every manager and any people manager in an organization has to undergo that kind of training in the beginning in order to be continually evolving and growing their skills and personal development as a manager and a leader and someone who’s going to gain more and more responsibility over time. And I wouldn’t limit it to just unconscious bias. I think about communication training, conflict mitigation, DEI, all of these kinds of things are fundamental to a manager’s ability to do their job well. And when we think about how to make sure things are equitable and inclusive, clear scorecards based on criteria are certainly a good component of it. But I also think developing some sort of oversight, some kind of advisory board dedicated to checking and balancing the decisions that are being made. Decision makers can’t be left to judge their own work, especially when it pertains to things like unconscious bias, because how are they going to check themself on things they’re unconscious of? So having a board that is diverse in all ways, in racial, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera. If you don’t have enough diversity in your company to do this well, that’s highlighting a part of the problem that you probably also need to solve. Finding external advisors can be helpful as a band-aid, but ultimately it’s those big systemic changes that will allow organizations to move toward more equitable and inclusive cultures.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Yeah. I totally agree with that. The different people from different cultures might define high performance and low performance differently. So bias makes you see things through your lens of experiences, and so that always leads to some form of cultural bias because you can’t have all the experiences within all cultures at the same time. So that means you’re going to identify more, this where the bias comes in, you might identify more with those employees who define high performance just like you do. Whether it’s staying later or performing at a particular task better. So, with that bias, yet another reason why we need to look more at objective performance metrics than leaving it up to managers, these very imperfect managers.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Those are some really great points. Especially the idea around performances viewed differently based on the end of the individual and everyone’s shared collective experiences and cultures and backgrounds really impacts their perspective. And so we need to definitely take that into count when undergoing performance reviews and evaluations and taking that into account.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Yeah. I had two different managers. One told me, “Do the work. Show everybody you could do the work and you’ll get the respect and people will follow you because you could do the work.” And I had, in the very same organization, I had a manager tell me, “Don’t do any of that work, learn how to delegate manage from above. And you’ll be good that way.” So again, two different perspectives about what high performance is as a leader or manager coming from even within the same organization [inaudible]. So how can you please that manager who sees things very differently than you do in terms of performance? Whether it’s culture or anything else.
Sarah Gallo:
That’s a great example, Paul. I’m interested to hear, what advice do you have for organizations that may be in that same boat where those stakeholders aren’t aligned on what high performance is? Is there any way that we can kind of make sure that everyone’s on the same page, so to speak, so that that type of feedback, differing feedback doesn’t happen?
Dr. Paul Leone:
So I think you have to start off defining what rockstar performance looks like. So be very specific. What good performance looks like, what their performance looks like, what very poor performance looks like. The clearer you can be with your criteria and your checklists, the more you can explain this to your employees, I think the better off you’ll be. Most importantly define the behaviors for each employee that’s going to take them to the next level. So many people are surprised, they go in midyear and year end, and they continue to score the same way on their performance. And they’ve listed all these accomplishments and they’ve connected so often and their leaders have even given them awards or internal recognition for all their accomplishments. And yet they can’t move to that next level in terms of performance. And that’s because their leader never tells them, how do you move to the next level. If it’s being better at X, Y and Z competencies, tell me exactly what I need to show you by the next performance period and then I could work on it. Instead of taking a stab at it in the dark and trying to impress you when I don’t know necessarily what you regard as high performance.
Michael Ventura:
To build on that, looking at where you are in the life cycle of the particular role is also something that’s really important to define for people, because let’s say you’re a project manager at an organization that most people stay in that role for 18 months before they’re promoted to the next role. Well, what are the things that are expected of you at months one through six of being a project manager? So at the beginning of that, where you have perhaps less experience being one. Then in the middle, and what do you have to accomplish in the middle to actually be able to progress to the other end of the bookend of this role in order to be considered for a promotion? So what’s the journey micro cosmically within the role, in addition to more macro, how it tracks over time inside the organization across multiple roles?
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Definitely. I really like what you said there in terms of looking at the employee life cycle, and really identifying those measures for performance based on where they are in that role. That’s a really good point. Kind of shifting gears a little bit, oftentimes leaders reserve feedback for a one time annual performance review. And we know that this is definitely not the way to go. I was interested if you guys could kind of elaborate a little bit about why it’s so important that leaders give continuous feedback to their team members?
Michael Ventura:
I’m happy to start us off and just say making small corrections are a lot easier than making big corrections and five degree pivots multiple times to get someone to the destination you want them to get to is going to be much easier on you as a manager and on them as someone trying to grow and learn how to do their job well, than if you wait a year or half a year and then try to make a hard right turn or a 180 with this person, because they haven’t had an opportunity for enough feedback. Those, you have to see it as an opportunity to increase the likelihood of their success every time you offer those corrections. Every time you have an opportunity to provide support and mentorship and guidance to someone that you’re managing, even if it’s in small idiosyncratic ways over time, they’re going to get the rhythm and they’re going to get the pace and the acumen for that role much more effectively than expecting them to download 15 different growth points that you give them at the six month mark that they have to now take on in addition to their role, and then go try to improve upon. So it’s important to take those small bikes process.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Yeah. Don’t fire anyone during their performance appraisal. Yeah. Two words? I would say no surprises. So, too often leaders use their one-on-ones to talk about project status or project tasks, things that need to get done every week and almost no time during the yearly one-on-ones or the weekly one-on-ones, almost no time. At least this is my biggest study. I think actually for training industry talking about one-on-ones and what should be, but they dedicate almost no time to talking about opportunities for development and strengths and opportunities across the organization. None of that. So most of it is just project updates and there are no performance discussions. My main advice would just be, keep those two things separately, even if you have to create different meetings. I think a lot of managers don’t know what to talk about every week. So they start, it’s easier, less innocuous to talk about project tasks. So keep them separate and I think there’ll be no surprises.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Definitely. You bring up a good point about it’s the quality of the feedback and how you structure that. It may necessitate separate meetings, different focus areas, because it is easy to kind of default into that, those status updates….
Dr. Paul Leone:
And I hate project updates.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Michael, do you have any additional tips on how to really improve that quality feedback that really translates into improved performance?
Michael Ventura:
Yeah. At the risk of being a hammer to which everything is a nail, I’ll start by saying empathy is really important. And how do you train empathy into people is it goes back to a couple very simple fundamentals. Get better at asking better questions, get better at practicing active listening, and be willing to change your preconceived notions or your behaviors based on what you find out from asking better questions and listening better. I think that’s a good place to start for a lot of people. I’ve always advised people to also consider how Socratic questions can work their way into feedback sessions. So instead of telling someone immediately how you think it went, ask them, “How do you think this went, what would you have done differently? What should we, as an organization, do to help more people do it the way you just did it?” And be pleasantly surprised with how they bring some answers to the table, because they will, they’ll have a point of view. They’re going to certainly have a sense of their own self observations. It doesn’t mean that that’s complete. There will likely be other things that you’ll have to bring to the table also, but it shows you how think. And hopefully that they’re taking the time to think this way before you asked, that they’ve considered that themselves. And here are some ways they would look at it. It’ll also help you ask better, more performance oriented questions and create better follow up that’ll be more effective because you’re grounding it in a reality from which they see the world. So I think those are a couple real, fundamental steps in getting better at empathic management,
Sarah Gallo:
Some great points there. Definitely just such a core leadership skill, empathy and self-awareness and active listening, all of the ones you mentioned there. I’m interested to hear, following up on that, what does really giving this quality feedback look like in a remote environment? So when you can’t have those face-to-face conversations, or it might be a little bit easier to connect. Do you have any tips for leaders who are managing remote or hybrid employees and how they can give them feedback that helps them in their roles?
Michael Ventura:
I’m happy to start, but Paul, feel free to jump in, too.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Yeah, no, no, go ahead.
Michael Ventura:
I think that one of the important things to remember in the hybrid or the fully remote environment is that everyone’s life is much more diverse. And the experience, the lived experience as an employee is only more complicated as a result of this. It’s like when we were all in the office, we were all, at least… We knew we all had to commute, we knew we all got there. It didn’t matter whether your commute was a half hour or an hour. We made it to the office and now we’re in this fish bowl together for the next eight hours. But when you have to give feedback to a colleague who might be managing two kids who are being homeschooled, might have had the internet go out half hour ago before this call even started. And you have no idea what that lived experience has been, but then they just kind of show up on the call and you launch right into whatever it is you’re are there to tell them, you’re not bringing any of the context or any of the sense of what is going on for them. So do check-ins and say, “What’s going on for you today? How are you feeling? Everything going okay at home?” You don’t have to pry, but you should set the context and set the table for where you are and what life is like for them in that day, because our lives have gotten much more nuanced over the last 19 months, going through this COVID-19 experience that we’re all having. Introverts versus extroverts, totally different experience. I know a ton of introverts who are like, “I could keep doing this for a really long time.” The extroverts are scratching at the walls waiting to get back in the office. Everyone’s kind of got their own pattern and rhythms and they’ve dropped into them now, cause it’s been 19 months. So then expecting them to pull the band aid off and be back in the office a month from now, because we’ve decided to make it a company-wide policy. Well, it might not be possible for them if their kids used to be in school and now they’re learning remote, they don’t have childcare and maybe they’re not in a position to pay for someone to watch their kids during the day. So you can’t just flip on a switch and all of a sudden expect everyone to return to what life was like before. And so that context gathering for managers is so critical to understand what’s going on in the lives of the people you work with.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Yeah. I think ironically it might have, in some ways where I think about bias and in-groups and out-groups at work, in corporate cultures where some people go out with their boss for lunch and some people don’t. And I think employees who don’t might see that. So I think this has put some more structure around it, ironically, because everybody’s getting those performance reviews in the same way. Virtually, over the computer. So I don’t know, in some ways it made it more structured and prevents against some of that biases and those in-groups and out-groups at work. But, as Michael says, in other ways, it’s the wild west now in terms of trying to nail down performance and what that looks like every day.
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah, definitely. Great. Well, before we wrap up, Michael, Paul, are there any final key takeaways you’d like to leave our listeners with?
Michael Ventura:
One thing from my end would be, this was something I picked up from a friend years ago and I’ve always hung onto it and I found it to always be a very helpful thing, particularly when working on new teams, but even if it’s with folks we’ve worked with for years. Develop some version of a user manual for you and share it with your team and ask them to do the same. Little things like what do you need in order to work best for a brainstorm? If you’re introverted, what are your preferred forms of communication? Do you do better with email where you can take a moment to respond versus being put on the spot in a meeting? Do you like getting feedback one-on-one? It’s not to pander or to create a bespoke set of criteria for every single employee, but wouldn’t you like to know that 50% of your team feel like they do their best independent thinking from 9 to 12 p.m. every day? Maybe don’t schedule your all-hands during that time if half the team really need that time to be working on the work product. So those little things that you can signal to your colleagues that ultimately accelerate trust and give them an opportunity to do what they do better because you know how to work better together are always really meaningful.
Dr. Paul Leone:
Yeah. I’m going to work this back into empathy, too, but really understand that your employees see you, almost all of them will see you as the sole gatekeeper to them moving up in the organization. So they’re very tuned into how you’re feeling, the words that you say to them. If they get an indication that you’re disappointed in some of their actions or on the opposite side, that you’re loving what they’re doing, they’re going to run with that. So just really understand that you really are that gatekeeper, the make-or-break person in that organization and the feedback and the kind of ideas that you are starting to form around them are so important to them. So don’t use your one-on-ones for task updates. Use it to have those important conversations.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Yes. Those are some great tips. Michael, I really like what you said there about creating a user manual. Never thought of it quite that way. Definitely something I’m going to put on my to-do list to start creating. But kind of on that note, Michael, Paul, thank you so much for speaking with us today on the Business of Learning. Definitely a great conversation. So how can our listeners get in touch with you after the episode, if they’d like to reach out to you?
Dr. Paul Leone:
I’m on HBO on Saturday, I’m at the comedy shop on Friday. No, I’m just kidding. I’m all over LinkedIn. So Paul Leone. And If you want to email me, leone@measureupconsulting.com
Michael Ventura:
And same for me, LinkedIn tends to be one of the best ways to track me down. But other than that, hello@michaelventura.co is also how you can track me down.
Sarah Gallo:
Perfect. Well, for more insights on all things performance related and to view the highlights from today’s episode in animation, visit the show notes for this episode at trainingindustry.com/trainingindustrypodcast
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
As always, don’t forget to rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. We love hearing from you. Until next time.
Speaker 3:
If you have feedback about this episode, or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us at info@trainingindustry.com or use the contact us page at trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to the Training Industry podcast.
