Performance Management

“I can't tell you how many times I would have managers say, can I just copy and paste from what I wrote last year? Nothing's changed. Oh, those kinds of things are hard and frustrating. Just low engagement.”

“If your performance review takes 20 minutes per employee, that's great. The real meat and potatoes of the program is to have the conversation with the employee about that, what you wrote, right? Have the conversation abo...”

“I think the area that I'd call out is performance management. I think it's one of the worst things ever invented by HR and forced upon organizations. I mean, I really just hate it.”

“Performance management processes are different to measuring performance and providing feedback. Those two things we tend to conflate in HR, but they're separate.”

“I think it's a matter of skill and will because coaching obviously requires an investment. But I think when you're coaching someone, they also have to be invested.”

“Practice makes perfect. And I think even when back in the day when I was in college, I was on the track team, right? You needed feedback from your coach if you want to improve your technique.”

“And within TA, you're in sales. So, A, you gotta understand your business and be able to sell it to people externally. So, you've gotta have your elevator speech of why do you wanna work at our company? But then you also...”

“I don't know a single leader in my career that has finished performance reviews ahead of time. It's always shepherding people in the process, but giving them the tools and tricks that I mentioned and engaging them on a m...”

“Would you rather have a team of high performers or a high-performing team?”

“We all really do need to be told evaluation feedback along the way. And because there wasn't really a standard of how this was happening at our company, it just wasn't happening in a way that really helped people feel se...”

“The idea of creating IDPs and getting performance reviews done and all of that was a challenge. It's a challenge for everybody, I think. And I would tell you that at this point, we actually have 80% of the entire workfor...”

“The only reason that a corporate training or learning and development team exists is to equip the workforce with the knowledge and skills they need to do their job, period.”

“You can practice things the wrong way, and then you're not going to do great work. So in this particular example, as we reimagine— we didn't reimagine what they had to do on the job. That's decided by others. But the way...”

“It's almost like saying a salesperson shouldn't be held accountable for a sale. They can't control what a prospect does, but they're held accountable for the end result, which is a sale or not. So it is breaking with tha...”

“Great team members just want to work with great team members. You can't tolerate poor performance. Your top performers will leave.”

“I'm not a fan of the traditional performance evaluation. I believe that performance management is ongoing. It's an everyday thing.”

“I want supervisors to supervise”

“a performance review should not be a surprise”

“I don't think ratings are inherently like a bad thing. I just think some organizations that they make sense, some organizations can handle them better, and some organizations are small, they're nimble, that they know who...”

“Clarity is everything to the team, and it's not enough to simply evaluate performance once a year.”

“The main objective of what we're trying to accomplish is around expectation setting, making sure that managers and employees are having those conversations to really bring role clarity, to really understand and set the p...”

“Performance reviews, I would say that overall they look like they are much more biased toward the rater than the people being rated.”

“ROE really is a workplace philosophy... It focuses on a few main tenets of Clarity and appropriate measurement of outcomes. And yes, every job can be measured. I will fight that fight all the time. True accountability, a...”

“If you wanna have a truly healthy workplace culture, you must do at least these 5 things... One being that you need to clearly define and ensure complete understanding of goals, outcomes, and metrics for all roles. And y...”

“We haven't had formal performance reviews at DoneWell for the last 6 years, and I will say when you talk about performance reviews in HR, I still like, there's definitely going to be differing opinions across the board....”

“the value and the impact of aligning performance goals really occurs the step before. Those goals need to swim in a pool of the culture. And so we've worked hard over the last 10 years around a performance culture.”

“if you want performance, it's care plus candor equals desired performance.”

“The thing I realized was that it was really hard to assess someone's performance if there wasn't clarity on what their roles or responsibilities were.”

“This puts everybody on the same page and allows managers to, rather than focus on rewriting a job description every 6 months or every year, remembering all of the work that's happened over 12 months if you're doing an an...”

“I think performance reviews are the bane of everybody's existence.”

“I want to keep it simple, right? So I want to be clear, but not overwhelming. I want to make it actionable, and then I want to rehearse it.”

“One personal rule I have when I deliver feedback is I never apologize for giving that feedback. I think an apology can really imply that you're doing something wrong when in reality we're helping the other person grow.”

“Managers finally had a full picture combining all the 360 feedback, the reviews, and manager input all in one place. It made the progress so much clearer, more actionable...”

“I realize that our employees and managers don't actually know how to do good performance management. They don't know how to give good feedback. They don't know how to coach. They don't know how to put development plans t...”

“But goal setting should be fundamentally linked to strategic planning. And oftentimes when you do a goal audit and look at the goals that were set and compare it to the company's strategic plan, there's a mismatch comple...”

“So what's the minimum that you can do? There's an architecture I love around outlining the impact or the intention of your feedback. Describe the situation, the impact, and a suggestion.”

“And I always ask at the end, I say, so is this rating or this feedback, are there any surprises? And if someone says, oh yeah, there's a surprise, then I haven't done my job.”

“So for us, performance, it's all about how are we truly doing in the eyes of our customers, in the eyes of our consumers, and quite honestly, in the eyes of our teams, because we feel that every day we're having to re-re...”

“For me, performance management is a daily job. It's not an annual review thing.”

“it's actually more in my mind about, it's actually less about evaluation, more about enablement for the team and helping employees do the best work of their lives by telling them what they're doing well and telling them...”

“If I could share one thing that today would be shifting the HR function from managing work and processes to focusing on outcomes. And we say this at Changebridge, we exist to lift and accelerate performance.”

“If someone in a specific program might be struggling, but they what they do, you know, they're highly qualified, they might be a better fit for a different program.”

“From when I started my career to now, this is the number one thing that leaders hate to do and employees hate to hear, right?”

“I realize that the word manage really just brings to mind a lot of negative things, which is not, I think, the intent... And ultimately, it's not about managing.”

“I asked the question, why do we do performance reviews? And of course, I think I got some looks like I had 3 heads, but I said, you know, hold on, stick with me. Why do we act like— why do we do them?”

“I would say maybe something controversial is we've taken a big pause this year on both performance and engagement.”

“One of the leaders in my team built a GPT, which is really to help our leaders use— not everyone was going into ChatGPT to help write their reviews anyway, but this was the— I front-loaded with all of our insights, the w...”

“Feedback is a gift. You can choose to take it or not, but ultimately it's my responsibility to be honest with you. And I think that is really where we continue to drive and be so successful.”

“50% of compensation was based on the what you accomplished and 50% of that compensation was based on the how, through the values and the behaviors.”

“Implementing performance-based productivity-driven schedule management. Allowed us to not only save on personnel costs and costs of employees... but it also allowed us to identify those individuals who are driving the hi...”

“Psychological safety was an actual causal reason for high performance. And why is that? It's because when you have psychological safety, you invite the best ideas to be heard and acted upon, and you're going to move forw...”

“We've thrown out the nine box. We don't use it anymore. We have algorithms that we use to talk to people about how they're doing against the job, how they're showing up and behaving at work against our core company value...”

“If you know anything about Bridgewater's culture, you know that it's focused on this notion of radical candor and radical transparency.”

“I've just declared it. I've told the organization, I'm not the happiness police. I'm not here to care about employee satisfaction... I'm focused on productivity.”

“let's engage together and partner together on something that hasn't happened yet and talk through all the various ways that potentially that project can be approached. So again, you're learning in that safe environment,...”

“The delivery that we get out of them is worth a whole lot more than fighting to say, no, you have to do it this new way when the recipe that they've got is working.”

“My personal executive coach keeps reminding me that every time I hear someone say KPI, I should actually reinterpret it as a key purpose indicator.”

“If the company goals are still trying to find product market fit, or you're still trying to get reliable revenue, maybe you're not trying to build the most extreme performance management process. Maybe you're just trying...”