Managing Management: Performance
The last section of this series is going, we’re going to discuss performance management. Some of the other pieces have touched on this, but here’s a more specific set of recommendations that you should have in mind when considering the performance of your team.
Do you have a clear set of expectations for everyone on the team? I wrote about expectations extensively in the first few parts of this series, but as a reminder, expectations are simply a concrete, measurable list of actions and results that everyone is accountable for performing. Without this being crystal clear, it’s very hard to evaluate specifics of performance.
Have you gotten feedback from others regarding your team? It’s important for them to solicit feedback and it’s also important that you go on your own and solicit feedback on their behalf. You may have more luck finding growth areas than they will since many people are uncomfortable discussing them directly but are happy to open up to a third party.
Is everything written down? If not, probably time to start going through documents and emails and chats from the cycle and finding examples to support whatever proposal you’re making for your team.
Once you’ve gathered all that, you should have some preliminary thoughts about the evaluations across your team members.
At this point, most larger organizations will have some process by which you collaborate with other managers in the organization to review the initial evaluations and makes sure that they’re consistent with how the other managers are evaluating their employees. Usually, the more you have in common with another team, the higher value there is in doing this with them. So, things like size of team, type of product, job family and specific responsibilities should be close. It’s also useful to find a few people who have no context for any of these things and try to explain to them how you got to your evaluations. This way it’ll test how much of the rationale is easily understood, and how good you are at communicating it.
It’s hard to say what happens next because it varies so widely with the size and type of the organization. In some places, the process is over once you make a decision, it gets written down, and that’s it. In others, you will go through many rounds of review to make sure that the ratings are evenly distributed and leveled across different parts of the larger organization.
And after the decisions are made, you need to communicate them with your team. The only piece of advice I’ll give here is that you have to take responsibility for the evaluation, even if you didn’t agree with how it metered out. If you do the opposite and pass the blame elsewhere, even for good reason, it undermines any trust your team will have in you.