Holding a "How am I (REALLY) Doing?" Discussion

Summary

The basis for this discussion is a special version of PAF Feedback that essentially creates the framework for a heart-to-heart chat about someone’s overall performance and potential. Think of it as a “reference”. In other words, it contains the kind of information that the manager might provide in confidence to someone else, but to which the employee is also privy.

Conclusions About How Someone is “Doing”

When managers form opinions about employee performance, they instinctively analyze both objective and subjective data collected from observing and interacting with them over time and in a wide variety of circumstances and situations. Objective data obviously include any measurable results produced by the employee that can be related to previously defined objectives or performance standards. Subjective data on the other hand include a myriad of less tangible, and therefore less measurable factors associated with personality and emotional intelligence.

It is the interpretation of this combined objective and subjective data that managers use to form the opinions, judgements and conclusions upon which they base their impressions about an employee’s:

• Overall performance

• “Fit” in the organization

• Future career potential

The result is a mental impression about how the employee is “doing”.

Example (Partial) Conclusion

Jim is a pretty good supervisor. He runs a tight ship and I can rely on him to get the job done – he generally meets the production targets, etc. He has a lot of initiative when troubleshooting the inevitable problems that come up every day – probably because he has been in the position a long time and knows the operation inside out and backwards.

The problem with Jim is that he’s a real “know it all”. He always has to have the answer to everything (he pretends that he knows everything even when he doesn’t) and this means he sometimes even takes the credit for things that someone else has done in order to come off as "better" than he really is. Sometimes it’s so obvious that he is doing this that people are laughing at him behind his back. He's losing respect and credibility with the team.

He’s dropped hints about promotion, but this just simply isn’t in the cards. We need managers who have good people skills and he’s just blowing it. Too bad really, because if it wasn’t for this problem I think he would have potential.

What Employees Want to Know

Most employees are desperate to know how they are REALLY doing. However, most employees never hear these real mental impressions, especially if they contain negative information.

It is no secret that the majority of managers tend not to provide much in the way of any kind of feedback. Employees in particular know that any formal appraisal does not contain the complete picture of how they are perceived (negative perceptions in particular are often absent, downplayed, or cloaked in such politically correct terms it is hard to understand what it means). However, they rarely ask - for any number of reasons from shyness, to being scared of getting a negative reaction to not really wanting to hear anything bad. Therefore they constantly looking for clues from their mangers to find out how they are really doing. For example, the questions that most of them would dearly like to know the answers to (provided the manager can do so in a positive and helpful way are along the lines of:

• What would you really say about me if you had to "sum me up" to someone?

• What would my (honest) reference look like?

• What are your honest opinions, judgments, and conclusions about me and my performance and potential?

• Where do you think my personality and talents would fit best in the organization?

• In your opinion is there something about my performance or behaviour that you think I should know about and change? Is anything holding me back? What do I need to keep doing, start doing, do differently, or stop doing in order to be as successful as I can be.

Communicating Mental Impressions Honestly and Effectively using PAF

PAF feedback allows managers to validate their subjective mental impressions and break the information into three parts: strengths, satisfactory performance, and things to work on. This information also relates to “potential” so there may also be a discussion about what the information might mean for the employee’s career.

The number of items that make up this discussion is not specified since it will vary from employee to employee. The recommendation is to give as many strengths and satisfactory items as possible while limiting ones in the "Need to Work On" category to one or two. If there are more than one or two items in the last category, then the manager should pick the one(s) that, if it was "fixed", would provide the biggest bang for the buck (it is not possible to build Rome in a day). Any others can be addressed at a later time.

Strengths/talents

• What is the employee particularly good at, and/or suited for?

• What are the implications of these success areas and traits for the future? Satisfactory elements

• Where is the employee performing at acceptable levels?

• Would the employee benefit at all from further development in any of these areas? Depending on the employee’s aspirations, it may or may not be appropriate to discuss how to “improve”.

Things to work on

• What is the employee not good at? Where is he/she struggling?

• What would successful performance look like? How could the employee achieve it?

• What are the implications/possible benefits of improvement for the future?

• What are the various options and consequences if the employee can’t, or won’t, meet the new performance expectations?

Key Success Factors

How the manager brings up the concept of this discussion and the explanation of what it will contain is critical if the employee is to feel comfortable with hearing it. It is also important to be upfront with the employee about everything that will be discussed. The negative element in particular must not come as a surprise or otherwise snuck in at the end. If the employee wants to talk about the area to work on first, then the manager can address that right away. The following hypothetical examples illustrates:

Hi (name). Thanks for coming. Can I get you a coffee or anything?

Okay. Well, as you know from what I mentioned before when we set up this meeting with you, the purpose of the discussion today is for us to sit down informally together and talk about how you are doing.

Again, this is not something that I have really given much time to in the past, I know. It’s not an excuse, but my previous bosses didn’t really give me much feedback and I guess that I’ve just followed in that tradition. I’m trying to rectify the situation with all my employees as I’ve come to appreciate the importance of feedback in helping employees be as successful as they can be.

To that end, I’ve put some thought into how I think you are doing and, as a result, I’ve identified one area of real strength that I think you possess – which is your interpersonal skills – and three areas where I think that you are performing well.

These are:

1. The fact that you are very safety conscious

2. Your sense of responsibility

3. The fact that you show initiative

Everyone has at least one area that they could work on - so, I’ll also go through the one that I’ve identified as being helpful for you as well. This relates to being more proactive in solving problems.

I thought that we could start by reviewing the strengths and the areas that I think you are doing well in first. Perhaps we could also look at what they might mean for the future. How does that sound as a plan? Any questions?

The first strength that I want to talk about is your interpersonal skills (followed by PAF Feedback).

When the manger has gone over all the strengths and areas where the employee is doing well and has discussed them, then s/he transitions to the one area that the employee needs to work on.

Well, that just about covers it for your strengths and other areas where you are doing well. As you can tell, I’m very pleased with your performance in these key areas and I want you to know that I appreciate the efforts you are making.

Do you have anything else that you’d like to say or to add that we might not have covered already? No? Ok. Let’s move on then.

At the beginning of this meeting, I mentioned that I had identified one area I think you could benefit from working on and I’d like to go over that with you now. Is that OK?

The one area is to be more proactive in solving problems (followed by PAF Feedback).

The conversation ends with a summary of the discussion and any implications for follow-up activities.

The key to the effectiveness of this type of feedback discussion lies not just in letting employees know what managers believe to be true about them and understanding why they have come to those conclusions. The key to its effectiveness is that it conveys that the manager has the employee’s best interests at heart and that the purpose is to HELP the employee succeed and reach his or her potential.

This is as far as any manager can go in performing this critical role. Ultimately, it is up to employees to decide what do with the information they receive.

Application Implications

While managers can of course hold this discussion with any employee at any time, perhaps the most critical time to do it is with “new” employees. This is because:

• New employees not only have a high need for feedback, but they also highly amenable to listening to it. They are usually bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and want to do everything possible to do a good job and get the recognition for it.

• Feedback can have the greatest impact on performance and productivity.

• There is no baggage so managers can start the relationship with a clean slate. Giving reinforcing and corrective feedback early on, or as issues arise, can prevent many of the poor performance or other types of problem behaviour situations that can crop up later on.

It is obviously much harder to bring up and correct poor performance once it has been going on for quite some time and has therefore been “accepted” – even if this acceptance is a result of having previously overlooked or ignored the situation in the past. The employee is bound to wonder or ask "why didn't you tell me this before?"