Take A Minute With Tim - Strategic Performance Planning

Choose your pace, choose your place to engage in purposeful performance feedback.

When your vision is to nurture and maximize talent, you understand that when delivered consistently with the proper intention, performance feedback becomes the most effective resource in the development, engagement, and retention of talent.

Intention is where we'll turn our attention today.

A Story to Share

"I spend 15 minutes with each of my people so I can knock out all of my performance reviews in one day."

This was a conversation among several leaders from a large healthcare organization during a recent community hiring event.

"Fifteen minutes to recognize 365 days of effort?" I asked.

Six heads pivoted and stared in disbelief. They weren't expecting me to speak.

Obviously, they didn't know me very well.

"That's all my manager spends with me," another leader offered.

Still doesn't make it right.

Another admitted to sharing only positive feedback because an annual review "is not the time for negativity", and another blamed human resources for making them meet in person with their direct reports.

And you wonder why they were searching for new talent at hiring event?

Grow, Develop and Succeed

We miss so many opportunities to support growth and inspire loyalty when an entire year of feedback is bundled into a deadline driven by compliance and delivered through misguided intent.

FACT: A formal performance review strategy must remain a key factor in your Retention Intention Strategy.

It simply needs to flow more intuitively and consistently using Pace, Patience, and Perseverance.

Pace

Pace refers to intervals or phases of operation that offer measurable performance outcomes: Periods, Quarters, Trimesters, Fiscal Years, etc.

Remember that pace rhymes with "grace" as you design an approach that gracefully recognizes and evaluates periodic performance while nurturing sustainable growth and development.

Continue to empower leaders with the confidence to say something if they see something or someone drifting off course prior to a planned discussion.

This alleviates doubt embedded in the question: "Why didn't you say something sooner?"

Your strategic review becomes an engaging conversation centered on where we are and where we want or need to go from here.

Patience

A strong feedback culture allows a more frequent exchange of purposeful dialogue between leaders and their teams.

Strategic performance reviews look beyond daily dialogue and present a cumulative perspective based on a broad sample of observations.

Have the patience to allow an individual to perform.

Observe performance behavior as it relates to what matters most: your unique collection of standards, customs, and beliefs.

Experience the depth and value when a strategic review truly aligns what was observed with what was expected.

Perseverance

Many of us manage KPIs or KPMs based on weekly or even daily results.

Recognize that growth is measured through a series of steps: some forward, some backward, and some that make you say, "What were you thinking?"

Your team is looking to you to create a better tomorrow.

Engage in critical dialogue within a well-paced performance review strategy that is clear, concise, and connected with what matters most to a person's personal and professional success.

In the process you'll create a multitude of tomorrow's, each just a little better than the one before.

Which is something you can review in your next Strategic Performance discussion.