How to beat the “performance review” blues: giving effective feedback

Usually, it as a line manager you will be responsible for giving a performance review. Increasingly however, if your role is a project manager, then you may also need to appriase staff. Whilst you can learn the skills involved in managing projects by attending a short project management course, you also need to learn how to perform appraisals which is what this article is all about.

Here’s what giving performance feedback is not about:

• Sending your staff a box of chocolates once a year (although that’s always helpful)
• Copy-and-pasting the “performance review guide” jargon
• Offhand comments about a staff member’s overflowing in-tray
• Telling your staff what they need to do to get into your good books
• Shouting down a member of staff in front of other team members

Performance feedback is an important tool for motivating staff, improving staff performance and building relationships. Mis-used, however, it can demoralise staff, discourage staff initiative and participation and generate resentment and distrust.

Successful performance feedback has four characteristics:

1. Regular

Your performance review should take place more than once in a blue moon.

If staff are unused to feedback sessions, then any attempt to deliver a formal performance review could cause concern and hostility. If feedback sessions are conducted once every three years, then it will be impossible to give an accurate measure of performance since the last review.

Ideally you should conduct several feedback sessions per year with each member of your team. If you have too many staff members to manage this, then it might be a good idea to delegate out to deputy managers or team leaders.

Establish the frequency of feedback sessions in advance, and at the end of each session decide on a date for the next. To give your staff even more preparation, remind them a couple of weeks before the date and ask them to consider any questions or areas of concern they might have.

2. Two-Way

The ideal performance review is a dialogue, not a speech. Open by asking staff members how they would describe their own performance, what their main achievements have been, and what they have been doing to improve their performance.

Offer, rather than impose feedback. Instead of launching straight into a tirade about the staff member’s sloppy writing or dress sense, offer to share the observations that you have made. Wait for acceptance before proceeding.

3. Performance-focused

You should not launch into a tirade in any case. A good performance review always describes the performance not the performer.

In other words, a manager delivering a bad performance review might tell Joe that he is rubbish at writing reports, while a manager delivering a good performance review would say, “Joe, I think the wording in some of these reports needs to be checked.”

Part of this is focusing on solutions. While the performance review should consist of description not advice, highlighting where and how improvement can be made turns negative criticism into positive and constructive feedback.

The difference between focusing on solutions, not focusing on solutions and advice is illustrated in the following feedback examples:

- Not solution-focused: “Joe, I think the wording in some of these reports needs to be checked. Not only have you mis-spelled your own name, but your sentences are too long, your syntax is incomprehensible and I lost the point halfway through.”

- Advice: “I’d like to see greater accuracy, and shorter sentences. Make sure that the important points are clearly made. You could get Mandy to check your spelling for you, or perhaps attend a night-class in English grammar.”

- Solution-focused: “I’d like to see greater accuracy, and shorter sentences. Make sure that the important points are clearly made, so that the reader doesn’t get lost.”

4. Balanced

Performance feedback that is entirely negative or entirely positive is not much use to either you or the recipient.

Telling the staff member that their spelling is lousy, their presentation skills are nil and their dress sense is the company joke will leave them feeling bullied and demotivated no matter how you dress it up.

Equally, however, while telling somebody that their work is unexampled and their performance a guiding light to the rest of the team might provide a confidence boost, it will not leave them any room for improvement, and might even lead to complacency.

A good strategy is to adopt the primary school teacher’s marking scheme – 4 or 5 out of 10 for poor performance, 6-7 for most students, and 8 or 9 for truly excellent work.

Offering a corresponding proportion of praise and ‘areas for improvement’ enables your staff to leave feeling positive and confident in their ability to succeed, as well as motivated to move forwards according to your direction.