Working in a team, it’s not unusual to consider how well you fit into the culture, whether your performance meets standards, and how well you interact with your colleagues. Building confidence around these questions is the key to creating a high performing environment.
The path to eliminating doubt relies on open communication, a clear shared vision, and trust. Managing these three factors is delicate work, and reliant on a robust process for handling feedback within the team.
Are we doing the best we can with the current methods?
The concept of ‘360° Feedback’ has gained popularity over the last few decades, offering a democratic spin on the traditional employee feedback process. Subjects are reviewed anonymously by a variety of participants (managers, peers, reportees, even customers) with an aim to provide actionable and impartial data that covers a broader spectrum than traditional top-down performance reviews.
Nothing is perfect. The weakness of this format has been well defined by Maury Peiperl, a professor at IMD Business School, in the form of the four paradoxes. In summary:
- Well-intentioned colleagues are often conservative with negative feedback.
- Teams may feel that highlighting a weak link will put the collective under scrutiny.
- Feedback that is collected and measured more easily has lower significance to individuals.
- Criteria driven review systems can be ‘gamed’ for superficial positive results.
In contrast: While traditional top-down employee reviews have many flaws, their strength is the ability to look at individuals on a case-by-case basis and engage in a dialogue. You can contextualize feedback, provide tailored guidance, and ensure the subject knows you have their best interests at heart.
It’s clear to see the pros and cons of both systems, one is almost a negative relief of the other.
How do we combine the best of the 360° feedback process format (efficient & democratic) with the best of the traditional method (meaningful & personalized)?
Know Why You Do It, as a Team.
If you want to turn a form filling exercise into a healthy review process, the team has to buy into it from the ground up. Every question must be meaningful and well understood, stemming from the values that matter most. Reviews have to be approached as a method to maintain the strength of those values, rather than to highlight weakness.
Last week I spent an afternoon with Nasir Zubairi, a mentor at Startupbootcamp, Venture Partner at FinLeap, and Founder of BillFront. He was advising a startup team on the initial steps of defining their vision and culture.
One exercise began with the following questionnaire being handed out:
The main benefit of teams is ____________________.
One important reason teams make sense for an organisation is ____________________.
In order for a team to work, the team leader must ____________________.
The number one thing that weakens a team is ____________________.
The key factor for a team’s success is ____________________.
In order to make a team effective, team members must agree to ____________________.
An important indicator of team empowerment is ____________________.
Each person was asked to write down the first word that came to mind for each question. The team was then split into two groups, with each group aiming to arrive at a consensus for their answers. Finally, the answers from the two groups were compared. Themes were identified, discrepancies were discussed, and the key messages were detailed and refined repeatedly.
A rudimentary exercise, but a very effective method to drill down to the team’s core values. The final step was turning these values into a contract covering fundamentals such as power structure, decision making processes, and communication. This would be a cornerstone of the company culture, and a key part of on-boarding new members.
In the space of a few hours, the team identified 6 major factors that strengthened them as a group. Everyone understood the reasoning and was keen to ensure the team continued on the path that had been laid out. This is the foundation of a great review process.
Know Why You Do It, as an Individual.
While team values are the foundation, the goal is to build a process that provides feedback and guidance to individuals. Defining standards solely around company culture, without accommodating for individuals, is a common trap. You need team members to approach the review as an opportunity for themselves and each of their colleagues, not just the group.
Personalization is the key to this challenge: Allow team members to tailor their own review in pursuit of the feedback that matters most to them. Recent projects, personal situations, goals and aspirations... There’s potential for every team member to benefit from tailored input in this format. Higher value responses also provide greater motivation when reviewing colleagues, and greater mutual satisfaction when improvements are made.
Rather than building a form designed for team members to review other colleagues, allow each team member to self-direct their own review — targeting the feedback that matters most to them.
Refining the Process
You may want to…
- …start out with a template to guide team members in creating their first review.
- …set some standard questions.
- …encourage colleagues to guide each other on what questions to add to each review.
- …be transparent if your team sees themselves drifting of-course from the values laid out.
How you shape the process to fit your needs is up to you and your team.
We have the technology to innovate in every space, including the age-old employee review. There’s no excuse for trying to wedge your team into a standard one-size-fits-all solution.
Did I miss anything? Disagree? I’d love to hear it— leave a comment!
