Annual Reviews at Uscreates — what we have learnt about empowering reviews
It’s the first week of Uscreates new financial year. We have lots of exciting plans coming up which we will share publicly very soon. But first a little reflection on the Annual Reviews we held this week.
As a design led business we are always reflecting and iterating how we run and grow as a business. Led by Mary Rose Cook, we took a new approach to Reviews this year (moving away from 360 feedback). The ambition was to create a more empowering and supportive environment for individuals to reflect and grow.
We design better futures is Uscreates’ purpose and this year our Reviews were really about supporting our team to design their own better futures.
Over the past few weeks, the whole team has been encouraged and supported to reflect back on their year, review what they want to achieve and work collaboratively with us to design their futures. It’s a new format, new approach and we weren’t sure exactly how it would pan out.
Here are some reflections:
Enabling and empowering people to own their own future is invigorating — Normally by the end of two days of 360 feedback and appraisals I feel pretty exhausted and drained. People are generally not so interested in hearing all the positive feedback but more interested in delving into critical feedback to improve. This meant we used to spend a lot of time discussing challenging feedback and I have to admit this was not always positioned and shared in the most valuable or actionable way. Enabling people to gather their own feedback, ask for feedback on the things that they really care about (rather than what people want to share with them), reflecting and looking forward, has been a much more rewarding experience for all of us. Personally, I feel invigorated!
Inconsistency across formats has been consistently better — Each individual designed and led their Review. Each person defined the format to enable them to get out what they wanted from it. I was amazed and overjoyed by the different approaches that people have taken ranging from well structured papers, great looking powerpoint presentations, beautiful hand drawn prompt cards, flip chart and post it presentations to notes in a sketch pad. Enabling people to determine and design the format that worked for them has supported individuals’ different thinking and working styles so that they could get the most from the whole process and the session. More than this, it has helped us as a leadership team to understand different people’s ways of working better. We were not constrained by (or bored by) templates and tools which kept things fresh for all of us. Also, as we are a bunch of designers, of course some great new tools for structuring thinking have also come from the reviews which I think we can build into our work with clients so even more value has been created.
The way people give feedback on others helps us understand what they see as important — Where people have felt they would like feedback provided anonymously, line managers have helped to do this. I’ve listened to feedback from clients and team mates and collated this for people. Through doing this, I’ve gained unexpected insight about those who are providing feedback on their colleagues. The way they talk about people, the examples and words they use to bring this to life and what they have focused in on are all indications about someone’s values and view on what’s important. Through listening to feedback we can understand more about the person giving the feedback as well as person gaining it. The question for us now is how can we be more explicit about this in the future and make the most of this insight?
Coaching and supporting progression needs to be acknowledged and focused on — The reviews have hammered home to me, the value and importance of effective, dedicated coaching and support. As a people focused business, supporting our team to progress and grow has always been important. But what I have realised recently is that it has not been an explicit ask. Our senior team have instinctively supported people to grow but we haven’t focused on the importance and value of coaching. We don’t report on it, we don’t track it, we don’t explicitly focus on it and this needs to change. As we grow as a business, we need to grow our people and talent with us. We need to grow as coaches to enable our team to design their better futures.
Some of the ways and tools we used to reflect are below in case they are helpful to others:
- Questions we posed: What you are proud of? Challenges or things that could have gone better? Where you have excelled? What you thought you would have achieved — and have / haven’t?
- Activities: Look back at Harvest (time tracking software) this time last year to remind yourself what projects you were working on and in what capacity. Look at your iphone photos to this time last year -what were you up to?Review your Career Development Plan (if you made one).
- Nice Fastcompany article on which skills to develop at each stage of your career.
- A booklet with excellent questions to help you reflect each year — Year compass
- Cassie Robinson’s post and templates on how to create a User manual for me
