A Servant Leader’s Guide To Performance Reviews
You’re a servant leader, get this process right to unlock career growth in your team
Before moving to her former college friend’s new startup, Sharon used to work in Big Tech. She loved her job overall, but she dreaded that twice yearly time sink exercise that was the performance review process. Everybody in the team had to fill in long and obscure online questionnaires, and provide “meaningful feedback” on each other. The thing is, nobody even knew what HR considered “meaningful”. Like, should Sharon talk about how Mark was always up for a quick water cooler chat when she was stuck on a particular task, regardless of whether or not they were on the same project, or would that just land him in trouble? Regardless, she complied every time, typing up pages upon pages of “meaningful feedback” for hours, like everybody else.
That world seemed so far away now, three years after the move. In that time, she had become an accomplished servant leader, but as her friend’s startup went through another rapid growth phase, she was asked to set up the very process she once dreaded.
She never really got the point of performance reviews before, and had always considered them the poster child of traditional management.
She had no clue where to start.
When you lead a small team, it’s easy to stay on top of everything. You know exactly what projects are being worked on, who’s working on them, and what the challenges are.
In such an environment, it’s easy for you to observe interpersonal chemistry, both within the team and with external parties, and to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses of each individual. Likely, you also get to speak to your team often, which makes you acutely aware of their career aspirations, and what they should do in the upcoming quarters to realize them.
As the team grows and people start spreading further apart, this changes dramatically as you no longer have the amount of visibility you had before, and that’s when performance reviews really start to become useful.
In a nutshell, the purpose of a performance review is to support your team members’ career growth plan.
Yes, compensation adjustments and bonuses should also be a part of it, and we’ll briefly talk about that later, but they’re not the main focus.
Since the focus on career growth is so strong, let’s take a quick detour to see what it means to foster it.
Fostering career growth
Generally speaking, career growth is about setting up opportunities to give an individual the chance to become what they want to be, abilities permitting. It’s about allowing them to build the skills required by their target job so that they can learn to perform it independently and with a high degree of quality.
Let’s break this down a bit. We’re talking about identifying:
- Where they want to be, and whether they can do it
- What path they can take to get there
- What work they can do today to move them along that path
Once this information has been identified, we want to be able to track progress and course correct if necessary, on a regular basis.
And that’s where the performance review comes in. A good performance review allows you to gather data on the person’s past activities (track progress), compare it to the goals you have previously set together. Then, you can make the necessary adjustments together (course correct) to eventually reach the intended goal.
OK, so how do we structure a performance review to foster career growth?
Performance reviews in three easy steps
A performance review process can usually be divided into three separate phases:
- Data gathering
- Face-to-face review
- Post-review actions
Let’s now look at each phase in more detail, bearing in mind our main objective as a servant leader.
Step 1: Data gathering
To kick off, we want to collect data on the work performed by the team since the last time we did a performance review, specifically in terms of how this work was done. In fact, there are two distinct components to consider here: the quality of the work itself, and the quality of the collaboration between team members.
The first component represents the hard skills of a person, otherwise known as the technical aspects of their job. The second is what we call soft skills, the ability to work with others effectively to achieve a common goal.
For the hard skills part, we can rely on performance metrics we have previously setup, such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which should have been put in place for the exact purpose of determining how people are doing on their day-to-day activities. To refresh our memory on KPIs, here are some examples:
- Software engineer: Number of patch sets / pull requests accepted vs. total submitted
- User experience designer: Number of revisions before a design document is accepted
- Customer support agent: Number of tickets resolved without requiring manager’s intervention
- Salesperson: Number of presentations given to prospects
The key point here is that hard skills should be easily measurable through numbers, since there shouldn’t be much interpretation to be done to understand whether somebody is acing it in their field of expertise.
Soft skills on the other hand require people’s input as they’re more about emotions, and this is usually where online questionnaires come in. However, verbosity isn’t a prerequisite and they can be kept quite lean.
My preferred approach is to ask each team member to answer the following questions about three of the people they worked with since the last performance interview:
- What did you work on? (Name the project or task)
- How was the interaction? (On a scale from horrible to splendid)
- Tell me more about what happened, in a paragraph or so.
We’ll talk more about the specific answers to these questions, especially the last one, in a minute in the “Face-to-face review” section. Before we move on, there’s a crucial point here I want to talk about: the importance of limiting the collection of feedback only to a handful of people (three in the case above, but the actual number is flexible).
Restricting this number forces people to pick the most memorable interactions of the time period in question, automatically filtering out low quality feedback. Also, it might help you flag people who aren’t visible in the team, thus receiving little feedback on their work, giving you an opportunity to address that.
Step 2: Face-to-face review
Once you gathered your data, you can run a comparison between the previous performance review and the current one, and discuss the findings with each team member in a face-to-face setting.
Here, you can show the overall performance of the team alongside that of the individual, and their progress since the last time you ran the exercise. Also, you can probe deeper in the feedback they left for their peers, and discuss the feedback they received in turn (being mindful to keep the reporter anonymous, or otherwise risk jeopardizing the honesty of this process).
As all of this should be run in the context of working on career growth for the person, here is where we have the greatest opportunity to work on their self-awareness, and think about concrete steps for their career plan. If you’re using Objective and Key Results (OKRs) to track these, and you should, it’s a good time to review existing Objectives and their Key Results, checking off those which are completed and removing those which are no longer relevant.
Step 3: Post-review actions
The final step in the Performance Review process is to act on anything relevant which came up from the previous steps.
For the individual, this just means revising their OKRs, and schedule a follow-up meeting to get them approved. After that, it’s all about the execution of work within those parameters until the next performance review. And there’s no need to stress further.
For you, there’s a bit more to do:
- Review the KPIs at both the team and the individual level, as they might need adjusting, especially in terms of target score
- Follow up on any negative feedback which might require further attention or HR escalation (hopefully there’s none!)
- Work out compensation adjustments, bonuses and promotions based on the results of the performance review
- Communicate the adjustments above to your team members
Some organizations prefer the last step to take place more infrequently than every time a performance review takes place. That’s fine. You can roll up the results of your performance reviews and use them when the time is right.
And while we’re on the subject of time, let’s talk about scheduling frequency for performance reviews.
How often should I conduct performance reviews?
The tricky thing with performance reviews is that, although useful, they’re undoubtedly time consuming. No matter how much we try to simplify the process, or how much automation we put in place, people still need to fill in forms and sit down to talk.
Reviews which happen too frequently take up a lot of time, and can leave the team with a sense of a perennial moving target for their career goals.
At the other end of the spectrum, reviews that take place too infrequently are normally built on data which is either stale (old) or incomplete (not representative of the full time period elapsed since the previous review), and leave the team with a sense of abandonment over your interest in their growth.
Although the most important thing is to conduct the reviews regularly, my personal preference is to go through the motions once per quarter, but I saw other managers getting decent results with anything up to six months intervals.
One thing is for certain though: one year is too long a period to wait to know how well you’re doing. You owe it to your team to conduct your reviews more frequently than that.
Summing up
Alright, it’s time to wrap up!
Performance reviews have evolved over the years and are just as home in the toolbox of the servant leader as they are in that of a traditional top-down manager. It’s just that their purpose is different. For a servant leader, performance reviews are a great chance to have a dialog about career growth with each team member.
However, to be most effective, performance reviews need to be objective and honest, and that means structuring them following a scientific approach:
- Gather data: Measure hard skills performance, gather feedback on soft skills performance. The specific skills involved in this measurement should be aligned with those required to achieve the career objectives desired.
- Review it: Sit down together and analyze the data to identify their performance over time. Is the person moving in the right direction? How well are they doing? Have they achieved their goal? Do they need new ones?
- Take action: Work with each team member to update their OKRs, so that they have a concrete goal to work on for the next time period. Also, follow up on any problem that might have come up during the review phase, and enact promotions, adjusting compensation and bonuses accordingly.
Following this approach takes time, both for the leader and the team, so it’s important to schedule performance reviews sensibly. The sweet spot here varies from team to team and from company to company, but once a quarter is a good place to start, adjusting either the amount of data gathered or the frequency of the review itself as time goes by to suit your specific organization’s needs.
Thanks for sticking around till the end. I want to leave you with a bonus quote that you can share with your team in your next performance review. It helps to set the tone, and hopefully it can make your performance review even more useful.
Reviewing performance isn’t about who’s good and who’s bad. It’s about how we can improve as a team and get where we want to be. When you identify an area of improvement in your teammates, you’re helping them become better. Nobody’s perfect alone, but we can all improve together!
