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Performance Without Appraisals (and what to do instead)
86 Plays9 months ago
Ben Simpson works with leaders and their teams to create better relationships, improve trust, increase autonomy, ditch bureaucracy. He very much sees that you perform best when you’re happy in your work. And he’s a fierce critic of traditional (command and control) management and prefers a more human-centric way of leading and managing.
He co-founded Organisational Vitality, is the Director and Chairman of the Deming Alliance UK, Co-organiser of Reinventing Work in Bath and is a visiting lecturer on the Bath MBA.
And he has the honour of collaborating with me when we work with clients together!
We geeked out in this episode but also made sure we offered practical advice for rethinking your appraisal system.
We covered:
- Is it true that appraisal processes never work?
- So why do they persist?
- The hidden/unintended consequences of annual appraisals
- If command and control should be a thing of the past – why is Amazon so successful?
- If we ditch the concept of an appraisal system what could you do instead?
- What do we mean by ‘ask better questions’?
- What actions can leaders start taking right now?
If you have any questions as a result of this Podcast you have permission to pick our collective brains! Our e-mail addresses are:
Find out more about Ben here: https://vitalorg.co.uk/
And connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensimpsonbath/
Click here to get your free copy of my Leader's Guide to Increasing Your Impact, Influence & Free Time [ www.visibly-different.co.uk/increasing-your-impact ]
And if you enjoyed the Podcast please share with someone who might benefit and leave a rating and review.
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Transcript
The Downside of Appraisals
00:00:00
Speaker
So is it true in your opinion that appraisals never work? I think on balance, I would say the upsides are marginal, the potential downsides of the process, either not being designed or executed well, very, very much tip the scales in the other direction. If you're really, really careful and you do them really well, you might have a marginal positive impact.
00:00:29
Speaker
But entering into the game, you're more likely to do more harm than good.
Exploring Appraisal Alternatives
00:00:48
Speaker
Join me as I talk to thought leaders and changemakers about practical ways to apply new learning and rethink the status quo. Get ready to become a visible leader in your organization. Leaders, please raise your hand if you love it when it's appraisal time. I know. We are all weary of the very idea of them.
00:01:18
Speaker
But they persist. And I think it's because people have great intentions when it comes to reasons why they want to do appraisals. They also see that there are flaws with the process, but they don't really know what to do instead. So if you're very keen on your team performing at its best, and you really don't want to get weighed down by bureaucracy, you're in for a treat with this episode.
00:01:48
Speaker
So listen to find out how to get performance without appraisal.
Ben Simpson on Leadership
00:01:56
Speaker
Today I'm talking to Ben Simpson who works with leaders and their teams to create better relationships, improve trust, increase autonomy and ditch bureaucracy. He very much sees that you perform best when you're happy in your work and he's a fierce critic of the traditional command and control leadership style.
00:02:20
Speaker
He co-founded Organizational Vitality, is the director and chairman of the Deming Alliance UK, co-organiser of Reinventing Work in Bath and a visiting lecturer on the Bath MBA. But really the pinnacle of his career was when he sat down with me in a cafe in Bath and realised that we might be able to do some great work collaborating together with our clients. Ben, welcome to my podcast.
00:02:49
Speaker
Well.
00:02:50
Speaker
Good morning and thank you. And yes, I have very vivid memories of our first meeting and yeah, pinnacle. I think that's absolutely the right word. And we've only ever, I'm not sure where you get to if you keep going upwards from a pinnacle, but we've certainly had some great joint forays into the world of work since then. So yeah, long back continue, Corin. Love to be working with you. Lovely to be having this conversation with you today.
00:03:20
Speaker
Excellent. I'm glad you agree. We wouldn't have landed so well if you disagree. So I was thinking what to call this podcast when we talked about it. And I was kind of thinking.
00:03:34
Speaker
appraisals, why they don't work and what you should do instead. But you had a little bit more of an elegant title for it, which was Performance Without Appraisal, which I think is a nice, less divisive type of title.
Performance Without Appraisal
00:03:52
Speaker
Yeah, now you're really worrying me because that is, of course, nicked. And I didn't come up with that turn of phrase. I think it was Peter Schultes who for a long time in his career, Peter's now long since gone. But back in the 80s and 90s, he was quietly campaigning amongst business leaders in his role as an international consultant.
00:04:23
Speaker
for them to ditch this practice. Yeah, I think he probably coined that term, but I liked it. So as is the case with many things in life, I nicked it, but we probably should just give a nod to Peter because he was a great guy. Yes, we will steal it, but we will do it gracefully.
00:04:45
Speaker
So, appraisals. Let's cut to the chase. So is it true in your opinion that appraisals never work? Ah, well, in my opinion, in my opinion, I certainly, I think on balance, given all of the opportunity that we have to have a look into all of the organisations that we work with, I would say,
00:05:14
Speaker
In general, they do more harm than good. If we look for more objective data, that's pretty fuzzy. But I think what it tells us is the upsides are marginal. The potential downsides of the process, either not being designed or executed well, are very, very much to the scales in the other direction. So I think what we say is,
00:05:43
Speaker
If you're really, really careful and you do them really well, you might have a marginal positive impact, but entering into the game, you're more likely to do more harm than good. How about that? Nice. Yeah, I think when I've seen them in place, often the leaders that are able to get these benefits get them in spite of the appraisal system because they are
00:06:12
Speaker
using sound principles, which would work even if we whipped that whole bit of paper away. But if you're being led by that appraisal system, then often I see that being where the negative consequences lie.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, I love that and that has sparked a memory for me actually. I remember sitting down to do an appraisal with a guy that worked for me when I was back in corporate life and I remember we did that. We went through to get a signal, we've got to take this box and we've got to fill in this and we did that so far.
00:06:52
Speaker
Well, while we're here, should we have a proper conversation about how things are going and what I can do to support you to be even more successful in your role, Mick? And we did, we literally did that.
00:07:05
Speaker
And I'd forgotten that we did that. That's weird. Yeah. So they are in spite of the system. Yeah. Because it created the meeting and the conversation, which is as long as you then use it in the way that you did with, with mate, then that, that makes the difference. But being a slave to it, tick in the box and then moving on. That's where we see this massive gap.
00:07:30
Speaker
But I feel like the intention is frequently really positive. So the place it comes from is often a place which is the thing that people want to achieve, makes sense typically, but then it goes down a particular path. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's lots of good intent.
00:07:55
Speaker
The trouble is, as with many things in life, is that it kind of gets pulled out of shape and more and more and more and more things get added on. And I think performance appraisal or performance reviews, the name changes, but really the artifact doesn't.
00:08:15
Speaker
you know, has fallen victim of that. And it, and then now is trying to do such a nested mess of objectives. It actually by, you know, by, by design, it's never going to do a good job of any one of those. Um, but, but still we, but still we continue. We persist. So, okay.
Challenges in HR Appraisal Processes
00:08:38
Speaker
Let's just step into the shoes of somebody in HR.
00:08:43
Speaker
They've been set the task. What do you think the multiple things they are trying to get from this appraisal system, what do you think is in the mix?
00:08:56
Speaker
Oh God, I mean, they're set an impossible task. So that's evaluating performance, define goals, objectives, ranking people, decide who's going to make the grade for the talent program or onward progression. And at the same time, it'd be a motivational conversational. And by the way, we've got
00:09:23
Speaker
45 minutes to do it. I mean, it's impossible. So I think the first thing we need to do is to disentangle all of those purposes of the process and start dealing with those separately and differently. Let's go back in time. Where did this start? Why are we where we are now?
00:09:52
Speaker
Well, this is a response that people like you and I, I guess, find ourselves thinking about, talking about whenever we're facing an organizational challenge. And the bottom line is that we have really struggled
00:10:11
Speaker
to shake off the underlying tacit assumptions of command and control and scientific management. In this particular instance, looking back in time is quite interesting.
00:10:28
Speaker
Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote Scientific Management I think in 2000 and no in not too bad is still alive and well we didn't write it then but in I think 1909 and that was followed hot on the hills by Walter D Scott who's an Aussie consultant and this is the genus I think of the of appraisals where he started building on Winslow Taylor's work
00:10:56
Speaker
He started this idea of man to man, get the language, man to man, Ariasins.
00:11:03
Speaker
because there will be laggards, there will be people slacking off. So the way that we manage that is compare people to each other and, you know, like rats in the cage, strongest person wins, et cetera. So if you were to ask people in here and now businesses, organizations, if you were to ask leaders, you know, is your organization command and control? They would say, oh, no, no, no, we're definitely not command and control. We've moved on from that.
00:11:32
Speaker
But you would see lots of practice and behaviour that is still very much built on those assumptions, not explicitly talked about, but it's still there. And you see those assumptions, the sort of Theory X thinking absolutely throughout, you know, what are deemed to be good practice appraisal systems.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, we're struggling to shake that off. The world of work has changed profoundly. People's expectations of work has changed profoundly. You know, the whole idea that managers know best. They do the thinking, make the decisions, and workers, inverted commas, take their brains out and do the work under close instruction and supervision is just...
The Impact of Command and Control
00:12:29
Speaker
It's of another era. But for some reason, we're really struggling to shake it off. I want to ask you about how we can look about us and assess whether or not some of that stuff is going on around us that we're a bit blind to. But I just wanted to nail this sort of command and control thing first. It does, obviously, in some organizations appear that command and control works brilliantly for shareholders.
00:12:57
Speaker
As long as you have a regulation length time that you go for a Wii, Amazon is great. So I don't, you're a fierce critic of it, but obviously not because it can't work in some ways. Give me your criticism of it in that context.
00:13:19
Speaker
Yeah, so Amazon is not alone, but they're a nice example because a lot of people admire Amazon. A lot of people love to hate Amazon, but no one can deny that, you know, the impact that they've had has been huge. The success that they've had has been huge. And I really liked how you caveated that, you know, if our soul
00:13:46
Speaker
purpose in life is profit maximization with no regard for the people that work for us, for the societies that we live in, for our ecology, then yeah, there's no denying. It can be successful. But my goodness me, we need to grow out of that. That's quite scary.
00:14:16
Speaker
Yeah, the planet needs us to rethink. Absolutely. Yeah, ecologically, environmentally, from a sustainability perspective and from a societal and just the health of human beings perspective. If we keep going down that track, then we're looking into a very, very, very dark place.
00:14:43
Speaker
I'm afflicted with a crazy amount of optimism bias and I do feel that we will in the near future hit a bit of a tipping point.
00:14:59
Speaker
our perspective on what success means for organisations will significantly change. I mean, it's been creeping in the right direction for a long time, but I think we will reach a tipping point and I think it will be, yeah, I think it will be driven by our new younger entrants to the workforce and they will make the change because they will vote with their feet.
00:15:26
Speaker
Well, with them in mind, let's take us back to
00:15:32
Speaker
organizations that feel like they're not command and control. They certainly don't aspire to be command and control, but actually maybe there's some sleepwalking into certain behaviors that do create some of the unintended consequences of that type of culture. So what type of things might the average leader be doing or creating in the organization that is a little bit
00:16:02
Speaker
more towards a command and control? I think a lot of this has to do with our innate behaviours so we feel that someone isn't giving their best and they've let us down and
00:16:20
Speaker
That sparks very often in us, I think, an emotional reaction. So in those circumstances, it's quite easy, I think, to dive in and start addressing the issue in a very personal way without gathering all of the facts. So I think that's an example of behavior and practice.
00:16:50
Speaker
And I think good leaders are conscious that they've been triggered in that way, but they stop and they take a breath and they say, okay, let's start from a position where we believe that nobody comes to work deliberately to screw things up. And let's come from a place where.
00:17:15
Speaker
we have positive regard for our individuals.
Human-Centric Organizational Focus
00:17:22
Speaker
And rather than launching in with a subjective and potentially narrow perspective of how they see the situation, start asking good questions about, okay, I'm really curious to find out how this has been for you. Let's have a good conversation about it.
00:17:45
Speaker
So I think overcoming that, oh my God, I don't believe it. They've screwed up over here. They've done it in front of the clients. Really embarrassing. Right. I need to, I need to, it's my job, manager, authoritarian parent, get in there, sort out, give someone a ticking off.
00:18:05
Speaker
That takes me back to my lovely Professor Peter Hawkins, my mentor, who always invited me to stop locating the problem with the person. So anytime I found myself doing that, it was pullback. This is a really nice place to get to, isn't it? Where you can have that pause and reflection and allow yourself to take a different path. Yeah, totally.
00:18:34
Speaker
But I think none of us, or at least very few of us, are naturally inclined to do that. I think our brains are wired differently. It triggers something in our less than executive function in our brains, which rarely leads to a helpful conversation. So I think there's a behavior side
00:19:01
Speaker
But actually in terms of the mechanisms that we employ in organizational life, I think there's a lot of those that actually support the reality of command and control.
00:19:17
Speaker
very often on topic for today, appraisal systems very often, you know, budgets and the way that they're managed very often the way that we manage organizational performance. So there's, as always, there's this sort of ying and yang of context and behavior.
00:19:40
Speaker
And we need to look at both and get both moving in the same direction. And that being, you know, much, much more human centric and much less kind of mechanistic sausage machine command and control. So I think we need to work on both. And I'm going to want to move to the so what in a minute of right. So we ditch it.
00:20:10
Speaker
or we rethink and then what we move to because I always like to get really specific, actionable ideas for people that they can put into place tomorrow or today because it's still early. We could fix it today. Before I move on to that,
00:20:31
Speaker
We've sort of had a little glance at command and control and rethinking that a bit. What do you see the benefits if we are to change the systems we've got? Why? What does it bring us? I think.
00:20:48
Speaker
increasingly it is becoming true that the performance of the organization is just so dependent on the relationships between people, up, down and across the organization. And I think if we can have a much more authentic and joint conversation around performance where people feel comfortable being
00:21:18
Speaker
incredibly open and candid and honest about their own performance and opportunities to improve it and develop themselves. That at a human level leaves us feeling in a really really good place for both parties.
00:21:40
Speaker
And I think that's the prize. That's very, very achievable. And I don't actually think it's that hard to do. I don't think it's that hard to learn.
00:21:50
Speaker
but I think the impact of that can be quite profound. Gallup's own data, as well as our own research suggests that 70% of people's experience of work, good and bad, is a result of your management practices, processes, and behaviors. So yeah, that's the size of the pie that we go out when we start being conscious about this stuff.
00:22:17
Speaker
So I think potentially it's huge and that isn't contained just in the performance conversations. That's always, that's forever. That's how we show up at work together. So I think the opportunity is massive. I think that's an interesting point. It's about the relationship, how you show up.
00:22:45
Speaker
or any interaction you have in the team or together. It's not just, certainly not, please God, an annual appraisal. No, no, that really is, that's the worst case scenario right there. You know, the sort of the multi-page prescriptive
00:23:08
Speaker
Everybody does it at the same time of year. You just feel that energy getting sucked out of the organization for those two months while we're harassing people to go through this process that they see no value in. That's cruelty, really. That's human cruelty. And we need to stop doing that. That's not helping anybody.
00:23:34
Speaker
And we expect, like we were saying right at the beginning, that benefit can be had in spite of the appraisal system, but that leader that can do that, generally, there's a level of skill needed to be able to have... I mean, I'm not saying that you need to have training, but there needs to be some
00:23:57
Speaker
approach mindset to those conversations to get those really great outcomes. Invariably, I think people would be a little bit daunted. And I think maybe that's why they reach for that box, you know, the tick box and everything, because they don't really know what to do instead. Totally. Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely right. I think there is real comfort, real safety blanket in, oh, we've just got to go through this and it's going to be a bit awful.
00:24:24
Speaker
for an individual who isn't overly comfortable having
00:24:29
Speaker
the sort of conversation I previously described, then taking that safety blanket away is really probably quite a scary place to be. I haven't got a form to fill. I'm not expected to be a robot and go through this. I have to think for myself. So yeah, I absolutely do think that there is a role for a people function or coaches within the organization to really, really help
00:24:59
Speaker
managers be more coach-like and specifically in this instance how they manage those conversations. That's not to say of course that there aren't some, you know, it's not that it's a bad thing to pre-script some good open questions.
00:25:23
Speaker
you know, that's fine. You could even write them down and have them on a piece of paper in front of you. And in fact, that may actually be helpful because that helps. So one of the beliefs that we have around performance conversations is that as a result
00:25:41
Speaker
there should be joint and several actions that come out of it, some of which that the manager takes away and the other of which that the person in role takes away. Because the person in roles performance is a product of both of their behaviors. You know, so a good universal question for a manager to ask is here, what is my part in this?
00:26:07
Speaker
What is it that I can do differently or better that will enable you to be more successful or will increase your chances of success in this thing that you've just described? And a lovely, lovely question, Ben. It's so rarely, rarely asked, I think, and it's a nice one. And I think it's a great point that taking away this
00:26:37
Speaker
Potentially, I mean, maybe what we're looking at, I don't know what percentage of organizations still have this quite long process. I work with a few clients that have it imposed on them from corporate and they're not going to change that. And so we just, you know, this is working in spite of that system, but these great quality questions can still have a place.
00:27:04
Speaker
But I suppose the more I've seen it, the more I think less is more. So a small handful of really great conversational type questions, which are like you've just described, rather than going kind of crazy and having to get through a lot.
00:27:27
Speaker
I'm just pulling you away from this episode because I want to share with you how you can get a copy of the free guide that I've created in which I share with you several of the techniques that I use with my coaching clients today and that you can use too, which will help you create more of an impact as a leader, have more influence and the holy grail, have more time away from the doing.
00:27:57
Speaker
You can use this time for key things like focusing on strategic thinking or go for a bike ride. If you want to grab the free guide, check out the show notes and click on the link. So I'm leader, say I'm empty of this business and I'm going to wipe my diary for a bit so I can give this some thought.
00:28:26
Speaker
How should I approach this? So I've decided that this annual appraisal six-month review is really not meeting the needs of what we've just been talking about. Everyone hates it anyway, so I'm going to ditch it. What do I do now?
00:28:43
Speaker
What you do now is you hopefully not locked away in your own room, but with some of your team, if not all of your team. So what is it that we're trying to achieve here? What is the purpose of this process?
Separating Judgment from Development
00:29:01
Speaker
And that conversation will very often boil down to two things. One of which is.
00:29:11
Speaker
making some sort of assessment or judgment of people for some of the reasons I described earlier. So salary increases, promotion opportunities, whether
00:29:24
Speaker
people get plonked on their escalator of the talent program. You can detect the cynicism in my voice. They're not discussing that particularly well. Heaven forbid, should someone be underperforming them, we need a body of evidence. So that's the judgment part. And then there's another part that says actually
00:29:47
Speaker
What are we doing systemically to enable people to learn and grow and to achieve more and to fulfill the whole of their human potential? Those two things should never ever be muddled up in the same process. They will work against each other. And if you start going down a route where you're combining those two things, it will not end well.
00:30:16
Speaker
So I think the conversation with the top team, so what's most important to us? And I would hope that in this fictional organization, they agree that the latter is more important than the former. And if that is the case, then we can start setting things up to have the sort of conversation that I've just sort of role played.
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah. So it's all about performance, learning, development, growth, et cetera. And these are conversations where people show up as equals because power distorts. So both of them are going into it thinking, I'm going to learn something here. Both of them are going into it knowing that they will come away with actions to complete.
00:31:13
Speaker
that will take them both and the performance forward. I think if you're going to have any sort of artefact, any sort of document, I think you need to limit it to probably one side. One side of A4, you know, so that's really
00:31:38
Speaker
somewhere between three and six prompts, which you can choose to use or not. But I think that helps the less confident leader get started in those conversations. They're the training wheels, they're the stabilizers on the bike. And then as they get more confident,
00:32:03
Speaker
But what that also does is it infers a frequency or an unfrequency actually. So performance doesn't happen with a metronomic regularity.
00:32:19
Speaker
And if we are to fit the process around the nature of work and performance and improvement, then actually those conversations are likely to be, the expression we use is frequent, but ad hoc.
Frequent and Informal Reviews
00:32:35
Speaker
So coming out of it, the manager's got a couple of actions, the person in roles got three actions, they say, okay,
00:32:45
Speaker
Reasonably, we ought to aim to get those actions done in the next couple of weeks. Okay, great. So let's look to get together over a coffee, 15 minutes, week three from now. Great. And the next follow-up might be a week away, the next one might be four weeks away, but it's informed by what they're doing, not by, oh, the diary says we've got to.
00:33:14
Speaker
And you know this is working, you know that this process is working.
00:33:19
Speaker
when the two parties naturally convene those conversations. So this we describe as a pull system rather than in most organizations, appraisals are pushed on and the form for this year is released and then after four weeks, you know, 7% of people have done it and then it gets ratcheted up and more and more senior people get it.
00:33:46
Speaker
we're having like red amber green reports on totally so and if that's your context then that is good data that is telling you your process isn't working yeah so if you're getting that then just stop just stop it because it isn't serving your people you need to stop and take a breath and reconsider
00:34:09
Speaker
Well, the other end of the scale that I sometimes see is we talk all the time and we don't really need to do anything else because I'm always chatting with Bob. My door's always open. I was waiting for you to react.
00:34:32
Speaker
Door doors open and we're always talking. So I don't think we need anything else. I see that so frequently. And for some reason I see that a lot with technical people.
00:34:45
Speaker
And I don't know whether I'm just grabbing a particular examples and actually it happens across the board probably. But often it's where there's a lot of need for this back and forth because there's a lot of operational stuff. So they feel like they're having those high quality conversations because they speak to each other frequently. I see that a lot. So it feels like that's the other end of the scale where they say, oh, we don't need it because we do it when actually
00:35:11
Speaker
when I dig under the surface of what conversations are actually happening in those moments, you know that it's all about the projects and the workload and the stuff. And only because often they don't know what a good question looks like as an alternative place. There's no pause.
00:35:34
Speaker
And there's no sense of this partnership and this other conversation, which when you then give them that pause and maybe role model some of those great questions, I love it because I see how much they get from it, both sides. Totally. Yeah.
00:35:57
Speaker
I think what's going on to an extent in what you describe is just the fact that people don't know what they don't know. So if they've never experienced those conversations, they think that the conversations that they're having are the same as the ones that we're trying to describe to them.
00:36:17
Speaker
And it sounds like you've got a good way of helping people see that to reveal it to them. But I think that is key. If people have never had that experience of line management that is of the ilk that we've just sort of role-played or whatever,
00:36:45
Speaker
then they literally don't know what they don't know. So they think what they're doing is that's what you do, because that's what I've always had done to me. So there is a tactic that can be employed quite usefully for us. And it's one that we introduce to clients and leaders very often. And that is being really, really conscious of the type of question that we're asking.
00:37:15
Speaker
By default, just as you say, the majority of those seemingly good conversations tend to center around task. They tend to center around what's coming up on Thursday, the next project milestone, getting this consignment out to very important client X, making sure that inbound materials from supplier Y are all checked out and
00:37:44
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? It's very, very, those conversations tend to be rooted in... And fighting fires. Don't forget the fires. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So short term, just as you say, quite often reactive, but essentially focused on the repetitive nature of just doing the work, getting the value out the door.
Balancing Development and Maintenance
00:38:10
Speaker
We label those activities and the questions that relate to those activities as maintenance. The maintenance activities and maintenance questions are not bad things. We need them. But there is another type of activity and another type of question that managers can and should ask and ask more often. And that we label development questions.
00:38:34
Speaker
And those are directed at development activity, which is clues in the name, which is all about building a better future for ourselves, developing us as individuals, developing our team, developing the way that we collaborate across the organization, developing ways of working, developing our product and service.
00:39:02
Speaker
and everybody but everybody should have a portion of their weekly work that is devoted to development and very often as managers we tend not to ask good questions about developmental stuff.
00:39:20
Speaker
So just giving people that mental model of the two buckets of activity and some examples of questions around maintenance and around development can be the thing that tips up until now an informed manager into this new world and this new way of being.
00:39:49
Speaker
And crucially, in those conversations, they are showing up pretty much as equals. Just like, oh, you know, we've got some really interesting feedback from, from, from client X. What do you think we ought to be doing with that? I'm sure there's more that, you know, we could do to really build that relationship. You know, not coming up. I think the problem is X. I think the solution is Y. And I think your part in that solution is Z.
00:40:19
Speaker
that's not the right conversation to have. It's arguably a development conversation, but it's tone and its direction is all wrong. So there are tips I think that we can give those managers to help them. You know, role-playing those conversations can be useful as well and helping them to, yeah, just adopt a more
00:40:42
Speaker
coach-like persona in the questions that they ask and the conversations that they have. And that clearly goes well beyond a performance conversation.
00:40:53
Speaker
I think there's so much in there. I would hate for somebody to listen to this and think, God, that's such a big leap. I don't think this person, that person would be able to have that. But I think that we always talk about Ben, it's just experimenting with a little shift in what you do, asking one of those great quality questions and see what happens. You don't have to change your whole
00:41:18
Speaker
You can do the very much like the normal operational conversation and at the end of it, you can add something in which is a little practice with some different type of question and see how it goes. It doesn't have to be perfect coach, but you're not a coach. No. It doesn't have to sound like a perfect coaching conversation.
00:41:41
Speaker
that and even actually even if you get that mindset which is that adult to adult and that you go in there thinking like that this is a partnership and just seeing what effect that has.
00:41:53
Speaker
I think that's absolutely right. And you could chunk that up and have that in mind, answering your question. So I'm the ND, I'm tearing up the process, the artifact that we currently have, I'm starting afresh. Start experimenting.
00:42:19
Speaker
Get some people involved who are interested in designing something new. If you say you're open to the idea of scrapping the old one, you're quite likely to have a few people. I'm sure we can come up with something better than this. And just as you say in the context of a micro interaction of a conversation,
00:42:40
Speaker
by giving yourself permission to not to strive for perfection as a first step, but just saying, okay, well, let's just try some short interval cycles of learning and experimentation. Let's just start with a sheet of paper and what's important to us. And let's just, yeah, let's release that into the wild.
00:43:07
Speaker
three or four volunteers going, okay, well, I'll experiment with this one with my team and see how it feels for me and see what benefit it brings, see what conversation develops and see what actions it generates.
00:43:21
Speaker
and get back together three weeks off, okay, what have we learned? Well, I like this bit of that one, but I like the sound of, you know, that bit in this one. And on the hoof, you're developing something which has got the buy-in of the people that are going to be delivering it.
00:43:38
Speaker
So it isn't being imposed. It's been tested in your context. This whole idea of there's one best way and world class and best practice. Absolute. But am I allowed to say bullshit?
00:43:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's an illusion. It's crazy. So it will be tested and iteratively proven and improved in your context. It kind of was better than that. Just get started.
00:44:08
Speaker
You know, it doesn't need to be launched with music and fireworks and a training program and a big hurrah. We can start much quicker than that. We can just get going. And I think that I again often see is that we're expecting our line manager to
00:44:34
Speaker
do a performance conversation or whatever. So we'll go in there and talk about how different that could look and share some ideas and practice it with them. But actually the manager isn't getting that high quality conversation themselves. And so it's this kind of like, we're going to do one to you, you know, but then I know always like, let's invite that person into the room. Let's share how that could look. And so that it's not this
00:45:03
Speaker
top-down thing that's done at people who are, like you were saying at the beginning, the motivation for it, instead of it being a partnership and everybody wins, it's how can we get these buggers to be more productive, stop having breaks and stuff? Yeah, so I think there's another golden rule that we kind of hold quite
00:45:32
Speaker
dear and close and that is
00:45:36
Speaker
the top team have to use the same process as everybody else.
Inclusive Performance Processes
00:45:41
Speaker
And so often in organisations, you look at this, you know, you look at this process or the artifact, the form, you say, okay, so you as the MD sit down and you go through these questions with, you know, your head of finance and your COOD. Oh, no, it's not for us. No, no, we're okay. We're okay. Yeah, we're good, thanks.
00:46:07
Speaker
No, absolutely not. I think everybody needs to be subjected to the same, subjected. Everybody needs... Oh my God, Ben, come on, we're not subjecting anymore.
00:46:17
Speaker
Yeah, but that's the thing, in that instance you are, because you're subjecting other people to it, but you're giving yourself a free pass because you have the power to do that, to either pretend that you've done it and mutually agree that, yeah, we had it on this day and it was fine, or just not doing it at all. So, yeah, no, I think actually there are other benefits as well as, you know, we're all the same and no one's got privilege with this.
00:46:46
Speaker
which is a good principle to have. The other thing that it does is that it starts with the very, very top people having these open, honest, equal performance conversations and they've experienced it. They are much more likely to deliver good ones to their people and so on and so forth.
00:47:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's a generally a good rule of thumb is it's really, really important that the top team experience these conversations that they too, you know, get help if they need it so they can have an appreciation of it and be able to talk about it with other people. But also it just demonstrates that, yeah, we're all in it together. We think this is a good thing and we're doing it.
00:47:39
Speaker
I also feel that if leaders took this different stance and practice this and were open and vulnerable and had a go and reflected and sought feedback and got much better at offering feedback, timely feedback and working out how to do that really well. I think this kind of how do we have difficult conversations thing would be
00:48:07
Speaker
massively reduced because it's the procrastination, not procrastination, but possibly the weight storing stuff up. So we're having to have a difficult conversation that this process potentially can alleviate us from a bit.
00:48:24
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I remember as a boy manager sitting on those things that I knew I should do and not doing them because I didn't feel comfortable and they grew and fasted and just got so much worse. And there's real power in that real time conversation.
00:48:49
Speaker
Again, going into that conversation with positive regard and assuming positive intent, but getting it at the moment, at the moment, you know, so things don't go well, you know, for instance, in a meeting and you see a, you see a colleague really, really drop the ball or things don't go well.
00:49:17
Speaker
and just taking the time afterwards and say, okay, let's just find a quiet corner, have a coffee. Let's just have a chat about this. How can I help you? I could see that you found that difficult. It was embarrassing or whatever. What is it that I can do that will be helpful to you and make sure that you don't have to relive that?
00:49:46
Speaker
but brushing it under the table, you know, really, really, really unhelpful. So again, a good example of
00:49:57
Speaker
ad hoc, right? Performance happens when it happens. Wait until the annual appraisal to cover that meeting. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Performance happens when it happens, good and bad. And it doesn't follow the cycle of the moon or our reporting rhythm. It happens in the moment and it's real and we need to be grown up and have good conversations about it.
00:50:26
Speaker
Lovely. Nice place to get to. We are coming to an end, Ben. Anything that we haven't covered that you think my listeners would really benefit from in the last minutes? Well, I think you introduced me as being someone that values openness, trust, autonomy, and is, it will,
00:50:52
Speaker
encourage people to ditch bureaucracy at every opportunity. So, probably very unsurprisingly, I would encourage people to very much simplify what they do. I think that's always a good thing.
00:51:11
Speaker
orientate around purpose, so what is it that we want to achieve by this process? What's its why? Being really, really clear on that. Starting small and simple and experimenting, I think, are absolutely key.
00:51:32
Speaker
There are light touch formats that can be helpful. We very often support clients, as you know, to do something called purpose-based role clarification, which sets a foundation and sets a routine ad hoc routine of these sorts of conversations in management dyads and between managers and people in role.
00:52:02
Speaker
Interestingly, a bit of convergent evolution there. I think a lady called Helen Sanderson who is
00:52:13
Speaker
a fellow member of something called the Q community. So the quality improvement community within the Health Foundation advocates is something called confirmation practices, which is similar in so much as people get to describe three to six things that they feel they need to be really, really good at in order to fulfill their role and add the value that they are able
00:52:40
Speaker
And the conversation very much goes along the lines of the manager in the position of coach saying, you know, which ones you want to tackle right now? What's going on? Just asking lots of good coaching questions and then asking, and what's my part in this? So it's quite interesting that, you know, my co-founder Dennis has been iterating and experimenting with
00:53:04
Speaker
the role clarification stuff for a couple of decades and Helen and a guy I think called Andy Brogan developed something that, yeah, you can see the similarities and we see the same thing going on in nature, convergent evolution and these things evolve because they work. Yeah, absolutely.
00:53:27
Speaker
So we just need to find the thing that's going to kill the classic performance appraisal dinosaur off. What's going to be the metaphorical meteor that takes it out. I'm looking forward to that day.
00:53:44
Speaker
Well, we will continue this conversation with our clients and hopefully when people listen to this podcast, they've got some valuable ideas there to really rethink how they do it. And it's very practical and it's not threatening and not too difficult to at least have a little try with. So thank you very much, Ben. It's been a great conversation.
00:54:09
Speaker
Well, as ever, I could talk all day with you, Corin. It's been an absolute pleasure on one of my favorite subjects. So I hope people have found it useful. If there are any questions, queries or whatever that emerged from this, then it's open season on me as people can probably gather. I love talking about this stuff. So please do reach out.
00:54:32
Speaker
I'll put all your details in the show notes, how to reach out to Ben and I look forward to continuing this conversation again, Ben. Maybe it'll be like in six months we'll come together again and see what's changed. Yeah, let's do that. See whether the meteor's hit. Great idea.
00:54:55
Speaker
I hope that that conversation inspired you. I really enjoyed it. It's a subject that I come back to frequently with my clients and I love talking to Ben about it. So I think you could tell we were geeking out a bit. I really hope it gives you pause for thought. What is your mindset about things like performance and feedback and evaluation? And really what's your role in all of that?
00:55:25
Speaker
If it's got you thinking and you're looking to rethink an appraisal system, or you've realized actually you've only really been having operational chats, then great. But you don't need to do everything in one day. One of the things I take from this conversation is if you start asking better questions, then you will be streets ahead of a lot of leaders out there.
00:55:54
Speaker
And another caution, Ben mentioned this as well, please don't lock yourself up in a room to try and work this out, make this perfect. Don't outsource it to HR, but involve your greatest resource, your people, bring them in and you'll be surprised at how they can actually contribute to looking at what the next steps could be.
00:56:22
Speaker
In the show notes, Ben's details are there. My details are there. Reach out, ask questions. I'd love to hear what you actually decide to experiment with. And if you've enjoyed this podcast or any of my other podcasts, then I'd really be grateful if you could leave me a review. Thank you.
00:56:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Visible Leader podcast. To stay up to date with the latest episode, hit the subscribe button. And I'd love to hear what you think, so please leave me a review. If you have any questions or comments, reach out to me. Kynheim's on LinkedIn.