Impactful Performance Discussions
A Compact Guide to Performance Meetings with Your Manager
Many years ago a co-worker told me a story about how difficult her recent performance discussion with her manager had been. I remember her saying in frustration: “I don’t know who is managing whom here”. In hindsight, rather than being annoyed, she might have wanted to have thought about how she could best manage the meeting rather than the manager.
Impactful performance discussions are the cornerstone of a productive and rewarding job fulfilment, which holds true for both for yourself as for your manager. Let me share a few thoughts with you on how to make your performance meetings with your manager work.
Reciprocity
You might think of your manager as an important supplier of your pay check, your next promotion, or as a giver of compliments. Next to supplier, start thinking of your manager being your customer. What is it what (s)he needs? What are her/his biggest challenges, and are any of these challenges common with yours? How does your performance, feedback and output contribute to a bigger context? If you are in sales, it might be easy for you to slip into that mode of addressing your manager as a customer. If you are not working in a sales role, think of yourself having been a customer. We are a customer in different settings, often many times a day. What is it, what made you feel excited when people helped you as a customer? What was the trigger that made you feel understood? Every performance discussion with your manager should have one big aim: Understand what is on her or his mind, and never forget, that s(he) needs you just as much as you need your manager.
Storytelling
I am quite sure every one of us has worked with colleagues or direct reports who tend to copy you on (too) many e-mails. It is a way to show what you do, but does it give the right messaging, which you would like to achieve? By sending such e-mails, you focus on the what. Don’t get me wrong: certain e-mails need to be shared, as your manager should really know about the content. Ask yourself: Do you send the message because of the content of the message, or rather to show that you are active? We all hate our overloaded inbox, so wouldn’t your manager too?
Rather than sending e-mails or telling your manager what you have done, tell stories about how your activities have resulted in a certain positive effect. Let’s look at an example. The positive effect is a very nice stakeholder feedback on a project you are intensively working on. Analyse carefully how your actions have contributed to the effect achieved. Talk about your actions, and the results from it. Stories stick much better than facts (or e-mails in your manager’s inbox). And there is simple reason for that: with a story you can paint colour around it, put emotion and passion into it and this really helps a good conversation. Tell your manager about that stakeholder feedback by repeating what your stakeholder said, how she looked when she gave you that feedback, and how it made you feel. Be open about it, don’t be shy to share the story, so you can make your manager feel what you felt when receiving that project feedback.
To make your story even more impactful, throw in the element on why this positive effect, the excellent stakeholder feedback in our example, is important to you, your manager and your team’s results. If project delivery quality is a key element in your personal — and maybe even your managers — performance scorecard, your action was not only useful, it was valuable for an internal customer and it helped contribute to the wider goal.
Acknowledge Improvement Potential
Nobody is perfect. Your performance will always have elements that need improvement. Good managers will address both your strong as well as your development areas. Don’t feel offended by feedback on your areas of improvement. Listen to them and try to understand your managers point of view. And most of all, avoid hiding your weaker areas of performance. Discuss them with an open mind, acknowledge the improvement potential and use the meeting with your manager to refine your common understanding on it. Your manager has a big interest in enabling you to be better at that specific point. Take an active steer in the discussion by using this discussion as an opportunity to develop or enhance those weaker areas. Your manager wants you to take forward an action from this, so why not mention pro-actively by yourself what you will do differently you after this performance discussion? Through this you show that you can reflect, and this will surely increase your managers esteem for you.
The Evil External
That brings me to the final point to take in mind for an impactful discussion about your personal performance with your manager. You can understand your teams and your managers priorities very well, you can work on your areas of development, but you could nevertheless still encounter external factors which negatively impact your performance. I talked earlier about the power of storytelling. Use this power in addressing this external factor. Let’s go back to our example on the project. Your project delivery might be negatively impacted by limited IT capacity. This external factor cannot be controlled by you, however impacts your performance. Every story needs a villain, and here you have it. A villain needs to be defeated, needs to be tackled. Ask open questions to your manager, and explore what could be done to overcome the IT resource challenges. You might be able to join forces with your manager to defeat that villain. Be constructive and solution-minded.
As a final thought: take care that your performance discussion has a good gain/complain balance. In your meeting, focus on the elements that make your manager gain confidence that you are on the right track for your performance this period. Complaining about stuff that is not working for you or your organisation is allowed in a speak-up culture, but try to keep it in the right balance. As soon as it starts to feel like moaning to your manager, your credits built during the meeting might be lost quite easily.
I wish you lots or creativity and ideas for your next performance meeting. It is you, who can make an impact.
