At some point in your leadership career, you’ll encounter performance management. My first bit of advice is the hardest: don’t ever let yourself think or say the words “performance management.” This is impossible, but aspirational. I will explain.
My hard-earned definition of performance management is: a well-defined and well-understood workflow that leads either to an employee’s improved performance or their departure.
The challenge begins the moment you say or think “performance management.” From that point on, the rules of manager-employee engagement change. The natural way you interact and communicate with this individual becomes structured and unnatural because performance…it’s being managed. Easygoing conversations become stilted, oddly…timed, and strangely punctuated. Smart, charismatic humans will tell you, “This is part of being a manager.” These humans are right, and while there are leadership merit badges to be acquired during performance management, the ultimate badge is awarded when you act early and (now for my second bit of advice) don’t end up in performance management.
The situations that yield performance management are as varied as the individuals involved in them, but I am steadfast in my advice: do all you can to avoid the consequential risk-averse, fear-based mindset of performance management, because once you’re there, reality changes.
In our 1:1, you start the conversation, “Nelson has been here six months, and I don’t see the sustained productivity. I’m thinking about…”
I interrupt you, which is rude, but you were about to say performance management, and I can’t have that. I hold up one finger, and I ask the only question that matters: “Have you had multiple face-to-face conversations over multiple months with the employee where you have clearly explained and agreed there is a gap in performance, and where you have agreed to specific measurable actions to address that gap?”
It’s a big question, and there are significant words and concepts in that big sentence that humans like to forget or ignore, so while you construct your answer I am going to call out the important points:
Multiple conversations. “Rushing it” is the classic entry into performance management. For a reason that feels completely valid at the time, an eager manager decides to get real with an employee. They have one hard conversation that goes poorly, so they decide it’s time for performance management.
No. Also, no. Three substantive conversations, at a minimum, are needed with the employee. You need to give yourself time to explain the situation clearly, and you need to give them ample time to think about what you said and ask clarifying questions. Chances are, especially for new managers, that what you think you’re saying is not what is being said or heard, especially when the message is critical feedback. The second and third conversations are essential opportunities to correct any errors in communication.
Face-to-face conversations. I gave them the feedback in an email. No, you just sent them an email with no opportunity to debate and discuss. Feedback about performance warrants two-way communication, and when you are uncomfortably sitting there delivering complex constructive feedback, you can see with your eyeballs how they’re hearing it. Email, Slack, and any other non-face-to-face mediums are avoiding the important educational work of bidirectional communication.
Many months. I used to be scared of flying. Takeoffs were the worst. I had a process of counting backward by seven from an arbitrarily large number to keep my mind off of my imminent death. It distracted me, but you know what helped my fear? Flying. A lot. For years.
Substantive changes to deep-rooted human behaviors are often necessary to correct issues with humans that lead to performance management, and that means talking about those issues. Repeatedly. In different contexts. For months.
I’ve handily tucked my most useful advice into the middle of this chapter: give yourself months and months to discuss a gap in performance. Analyze it from different angles and make it about learning rather than a step on the road to performance management. This requires your feedback to be…
Clearly explained. If whatever the emerging performance issue had an obvious fix, you would just say to the individual, “Hey, I asked for XYZ and got ABC. Let’s debug this together and figure out what happened.” You are currently not in a situation where the path forward is obvious, which is why you need to take the time to clearly explain the situation. Write it down before you say it. Ask a trusted someone to listen to your explanation and see if it resonates. Then, clearly explain the situation to your employee.
Did it work? Maybe. There’s an easy way to find out.
The final clause—agreed to a specific measurable action to address that gap—is the most important because if the employee doesn’t agree with your description of the situation, they aren’t going to act. How are you going to tell if they agree? You ask.
Is it clear what I’m describing, and how we can address it? Did that make sense? Do you agree with my assessment?
When asked within an aura of performance management, these questions sound entirely different than when they are asked as part of the regular course of being a leader. The structure and formality of how I’m breaking down the performance question might give you the impression that I expect your conversation to be structured and formal. Nope, nope, nope. Your attitude and your demeanor should be that of a coach. If you’ve flipped the switch to performance management, your demeanor is that of the Grim Reaper, and that makes the difference between them thinking, “Oh, I get it. I know what I need to do” versus “Oh, I get it. I should be looking for a new job.”
What if the employee doesn’t agree with your assessment? Great. Start the discussion. What wasn’t clear? What did you hear me say? What data do I not have? How do our facts differ? Is there a different approach we could use? You’ve begun a healthy and clarifying conversation where the stakes are not making a decision about whether to fire or not fire, but figuring out how to communicate and work better.
What if, after you’ve clarified your rationale for the assessment, they still don’t agree? No problem. Let’s agree to table this discussion for today. Give ourselves a week to let the conversation percolate and pick it up next week in our 1:1. We’re not on a timetable. We are simply working on a project.
What if, after percolation, they still don’t agree? I have to follow this path because one day you, as a leader, are going to find yourself two months into a conversation where either you’re not clearly explaining or perhaps they just don’t want to hear what you have to say. Performance management time, right? Wrong.
Try one more approach: write your feedback down.1 This might feel like a formal step toward performance management, but we’re still not there. We’re removing the interpersonal dynamics from the situation and focusing on the words, transformed into sentences, that are delivering a critical thought. Yes, there is a smidge of formality that comes with the written word, but in my experience it also comes with a higher chance of mutual clarity.
The reality is that you’re always managing performance. Your very existence as a leader sets a performance bar. How you act, what you say, how you treat others, how you work, all of your attributes influence how your team performs because you demonstrate what you value as a leader.
The performance management attitude I want you to avoid is the flip-a-switch approach with your team—“Well, now it’s time to get serious”—because in my experience it’s manager shorthand for “How do I let this human go?” rather than “How do I make this human better?”
There are very clear, obvious, and immediate situations where you do need to let a human go—for example, if they are stealing from you, you let them go. The vast majority of the situations surrounding performance, though, are coachable. The work is complex, uncomfortable, time-consuming, and often hard to measure, but it is during these hard conversations that you become a better communicator, you learn the value of different perspectives, you build empathy, you become a better coach, and you become a better leader.
1 Yeah, I know I said don’t deliver feedback digitally. But this is at the two- to three-month mark where face-to-face discussion isn’t working yet. In the case where you write feedback down, you deliver it in a printed-out form in your next 1:1.