C (51:39)
And I hate to be a pain, but I got to tell you, the reason why they do that is because managers are afraid. Because they're afraid to have that tough conversation to say, you didn't perform as well as I'd like. And so while the mean raise that the organization is giving out this year is 3%, I can only justify giving you 1%. And I'm doing this for two reasons. One, as a reflection of your performance last year and to encourage you to do better next year. I want to work with you. I want to do better, and your raise is 1%. Okay, so that's everything on evaluating the data. And now we actually have to write the review. We apologize. We don't have everybody's review forms to give you individual guidance. Although when I consult with companies and we start talking about improving performance, one of the things I ask for is, let me see your annual review so that I can be talking about that throughout the year and coaching managers on how to talk about it so that we're delivering a consistent message. There are some things you can do to be more effective, even in a largely generic sense. And the primary thing is the key point to keep in mind when you're writing a review, when you're actually filling out the form, whatever form it is, and you're making your case on that form, determine what information you have best conveys the core message that you came up with when you were evaluating the data. Now, that's likely to be a combination of behaviors and their results against goals and performance against goals. Behaviors aren't exactly performance. Performance is sort of aggregated behavior and results is aggregated performance, if you will. Again, I want to go back. This isn't suggested if. If performance is poor, you're only going to put bad examples going in the review. But the key is, does the preponderance of the information on the form support your core message or key point? And this is a neat tip. For a lot of managers, keep in mind that you can't address everything that happened in the past year on the form. So you'll want to have all the data you collected with you in the review meeting to be able to elaborate in any area. If you get pushback or people want to know more, more data is better even if it's not on the form. So if somebody challenges you, you can say, well, that's the example I put on the form, but I actually have six more here. Joe, that will tell you really where I think you stood. And I think if you put all these together, it will give you a clear sense why I said what I did in terms of your ranking in that particular area. Now, there are two writing techniques that, believe it or not, Mike, when I first suggested these to a manager, she said, that's the neatest thing I ever heard when it came to writing an evaluation. And I just kind of taken it for granted because I learned it from a great boss I had. But we're going to share two points and we're assuming that your review form is some combination of numerical ranking or a scoring system, plus some opportunity for written comments, usually not long essays, but some brief period where you get to elaborate upon a numerical ranking. And usually the guidance is if you give a very high ranking or a very low ranking, you're expected to give good data, good information, good commentary to support those rankings. And I know a lot of managers who actually put a lot of people in the center of the form simply because that means they don't have to write a lot. That's not a good reason to do so. Although generally in a bell curve situation, it would not be unusual for there to be a lot of average performances against task, and that's fine. So in those cases where some short amount of elaboration is required, we suggest you use one of these two techniques depending upon how much room you have and how important the point is that you want to make. The first technique is called the SER technique, S E E R. And it's generally used in the places where you have more room. And it's probably better if you want to make a more important point. I generally try to use this one first and then if I don't have room, I tend to go to the second technique called the SUMX technique. So the SER technique stands for ser. S E R stands for summarize, elaborate, example, restate. So, for instance, Bob is my best customer service rep. He consistently exceeds every customer service rep standard in the company. He recently saved A difficult call after three other reps had failed to do so. He's an example we ought to put on training videos. So let's go back over that. Bob is my best customer service rep. That's a summary. He consistently exceeds every standard that the company puts on customer service reps. Okay, that's an elaboration. An example, he recently saved a difficult call after three other reps had failed to do so. And then a restatement. He's an example we got to put on every training video. Or if you want to be even more blunt, on the restatement, Bob is my best customer service rep, period. That's it. Four sentences. Okay. If you need a little, you have a little bit less room or it's not quite as important point, then you use what's called the SUMX method, which is essentially summarize and then give an example, and it's two sentences long. In the first sentence, summarize the behavior and the second, give an example. So this would be as simple as Bob is my best customer service rep. Recently he saved a difficult call despite three other reps not being able to. Period. There it is. I will tell you that one of the neat techniques, writing techniques. This is an actual writing skill. One of the best ways to reduce the chances that people will disagree with your writing is to write short, declarative sentences. And that means avoiding commas, avoiding ands, avoiding semicolons and colons and howevers. The less commas you use in your review, the less other people will misunderstand and. And the more likely your review will get the point across that you want to. And it will also pass muster with the organization and with hr. Good writers hate commas, and good writing usually is considered good because it's clear commas tend to make people less concise. And I've actually seen plenty of times where all I did was exchange comma with a period. And that's all you need to do. Simple. Pretty simple. Now, again, there are a thousand different ways to do forms, depending upon the form. And so we'd love to give you more guidance, but it just depends on your particular form. Again, now you're going back. You want to overall think about whether or not your core message is accurate and whether you've supported it with enough data. If for some reason, as you look to the end of your form and you say, gosh, I'm just really not sure about what my final rating should be, does this form support the final rating? Highly exceeds or usually exceeds or sometimes exceeds or meets expectations Whatever the case might be, if you feel like you're not really certain if a final rating is called for, a neat technique that I've seen some really savvy managers, particularly technical managers, use is to use a weighting factor. When you look at the criteria that you're using. Let's say there are seven criteria, and then at the end there is, okay, tell them where they fit on the scale of doesn't meet expectations, usually meets, meets, exceeds, far exceeds, something like that. If there are seven criteria that are not weighted, in other words, they don't give you a formula to multiply part one by and part two by. Then put your own weighting on them in order to see whether or not you're really justifying the far exceeds or the usually exceeds or the often exceeds. So if you've got seven, maybe you look and you say, two of those really are the ones I feel are most powerful. Well, okay, weight those more heavily and take all seven and start off with, say, each one getting 15% of the total, which is close to 100%. And then add some to the ones you feel most important about and take some away from some of the others. That will be a way to multiply the one score by the weighting and then add them all up and that will give you an overall rating and it will tell you how you fit against the new standard, if you will. And then there are two final steps that we recommend that are simple to understand and hard to do. The first one is to take a strategic break. I am really surprised at the number of managers who ask me for help on a review. They send me an example and I say, well, I'd change this. And they're about halfway done. And the next thing I hear, they're all the way done and 15 or 20 minutes later because they finally got excited and they're burning through it and they're done. I see a lot of managers rushing at the end of the review process just to get done versus to support the purpose of the review. Don't do it. Schedule time now before the deadline of when you have to deliver these reviews to take a strategic break. A weekend is great. Don't work on weekends. Don't. Don't stay busy all week at work. Your January is probably relatively unscheduled right now. Don't fill up your time with stuff during the week in January and then spend your weekends being miserable and making your families miserable by putting it off and rushing at the last minute to get done by Sunday so you can deliver something On Monday, schedule time now, during the holidays, not when you're off with your family. When you're off, you should be off and not working, but schedule time when you're at the office. An hour here, two hours there to gather the data and evaluate the data. And then schedule time during the work week in the early January to start writing the reviews. And then once you're finished writing it, it's going to be a draft. Think of it as a draft. Leave it aside for a weekend or for two or three or four week nights, step away from it, Let the review sit, and then when you come back to it in the final step in the final review, review it fresh and make sure that main point that you want to make is clearly made, that the numbers support whatever final answer you came up with, that the data is supportive of the point you're trying to make. And lastly, let's make sure that there are no spelling or grammar errors. And if you're wondering how to keep from there being spelling errors of words that are incorrect but in fact are spelled correctly, most copy editors will tell you to review the document in reverse order, read every word backwards. It's kind of hard to do, kind of confusing, but it really points out when you've got spelling or grammar errors. And then lastly, you want to have all your supporting data available on a separate page or two, typed, handwritten, whatever the case might be, organized to make it easy for you to find what you need that didn't make it onto the final review form itself. And, you know, I think we've probably spent about an hour talking about this, Mike, but that essentially is that those are the steps. You've got to gather the data, collect the data, you got to evaluate it, and you've got to write the review. And then, of course, the next step is to deliver it. But that's. We got a way to save that for another set of podcasts.
