Preparing Performance Reviews - HOF 2025

Summary

Manager Tools Podcast Summary

Episode: Preparing Performance Reviews - HOF 2025

Date: November 24, 2025
Hosts/Speakers: Mike (B), Mark (C)
[Skip to: Key Timestamps at end]

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Main Theme

This episode dives deep into how managers can effectively prepare for annual performance reviews—one of the most crucial yet often mishandled managerial responsibilities. The hosts lay out a practical, step-by-step process for preparing, writing, and ultimately delivering meaningful performance reviews, focusing on actionable guidance tailored for managers who may not have diligently tracked performance throughout the year.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Importance and Broken Nature of Performance Reviews

• Annual performance reviews are often mismanaged; most companies lack an effective, data-driven process, which undermines credibility.

  “This is one of the three or four most broken personnel processes in corporate America and maybe perhaps worldwide.” — Mark [05:56]

• Quality reviews are a huge competitive advantage for disciplined managers.
• The modern state of reviews has become “about writing or about filling out the form rather than about being clear with your subordinates.” — Mark [06:37]

2. The Review Preparation Process: Three Core Steps

a. Collecting Data

• Sources to include:
  • Job description and requirements
  • Performance/behavioral data (metrics, incidents, feedback)
  • Individual background (history, resume)
  • Self-appraisal from employee
  • Organizational perspective (input from peers or similar roles)
• Immediate Actions:
  • Reserve a location for reviews
  • Ask employees for their self-appraisal before year-end break
    • “Lock down the location... and ask your folks for their input to be given back to you within a couple of weeks.” — Mark [10:42]
• Job Description: Even if imperfect or absent, create or update one to provide an objective standard.
• Performance Data: Metrics (attendance, output, quality), critical incidents, and documented behavior—avoid over-relying on opinion or “recency bias.”
• Self-Appraisal: Have employees complete a review form themselves; note who invests real effort.
  • “Somebody who really does a bang up job and gives me a lot of information, I'm going to mention that in the review…” — Mark [33:16]

b. Evaluating Data

• Start with the end in mind:
  • What is the core message you want the employee to take away?

  “Lay everything you’ve got down and ask yourself, what is the core message that I want to send to this person?” — Mark [41:00]

• Watch for common evaluation errors:
  • Halo/Horns Effect: Letting one positive/negative trait color the whole evaluation.
  • Similar to Me Effect: Overrating employees similar to yourself.
  • Be mindful of demographic or tenure-based biases.
• Distribution Analysis:
  • Map all reports to a bell curve, ensuring objectivity and making fair use of available raise pools.

c. Writing the Review

• Choose the information that best supports your “core message.”
• Writing must be concise and clear; avoid complex prose.
• Two Writing Techniques:
  • SEER: Summarize, Elaborate, Example, Restate.
    • “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.” [SER example, 53:15]
  • SUMX: Summarize, Example.
    • Shorter, for limited space.
• Take a Strategic Break:
  • After drafting, step away, review it fresh later, and proofread, especially for grammar and spelling errors.

3. Handling Systemic Problems in Evaluation

• Inflation in Ratings:
  • Most organizations “inflate” ratings, making it hard to distinguish top from average or weaker performers.
  • Practical advice:
    • Don’t penalize top performers by being the only objective manager in a sea of inflators. Instead, satisfy system requirements but ensure direct feedback with your top and bottom performers about where they truly stand.
    • “The last thing I want to do is say to myself, ‘I can't irritate anyone…’ The people I'm most interested in taking care of is my top performers.” — Mark [74:19]
• Spread out your bell curve:
  • “The act of doing that has encouraged the poor performers to leave, and it's encouraged the best performers to stay.” — Mike [77:14]
• Quarterly Reviews Recommended:
  • Real performance management means quarterly, not just annual reviews; it “catapults” your effectiveness next year.

4. Performance Review Tools and Technology

• Performance Review Software:
  • Useful for formatting, not for content.
  • Don’t expect tools to fix lack of preparation:

    “If you're really well prepared, writing is easy, so I generally don't recommend [software] because people use it as a crutch…” — Mark [62:55]

  • The right simple structure (SEER/SUMX) suffices for most managers’ needs.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You cannot win a game being down by four touchdowns with a great two minute drill. Performance reviews were meant to be the end, an afterthought almost from a performance management system.” — Mark [03:22]
• “The writing is really around the formulaicness... of the form as opposed to it being chock a block with good information.” — Mark [07:41]
• “If you don’t have a job description, if there’s no standard… then all it boils down to is your opinion.” — Mark [19:08]
• “People evaluate how well they've done…based upon the raise they get and the rates they get relative to their peers.” — Mike [49:34]
• “Simple. Pretty simple. Now, again, there are a thousand different ways to do forms, depending upon the form… But the key is, does the preponderance of the information on the form support your core message or key point?” — Mark [51:39]
• “The only way to maintain credibility…in terms of getting your best people promoted, you have to highlight the worst performers as well.” — Mike [78:56]

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Practical Takeaways

• Act Now: Reserve a review location & request employee self-appraisals before holidays.
• Data is King: Collect from multiple sources—job description, performance metrics, incidents, self-review, and wider org context.
• Be Structured:
  • SER for fuller commentary
  • SUMX for brevity
• Beat Bias: Be vigilant against “halo” and “similar to me” effects.
• Bell Curve, Not Peanut Butter: Spread raises/ratings wisely; avoid flat distributions.
• Review, Break, Review: Don’t rush—let reviews sit, then edit with fresh eyes.
• Prioritize Top Talent: Protect and reward your best, and let poor performers feel consequences.

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Key Timestamps

• [01:16] — Introduction: Why reviews are so often mismanaged.
• [11:00] — Immediate prep steps to start today.
• [14:14] — The Five Sources of Data for reviews.
• [28:13] — Using email folders & records to track behavioral incidents.
• [41:00] — Evaluating data: Begin with the end in mind.
• [44:06] — Halo/horns and similarity bias.
• [49:34] — Distribution analysis and the pitfalls of “peanut butter” raises.
• [51:39] — Writing techniques (SER & SUMX).
• [62:34] — Performance review software and its limits.
• [67:35] — Balancing objectivity with system inflation.
• [77:14] — Bell curves encourage strong teams & attract talent.

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Final Words

“If you do this well this year, it will catapult you next year—you’ll change your relationship subtly with your folks and it will remind you how important it is to gather data throughout the year and do the reviews quarterly.” — Mark [80:17]

By shifting from ad hoc, last-minute efforts to structured, data-driven, and candid reviews, managers can transform a much-maligned annual exercise into a true engine of team development and personal managerial credibility.

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Transcript

[A]

Hey folks. Sarah here from Manager Tools. This week we're coming at you with a throwback podcast. It's because we just, like you, have families that we want to spend this time of the year with. If you are not in the United States, it is Thanksgiving quickly approaching. Therefore, as we do every year, we are going to release some of our classic performance review podcasts, knowing that many of you are preparing for performance reviews at this time. So today we're going to release our classic podcast, Preparing Performance Reviews. Looking to take your career to the next level? The Manage youe Tools License offers thousands of hours of actionable advice, tools and frameworks to help you lead effectively, communicate with impact, and manage your team with confidence. Whether you're aiming for a promotion or preparing for future opportunities, our license provides the resources you need to succeed. With access to exclusive content and a supportive community, you'll be equipped to tackle your career challenges head on. Start your career journey today at manager-tools.com memberships to learn more about the Manager Tools License.

[B]

Well, it's that time of year again. Most managers we know right now are thinking about the holidays and annual reviews. Now, you didn't forget about that, did you? Well, after years of managing training, consulting, we've concluded that this is one of the most poorly managed and implemented processes that we're aware of. It's not hard to do, but for plenty of bad reasons, many managers just don't handle this responsibility well. For those of you who do, it's an enormous competitive advantage. Now, this is a huge topic, so we're dedicating at least the next three podcasts to helping you deliver an effective performance review. You've taken the approach that you haven't had a whole year of one on ones, despite I'm sure, your dedication to doing so in the coming year. So you don't have the related notes and haven't done quarterly reviews to prepare for this one. In this first podcast, we start walking through how to write the review. There are three steps in this first part of the process. Collecting data, evaluating data, and finally writing the review. All three of those steps are going to take about two podcasts to get through. And then starting with the third cast from the series, we'll talk about how to actually deliver the evaluation. So with that, let's get to the conversation with Mark. I think today's topic is going to be pretty useful to folks. It's about this, the time of year when people start thinking about reviews and getting ready. And I know a lot of managers approach this time of the year with a lot of trepidation because they really don't have a methodology for how they're going to go about doing the performance reviews.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Do you find that folks get.

[C]

Are.

[B]

Pretty worried about how they go about this during the.

[C]

You know, it's funny, I think the really good ones do and privately they get upset that the company doesn't do a better job of preparing them and giving them information. I mean, the HR is great at giving deadlines and shaking their finger and saying you will and you have to and you must and you should. You know, I think a lot of managers just put it off and I'm not sure there's anything worse they can do than that because everybody knows they're putting it off and then rushing around at the last minute and then expecting to have some credibility, some professional credibility when you're delivering a last minute review, why bother? It almost sets you up for three months worth of failure after the fact. To me, I'll tell you, I've been doing this job long enough, Mike, that really my whole feeling about annual reviews, performance reviews is it's horrible. And it's horrible because you cannot win a game being down by four touchdowns with a great two minute drill. Performance reviews were meant to be the end, an afterthought almost from a performance management system. Look at it this way. No companies, almost none, did any performance reviews. Annual reviews, evaluations. Before World War II, almost none. Even before World War I, the only ones that did it were a few big companies that were very technical or had a really unusual background in the military. And the military did it for a very simple reason. Their chain of command might change very drastically, very quickly if they have to do their job. And so they needed a good sense of where talent was. That's why the chain of command is so important in the military. You know, if the captain dies, I hate to say it, but the first lieutenant takes over. Interestingly enough, the military does this better than anybody else. And in fact, the military is good at it. I mean, the system the military has, you and I both were in the army. The system is very good. It's a little inflated like most companies, but not as much as most. And the process by which it works is very efficient and everybody knows it. So the military actually was really the first ones that did this. And then believe it or not, my hero, Peter Drucker came along shortly after World War II and invented a concept called management by objectives. He didn't invent it. He essentially made it very clear to people that if the big company has an objective that the only way for it to get there is for all the individual managers to support that objective. And so bosses would say, I need this from you this year. And then they would at the end of the year evaluate on whether or not you did it. The whole point was management by objective was a way of dealing with things day to day, week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter. And then at the end of the year you had so much data. The annual review was fairly straightforward. Over time, management by objective went away. It was too harsh, it was too mean, whatever, all kinds of reasons. Companies got away from coaching and feedback and day to day performance management. And without that, the valuation becomes very important. You mean you're going to change my pay but you're not going to do me the courtesy of giving me feedback along the way so I can move in the right direction? And so we've essentially lumped our, we've put ourselves through lack of discipline into a situation where we have a very important process that has no hard work done in advance of it in most cases, but it still has all the implications of salary of pay. You know, we did a podcast once called you'd resume stinks. Most people's resumes are not that good. That's the individual equivalent, in my opinion, of performance management performance evaluation. This is one of the three or four most broken personnel processes in corporate America and maybe perhaps worldwide that I'm aware of.

[B]

Yeah, I agree. I've witnessed it for longer than I care to admit.

[C]

One of the things I've noticed, I bet you there are a lot of people who would think of you as being a good evaluator, even if during the year you weren't giving a lot of feedback. I know that wasn't you. The things they lionize about the process now is that you write good reviews and it's become about writing or about filling out the form rather than about being clear with your subordinates about what needs to happen, having giving them feedback and being clear when you deliver what they've done well and what they haven't done well. I've been in a number of meetings where HR people, senior managers, held up reviews that this is a well written review. And I wanted to say, well, yeah, that's true, but you know, is that we're really shooting for. Because I can write real well, does that mean I don't have to show up for work for a year, but then I can just write good reviews? So yeah, standard has become a, well.

[B]

A well written View in the sense of prose versus an instrument that's useful in helping guide someone towards improving their performance and enhancing their opportunities for development within the company.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely right, yes. And I believe that the writing is really around the formulaicness, if you will, of the form as opposed to it being chock a block with good information that will help people.

[B]

So yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people have difficulties with reviews and I suspect that most managers right now are thinking about reviews. They may not be doing anything, but they're certainly thinking about it and feeling a little bit of stress going into the end of the year because they really haven't developed a method for completing performance reviews.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

And I think some of the things we're going to talk about today should alleviate some of that stress because it's a relatively straightforward process. I'd say it's particularly straightforward if you're following our advice on performance management systems throughout the entire year. But there's certainly time now to between now and the end of January to give somebody a well written and effective performance review if we kind of go through some of these steps.

[C]

Yeah. One thing you mentioned end of January, you and I have kind of agreed through my, my experience and your experience that end of January is a not unusual time for the deadline to be. But we'd like to put out an ask to everybody here to send us a note, send us an email or post to the website and tell us what the rough timeline is at your company. We'd also love to see any of the evaluation forms just so we can continue to advance our knowledge and be able to provide insight based on what's happening out there. Now we suspect most forms are a combination of numerical analysis, ranking against behavioral traits and also know some brief commentary. That's a short answer to what we know is a great. We have a great deal of knowledge of all the different formats but we'd like to see what exists now. But we'd particularly be interested in what the timeline is. We're doing this at the end of the year, this year because it makes sense. But as you say, this is the end of the performance management process for the previous year and we're going to have to take the approach that not everybody who's listening to us and has done performance management throughout the year. We're going to take an abbreviated approach to this and talk about getting ready at least in this cast and maybe in another one about writing the review knowing that you haven't dotted your I's and crossed your t's. Throughout the year. And then we'll remind you at some point in the near future here how you can be more effective in terms of dotting your I's and crossing your T's in the next year so that you'll be ready and writing your review a year from now will be much simpler. All the data will be right in front of you. You won't have to gather it and you'll be able to come to a conclusion very, very quickly.

[B]

Yeah. Now most of our listeners will be listening to this on Monday or Tuesday. Are there any things that they can do today right now to get this process started?

[C]

Yeah, there are two things right now you can do that will make your life easier that will put you half a step ahead of a lot of the people. First of all, lock down the location where you're going to do your reviews. Now obviously, if it's in your office, lucky you, good to go. If it's not going to be in your office, find a space at the company where you can do it. That means going in and locking down the conference room for a couple of days in order to get everybody through. That will make things a little bit easier. The other thing is you're going to be asking each team member to review their own performance. That may surprise you. Maybe your company asks for that and if that's the case, great. We've got on our website so you need to go and visit today a document that you can use as guidance in terms of sending out an email or visiting with your folks in your one on one. It's a script or a memo to send out to say, look, I'm going to ask you to review your own performance. So you can ask them to do that now before the Christmas holidays so you can get it back. So if you have any chance to think about this over the holidays, you'll be well ahead of the game. You don't want people handing it to you right before the you deliver your review. You want to get it back in time to consider what they've included in your evaluation of them. So those are two things. Lock down the location and ask your folks for their input to be given back to you within a couple of weeks.

[B]

Yeah, I've always found my personal experience has been that a good deadline for me has been before you go home for the holidays, have this to me. So usually by Christmas time and people say, well, what about their performance between Christmas and end of the year? There's not a lot, a lot of stuff happening.

[C]

Yeah. And I would Also say you can trust me to consider all of that performance, but it would really help me. If you look at the first 50 weeks of the year, I can worry about the other 4%. Those are two things you can do right away. Now, I think our plan isn't our plan, Mike, to really focus on really to break this into two parts. One is writing a review, and then the second part is delivering the review. The writing is really where the more work you've done in advance, the easier it's going to be. But writing a review, preparing it, going through the steps of preparing a review and then writing it is very different from the actual meeting of delivering it. And so we're going to make a whole separate show or shows around delivering the review and talk about what to say and how to say it and data you need to have there and so on. When we talk about writing a review, really, there are three key steps. You have to own three components of writing a review, and that's collecting the data that you're going to use, evaluating the data, and then, of course, actually writing the review. And we do have some suggestions there. Basically, when it comes to collecting the data, you've got to go back through the year and look at whatever you can get your hands on about how the employee did their job. We do have some suggestions. Then you need to evaluate the data. And that means before you start writing, you have to think about the employee's performance. You don't want to get all this data, and then immediately start writing. Because if you start off in the wrong direction, if you don't pause, you'll end up in the wrong place when you get done. Lastly, it's important that you write a review that the system will accept and the employee will accept. That's the third step, is writing one that you can feel good about. There are some simple writing techniques. We have a couple of them that will make filling out those essay portions a lot simpler, that are concise and yet full enough to deliver the information you need to make your point. So you want to talk about collecting data first?

[B]

Yeah, let's talk about collecting data.

[C]

Okay. As I mentioned before, we don't have time to teach you all the stuff that you should have been doing but haven't been doing over the past year. We respect that. Everybody's been busy and you haven't done it. That's fine. This, what we're about to deliver is as if you have not done anything in terms of management skills. You don't have anything in front of you, and hopefully this process, as we walk this through, our listeners will see the incredible value of one on ones as a bucket where you not only communicate on day to day, but if you're keeping good records about one on ones, you have the very low tech but highly powerful one on one forms as a repository of incredibly valuable information for collecting review data. So we want to go through as we collect data. There are five sources of information that you need to collect data from. First is the job. Secondly is the job holder and we'll talk about what that means in just a bit. Then the individual subtle difference between individual and job holder. Then self appraisal. We've already talked about that. We're going to ask them to appraise themselves. And lastly some organizational data. So first let's talk about job data. Believe it or not, you want to start with the job description and you want to review it and you want to ask yourself first question, is it accurate? And that means is everything that's on it correct for this person's job? Now, I know what there's some people, Mike, let me ask you something. What do you think that some managers here are listening to this cast right now? Some of our listeners are listening right now and are thinking, okay, get on, get on with it, get on. Tell me about how to write the darn thing. I just want to put a little clutch. You think they're probably doing that?

[B]

Oh yeah, absolutely.

[C]

So I'm going to put a little clutch in here and I'm going to say, folks, this is the process. Take your time. If you want to do well, delivering a good review, you've got to put your time in up front. You've already. I'm going to be the dark mark for a minute. You've already frittered away most of the year. If you want to continue that, that's fine, but just don't tell anybody. When you deliver the review from which you didn't evaluate the job description, don't tell them we helped you, but review the job description. Is it accurate? Is everything that's on it correct? And then is it complete? Is there something that's not on it that should be on it? And it's likely that some things are not going to be on it. Please don't say it's so horrible that this step is not worth it. Because if you don't touch on it and your boss or HR look at it and see places where you disagree with it, that's going to make it harder. Even if you're proven right, it's going to make it harder because they're assuming that you will have looked at the job description. Now it's also a good time for you to make a note and say, boy, this is really not that good. I'm going to have to update it and me and my employee are going to update it. We're going to collaborate on update in our goal setting session. That happens later on. And if you're saying to yourself, well, we don't have job descriptions here, that's okay, we've got a way for you to simply create one. Doesn't take very long and this will help you think about the job because the job is what the person is being compared to. And if you don't have anything to compare them to, then it boils down to just your opinion. And that generally doesn't hold weight, doesn't hold water. If HR doesn't like you, if you have a difficult relationship with your boss, you want to have objective things to compare the person's performance to. So five simple questions you can ask yourself and all you have to do is fill in the blanks. The first question is the reason the company created this job was to Second, the most important ways a person doing this job should spend their time are blank. Don't have to have any formal, big, impressively worded answers. Simple plain spoken English or whatever language it is you use. 3. The two to three most important duties of this job are. Number four, what this job takes to be successful is and that tends to be more traits and characteristics. And this is my favorite, the simplest, easiest way to see if this job is being done well is blank. Okay? Now remember, that's about what we've just gone through is about the job. Okay? It's not about the team member. We're not asking you to evaluate the team member in this. We're asking you to think about the role that they're in. This would apply if you've got 10 customer service reps or 10 product engineers working for you, whether they work on different products or not. If they have the same job description, you will be doing this for all 10. So this may be depending upon the types of people you have working for you and the diversity of your team. It might be a short step after you go through it the first time for one of the people on your team.

[B]

Why is this so important though? Not everybody has them. They've done reviews in the past. Why is the job description so important that recommending people spend some time, even if they don't have one and have to create one.

[C]

Okay, a couple of reasons. First of all, as I mentioned before, if you don't have a job description, if you don't know what you're. If there's no standard to which you're comparing this employee, then all it boils down to is your opinion. If this person gets a very good or a very bad review, you don't want to be standing in front of your boss or your boss's boss or HR saying, this is my opinion, and I don't have any legitimate standard to compare them to. If in fact there are legitimate reasons, organizational changes, institutional changes, marketplace changes, such that several of the goals you set for them in the previous year they couldn't have achieved because they were outside of their control or another division changed their plans or what have you. If you don't have any goals to compare them to, no objectives, and there's no standard in terms of their job, in terms of a job description, there's nothing objective about it, then you're left with your opinion. If they did very well and you want them to get a big raise and it's all your opinion, the person who has the budget is going to say, well, no offense, but you're just a manager or director or whatever, that's nice. That's their opinion. But we don't have anything to compare their data to. We're going to choose to leave him off, as opposed to the person who nailed every single one of these other job description points over in this other division. Or if they did really poorly, you don't want to be in front of HR saying, this is my opinion. They say, well, but do you have a job description? Well, no, we don't. You guys didn't do it. Well, even though we didn't do it. You know, you really need to compare them to an objective standard. Let's go ahead and wait another year before you write them a difficult review. Let's give them a job description to compare themselves to.

[B]

Right. So you can only evaluate performance in the context of a specific standard.

[C]

There you go. You know, I took two minutes to say what you said in, like, three seconds. No wonder our podcasts are too long for those morning commutes. Good point. You're absolutely right. You need an objective standard. It gives you so much credibility when you have to stand next to your reviews. And again, the big thing with reviews are either tail of the bell curve, the top and the bottom. You want your top people to get what they deserve, and you want your bottom people. You want the review of the People at the bottom end of the spectrum to stand up so that you can have credibility when you put them on step one of counseling or whatever the case might be. You want the organization to stand behind whatever evaluation you give. Okay, so that's the job.

[B]

You said, go ahead. Yeah, you said. So you said something about the second source of information being the job holder. What's a job holder? That doesn't.

[C]

Yeah, you know, it's really a bad title. We may want to come up with something different. This is actually the work that the employee did, but it's not. We're not at this point talking about the employee. Okay. We separate the objective data we could gather or behavioral observations from the person. For instance, Mike, when we talk about the feedback model, we don't say, you're a bad employee. We said, you did X. And here's what happened. What can you do differently? In fact, I think I joked in one of our sessions, I said, it's completely okay for you internally to say to yourself, I love you, or I care about you. And when you behave this way, here are the bad things that happen. We don't say, bad boy. We say, son, I love you, and you need to do this differently. Not implying again that employees are kids. They're not. So we make a distinction between the individual, where we look at their history with the company and their resume, previous reviews, that's past, and the actual stuff they did in the job. If you wanted to call this performance data, that's fine. You could. Does that help? Yeah, we might want to change that and call it performance data.

[B]

So what kind of things would you find when looking at this particular area of information?

[C]

The first one, and I'll tell you, this is one that gets missed a lot, is objective data. And I'll tell you why it gets missed a lot. Mike, we talk about this. You and I have talked about this before in terms of human behavior. You've commented that I have a really good ability to observe someone and then describe their behavior rather than how I feel about their behavior. For instance, the old saying about you made me mad. No, you didn't make me mad. You behaved a certain way, and I choose to get mad. Well, so often managers are so quick to say. To not even see the behavior, but just to say, oh, he's angry or he's sharp or she's full of foresight or she's got a lot of insight here. That's not actually what happened. What happened was things they said, things they did, the words they said, how they said. Them and so on. And a lot of times what happens is managers are quick to generalize or to draw a conclusion and forget what behavior or more importantly in this case, the data that they have that supports their opinion. I tell you what, if you don't observe objective data and there is objective data in the system somewhere and you have a review that's really good or really bad, because those are the ones that are going to get challenged. If you have a really good or a really bad review and there is objective data available to you that disagrees with your conclusion, you can expect expect to have to make a case why you're smarter than the data and generally you're going to lose.

[B]

So give me some examples of the kind of data that we collect for this.

[C]

Obviously this assumes that you're in a company big enough that pays attention to metrics and standards and reporting. But look, it could be as simple as the number of days they were late, number of calls they answered, number of calls they dropped, the average quality score of stuff that they produced, total parts, produced, total jobs, finished, the number of complaints, the number of compliments, the number of errors, the number of spot bonuses they got, the number of times they went on display, the number of end of quarter awards, their ranking in the representative structure, the number of quarterly contests they won, you notice I'm not talking about the quality of their work, I'm talking about the numbers that then may cause me to draw a conclusion about the quality of their work. If I say that somebody has a poor attitude in their review, I better have five or six specific examples of objective data. For instance, it's not enough to say routinely late. Well, you can say they're routinely late, but if you say in one two month period they were late 26 times, you're not going to have anybody from HR arguing with you about their attitude. So you've got to gather the objective data. And what's helpful is one of the things managers tend to do is they tend to rate people who are like them or very dislike them, either positively or negatively. The objective data generally. We'll support your conclusion. I'm not going to kid you. Most managers have a pretty good sense of their team. But it's very helpful to know that there are specific bits of data that help your case and you want to state them if in fact you want to make a particularly strong case. Okay?

[B]

Okay.

[C]

All right, good. Now, I'm not saying that those are the only things. There could be hundreds of pieces of objective data. For me as a consulting firm, Owner, it would be the number of clients, the number of revenue, the amount of revenue, the amount of profit because I have responsibility for costs, the number of successful hires, the number of days employees have been retained, those kinds of things. Different for every job. Certainly budget for managers would be an issue. Okay, next thing. Critical incidents. It may be hard if you haven't done it throughout the year, but this is basically an accounting of events which involve the team member, big or small. Doesn't necessarily have to be huge. And of course the problem so often is you can't recall things that are not huge at the end of the year, particularly things that happened in February. It doesn't have to be huge or grand or good or bad. And it can be an incident. It's an incident rather than a bit of data. It could be the handling of the John Smith referral call. It could be the connection between engineering and production on widget number 525. And what you want to do is write down your recollection of that incident. Use whatever system you already have to gather data from. And obviously again, those one on ones with yellow stickies on them. If on Tuesday I'm going to meet with you in our one on one and on the Friday before something happens that I want to remember, I just write myself a yellow sticky and put it down in the 101, I may or may not talk to you about it in the 101. I probably will. But at least at the end of the year I've got 50 probably one on one forms that I can review.

[B]

You know, let's see if you can guess where my mind immediately goes to where I can find all those critical incidents.

[C]

You tell me. Yeah, I mean, you know what's funny about that, Mike, is that people complain about email, but there it all is. I mean, sometimes it's trivial, the smallness of it, but that's the beauty of it. For an annual review is you've got, in most big companies, typical email load. You've probably got 1,000 emails from your employees. And you can go back to February and you can remember all kinds of things about what was going on in February based on what you're emailing back and forth about.

[B]

Well, you know what I used to do, particularly when I had a much larger organization to worry about than I do now, is I used to have, and I still do for all my people, I still have an email folder, but I used to have a very specific one that was a subfolder that was specific to their review. And as things occurred throughout the year that I wanted to be able to. I wanted to be reminded about when it came time for reviews, I would file that in the special folder. And so that was the absolute first place I went when I started digging for this kind of information. And I made sure that I was pretty balanced in terms of both good and bad things I put in that folder.

[C]

Hopefully our folks have started using rules to sort mail by each of their team members so that if it comes from Bob and Terry who work for me, there's a mail inbox folder from Bob and then also one from Terry. And I've seen it, Mike, now you're a little bit more sophisticated, but I've actually seen managers faces just get so excited and feel like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be able to give a great review. Because they're going through their inbox folders and seeing things that happened in January and February that are so long ago they never dreamed they would. And there it is in black and white, a string of emails back and forth and how they handle it and whether it was good or bad. Quite frankly, sometimes all you need to do is see the first email about a particular situation and that takes you right back to March and you're going, oh, I remember that. That turned out really well. He saved my tail on that one. So I've seen the looks on faces and it's well worth going back through email. It shouldn't be a crutch to keep you from doing one on ones and keeping notes in other places, but email is a great place to look. Okay, and the third thing is, and those are incidents we're talking about. And the third thing is actual behavioral observations. We're not talking about performance in terms of results here, we're not talking about an incident, but just anything you see that happens day to day, week to week. Again, unlikely you're going to naturally remember it. And in fact, this is the one. Behavioral observations tend to be the ones that cause you to have what we call the recency skew, which means anything that happens in November and December tends to get weighted more heavily than things that happen in January or February. That's one of the errors in terms of evaluation, that's pretty common among managers. But if you've been keeping notes about feedback, you've given them positive or negative feedback, it will be easy for you to remind yourself of what the behaviors are. And the reason we mention that is because most evaluations tend to be a combination of how do they do versus their goals, what was Their performance against plan. And then also some comment, some feedback, some review of their behavioral traits or characteristics, their personality if you will. That's probably too loose a word, but those are the kind of things that may very well be on the review. And if you take some time to think about them and again, think about behavior rather than just generalizations like friendly or warm, think about specific behaviors, you'll do well and it'll make it easier for you when you actually sit down to write. Alright, so that's it for job and job holder. And then we got to go to individual data and this is just a step to remind you to take you back out of the job and their performance. And remember that you're evaluating a person's performance so that person's background is important. Get data on their history with the company. HR should be able to give you this. And Mike, I got to tell you, I'm amazed at the number of companies that say, hey, we want you to do reviews. Here are the forms. HRS get all this great data and they don't send the great data down because, oh well, that's confidential. Well, I'm about to write a review that's going to go into their confidential file. Can I see the rest of their files so I can write a good review? Also, I think you should review their resume every year. It helps you to see what their career path is, what they've been doing, whether or not there's anything in their background that you're not tapping that might be helpful. We sometimes get so focused down in the weeds on the day to day, week to week, month to month, project based stuff and person's role within that project that we forget to think more broadly about them and their skills and how they might be able to be effective for the organization.

[B]

Yeah, wouldn't it be wonderful to give somebody some feedback on the performance review about how well they're doing towards achieving some of the goals that they had laid out in terms of the job they want or the position they wanted or transition to another area of the company that required some new skills that they hadn't developed yet.

[C]

Yeah, I'm amazed at the number of managers who, who say, well I gave them a review on the year. I'm saying, yeah, okay, that's good, that's what you need to do. That's what the company asks of you. But gosh, more importantly, wouldn't you want to tell them how they're doing versus what they want? I mean, if they really want to be a manager someday, we just Got a question recently about how can I break into management? If they want to be a manager someday, maybe you should show them how what they're doing is going to help them get into management or not. They may have done everything they're supposed to do during the year, but if you didn't know they wanted to get into management, you may not get as much energy delivered towards you next year. Really, if all you do is focus on goals and objectives, you've got too narrow a focus because it means that all you do is manage them year to year rather than over the lifetime of their experience with the organization, any changes in behavior and performance. If in the previous year they achieved every single one of their goals and objectives, and the year before that they achieved every single one of their goals and objectives, and this is the first year they haven't, maybe it's not them, maybe it's you, maybe it's the role they're in. If they're in a new role, they were in a role previously and now they're in a new role and they're struggling a little bit. You may have to spend more time with them. And you didn't realize that you need to be able to review the individual data to help you get a sense of where they are within their career and the company and the job. Number four, self appraisal. And I really feel like this is a huge competitive advantage. For those of you who are listening, it's too often ignored. Whether your organization requires it or not, we recommend you ask the employee to review themselves. Have them fill out the review form and add to it anything they like and tell them you'll be incorporating their input into the review. Don't tell them that they're going to get to write their own review, because they will. Don't mislead them. Give them a deadline that allows you to incorporate it. Of course, don't expect them. And I would say that if I give somebody two weeks and if I have a month to evaluate 10 people and I give employees two weeks to get me back their stuff, and after week two, Joe, who works for me says, well, I'm not done yet. I said, okay, Joe, I'll give you a couple more days and a couple more days. I still haven't heard anything from Joe. I'm going to say, joe, look, let's make it easy. Let's make it sort of a no risk kind of situation. I'll give you until week three and one more week. If you haven't completed it, then I'm not going to include it no matter when you get it to me. And I don't have any problem if I end up getting something at the last minute that's really poorly thrown together. I have no problem giving him feedback about the fact that it's apparent that he doesn't care as much about his review as I do. I may not ding him significantly on the review, but if he's got other problems, I might use that as an example of him not stepping up to a reasonable request on my part. On the other hand, somebody who really does a bang up job and gives me a lot of information, I'm going to mention that in the review if I feel like it was an exceptionally good piece of work. And then lastly, I generally think think more broadly than just yourself or your team and that means approaching a couple of peers, particularly if you're a new manager. Ask them to give you a couple of reviews that they've written on jobs roughly similar to maybe what your team does. And if they need to anonymize them so you can't tell who they are, that'd be fine. But you need to see how other people in similar roles to you review people. I wouldn't ask HR because they always have 20 questions and they want to. It becomes too hard and I would just do this sort of quietly to give you a sense of how well you're progressing toward what you think a good review might look like. This is particularly important if you've never done this before.

[B]

So in this case you're actually looking for information about how others review others versus looking for. For input about a specific individual's.

[C]

Yeah, you're looking for. This is sort of the last step before you start evaluating the data. In my mind, the data that you're looking at includes two distinct sets. It's everything related to the person and then there's the organization within which they work. And so when you look at the job, that's not really the person, but the job holder and the performance data that's about the person. Individual data is about the person. Self appraisal is about the person. But the job is a function of the company. The organizational input is a function about the arena in which the job and the person are working. It helps to know systemically or systematically how it is the organization works. Now, if you've done this three or four years in a row, you probably don't need to know how your peers are evaluating. But I think if you are an experienced manager, you ought to be sharing data with those who are Fairly new. In fact, it would be great if some of you are listening, if you've been doing your job for a while, go to some of the new managers and say, listen, I'd like to help you out. I've taken out all the personal information I thought you might like to see. The last year HR said these were particularly good. Maybe this will help you write your reviews. Wouldn't that be a lovely thing?

[B]

Well, before we get into. I think the next area we're going to talk about is evaluating data. But before we get into that Kirby, we didn't talk any in the collecting data section about other sources of information. For example, collecting data about the job holder going to the individual's customer, say they serve a particular customer within the organization, or going to their peers or going outside of your direct knowledge of the individual's performance. Is that something worthy of.

[C]

Yes, absolutely. You know, you and I, we always struggle against the form we're delivering and how much time we have and so on. I absolutely agree that that would be good. In my head, Mike, I'm not saying this is the way to do it, but in my head I kind of lump that into the objective data and the critical incidents. But you're right, we should add it may be that you have to reach out to get some of that information. I'm a little bit cautious in just this form to suggest that people ask peers of the employee for input. That touches on something called 360 degree feedback. And while many companies use that, many companies do it terribly, terribly wrong. And I know many companies who say they do it well, who then when I talk privately with managers they say well yeah, but there's a way to game that system and we talk about it and make sure that we're doing the right thing for each other. Which absolutely defeats the purpose of the thing. So other than I'm not saying some managers can't do it and do it well, I would probably reserve that for knowledge of the particular manager and the particular situation. I absolutely agree though. If they've got a customer or if they're serving somebody internal in the organization and I can get information from them around objective data or critical incidents or behavioral observations, I'm absolutely going to be all over that that's another source for that job holder or performance data that is so important. And I agree, you're dead on right with that. Yeah.

[B]

And I suspect in today's business climate that that's required more and more where folks are matrix out in various different capacities and they're Actually, even though there's a functional manager responsible for writing the review, there are a number of other supervisors or managers out there that are going to want to have some input into the person's review.

[C]

You know what's funny about that is that everybody talks about the Matrix and, well, it's a good plan. We've got a functional relationship and they've got a customer. And so I want to hear from the customer. And you send an email asking the customer for input. You don't hear anything back. You send another email, nothing back, or, ah, he's doing fine. But then when there's a problem, they want to scream bloody murder. That, well, I wish I could get better people, and so on. Like, hey, if you're not going to help me be part of the solution, you're part of the problem. I wish I weren't so cynical about that.

[B]

Yeah, I won't say I've ever used that technique.

[C]

Okay, so now that's the five sources of data in terms of collecting data. And, you know, we'd love to spend two hours on that. There's a lot more to talk about, but it depends a great deal on the individual, it depends a great deal on the company and so on. And I'm sure somebody's going to write us a note and say, well, that doesn't really work for me. And we'll say, okay, you're probably right. We can't cover every single wharf on the waterfront, but we do our best. That was part one of preparing the performance review. I hope you've been taking notes, and if not, a license to our work will get you the show notes, which are pretty great. Since we created these casts, we've created a lot more guidance on performance reviews. So if your question didn't seem to be covered, go to our website, type in performance in the search bar, and it will list podcasts for you that address that. Now, here's part two. The next step is evaluating the data you've gathered. And we feel even this is even harder because it's really, again, it depends on the company and the role and so on. But there are three steps we do suggest everybody go through before you actually write and fill out the form. And I will tell you that if you do these well, these are ones you'll remember as being most helpful. You got a big pile of data in front of you. And the first thing, as you've been gathering the data and as you're thinking about it, what does this mean for Joe? This guy? I'm evaluating what does it mean for Terry? What does it mean for Jane? The first thing is begin with the end in mind. Just like Stephen Covey says, lay everything you've got down and ask yourself, what is the core message that I want to send to this person? What is the one thing I wanted to learn from this evaluation? What do I not want him to miss? And then don't lose sight of that idea. As you evaluate, as you continue to evaluate and you write, make sure that message comes through. Now, I'm not suggesting that means that's the only message you don't want to say, well, I want to send a message that he's good, so therefore I'm going to take out everything that's bad. No, that's not it at all. There's both going to be good and bad in probably every evaluation. But so often what happens is we go through each part of the form as we rush to write, we go through each part of the form and then when we get done, we're kind of like, oh, what does that say? Well, each part is right, but the overall intent or the overall message is very muddied. And I found it's very, very helpful when you're actually delivering the review to have a clear up front paragraph or two that describes what the key takeaway should be of the meeting that you're having. And I tell you, if you do not tell people what your key message or take away is, they won't get it. Quite frankly, when you deliver a review, the only thing you can be sure of. It's a little pop quiz, Mike. What is the one piece of information that everybody can be sure, every manager can be sure the employee gets in an annual or in a performance review? Mike, forget about the form, forget about the review for a minute. Think about the meeting you have with the employee, the words you say, what they're coming in to hear from you, what they're hoping to find out when they get done with the meeting. What is the one thing you tell them that they will not forget?

[B]

Their raise, their merit increase or whatever?

[C]

Absolutely right. And if you're not careful, that's what they'll remember. And if you don't have a clear message about the performance, particularly when the raises are smaller or the buckets are narrowly defined between top performer and middle performer, or almost top performer, and there's a 7% raise or a 3% raise or a 6% raise, if you're not very clear about what your message is, they'll spend all their emotional energy thinking about did I get a 6 or did I get a 7% raise? And why did I get a 6? And boy, can't he see that I nearly killed myself this year for him? I think I deserve a 7.

[B]

Yeah, or give him a 1%. They'll remember that too.

[C]

Oh, they'll remember that one. Yeah. Okay, so that's the first thing. Begin with the end in mind. Sketch yourself some notes as you're looking at the data. What is the key message I want to get across and make sure you don't lose that to include a prefatory paragraph or two in the meeting itself where you talk about what the message is. Second thing, good idea to remind yourself of common evaluation errors as you evaluate the data before you put pen to paper. There are many of them that psychologists can talk to you about. Six or seven or eight that are sort of semi famous. And maybe in a longer podcast we'll talk about all those things. But we believe the two that are most common are first, the halo effect, or its opposite, the horns effect. That's one that just simply means you like or dislike the person in general and then you generalize to every part of their performance based on that one perception. A good example might be you like me working for you. I tend to be pretty smart and pretty aggressive and so therefore overall I do real well. And that causes you to overlook the fact that I can be abrasive at times with some of my co workers and that needs to be included as a developmental opportunity for me. So that would be a halo effect, giving a skew to my evaluation. The other effect that I think is very important is the similar to me effect. And basically, if someone resembles you, and I'm not just talking about appearance, not going toward race or gender here, but if they're similar to you in drive or personality or desires or career path or background, this gets layered over their whole evaluation and they tend to do better on the evaluation than they should. And the opposite is true as well. That person has a very different background than me. They tend to think differently than me, so therefore they're not going to do as well. Overall, there is very little evidence that race plays any factor in evaluations. It's very, very, very slight based on a study a number of years ago, but it was not statistically significant. There's very little evidence that gender plays any difference, makes any difference in evaluations. About the only thing that tends to be systematically proven in evaluations is that younger managers, newer managers, tend to be tougher than more senior managers, more seasoned managers if you will. That's about the only bias in terms of broad biases and those kind of things that tend to be true. But individual common evaluation errors are the two that are biggest, I think for most managers are the halo effect and some more to me effect. So just take a moment and think about that. And this leads to a final point, which is when you're done evaluating everybody, you should look at where everybody ranks. Put them on a bell curve, if you will, and who's my top person, who's my bottom person, who's in the middle, and so on. And then look and see when you cut it up by race and by gender and by age and by background and by personality. Make sure there's no trends that stand out too. Obviously, if all the people who are friendly and outgoing tend to be at the top, but the data suggest in terms of numbers and the objective data are spread pretty evenly, you may be guilty of a similar to me effect. And you want to be cautious about that. That's really the third point we want to make, is a distribution analysis. See how they fit in terms of a distribution of bell curve analysis. And believe it or not, keep in mind that a majority of your team is likely to be in the middle of the bell curve, because that's the way bell curves are structured. I know every manager tells me all the time, Mike, I kid you not. I talked to one manager a couple years ago at a very large company. He told me, mark, the worst person on my team is better than the best person on any team. That's how loyal I am to my people. I said, well, unfortunately, your loyalty is not what's being evaluated on this form. It's better to reduce any skew that you have now and let the data drive your evaluation. And then if you feel like there's a misunderstanding or it's really not accurate, then go back and mine the data again to see if you can justify a higher ranking for somebody if you need it. Don't start out with everybody at the top and then let the data try to drive you down because that will be indicative of an evaluation.

[B]

I can tell you from years of managing managers, of managers, of managers, that the argument that your managers or your people are all of them are better than every other person within the entire organization is. It gets you absolutely nowhere and brings into question your judgment as a manager. So don't go there.

[C]

Yeah. And you know, in fact, I listened to a VP once, Mike, tell me, Mark, you know, I hear that all the time. I have the simplest solution in the world. I say to them, okay, Rob, great. And you've got. This is your bucket for raises. You're not going to get any more. You decide how to apply it. And then this person said, and Rob, if you give it to everybody equally and Joe and Terry, who you know are your true top performers, even though everybody else is real close to them, if Joe and Terry get 2%, because you're trying to protect everybody in your team and over on the team next to yours, Bob and Jane get 5%, you have just given short shrift to your two top performers. You're going to have to figure out how to divvy up this bucket of increases. And the best way to do that is to think about the bell curve.

[B]

Yeah. In my experience, people evaluate how well they've done. It doesn't matter what you've written on the paper. In the end, they judge it based upon the raise they get and the rates they get relative to their peers. In my experience as well, there is nothing more difficult for managers to do than distribute a fixed amount of money across their team. And the number of times I've seen where people have done this peanut butter approach and just spread it evenly across the organization is. It's incredible. And it is absolutely damning to the organization when you do that.

[C]

Yeah. The sad thing about it is it's much easier to do that if you haven't done feedback and coaching out throughout the year where you haven't given them a lot of insight into how they're doing. And of course, one of the things we've talked about before, we're not making a big deal out of it in this cast, but you ought to be doing reviews on everybody. Not with this much detail, but you ought to be doing annual reviews on everybody, performance reviews each quarter so that they're prepared to hear what you're going to tell them at the end of the year. But the danger of giving everybody equal is that it demotivates your top performers and motivates your bottom performers. It essentially says, keep doing what you're doing to the bottom performers. Because whether you like it or not, people may not. It may be private, but let me tell you, your top performers are going to walk out of there being ticked. Your bottom performers are out there going to be going, whew, man, I got the middle. I did fine. So they continue to do what they do. And then when you try to give them different feedback in February, they're going to say, wait, last year I got the same raise as everybody else. Why all of a sudden are you picking on me? And the top performers say, look, if you're going to pay everybody else the same amount, why should I give you my best? I'm going to either a move down to the level that is commensurate with the pay you're giving me, or two, go to a different company or a different boss who's going to pay me what I'm worth.

[B]

Can you think of a worse situation than a manager encouraging their worst people to stay and encouraging their best people to leave? That's exactly what happens. And I've seen it happen.

[C]

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.

[B]

Right. Super. Let me ask you a question, though, before we go. Sure, yeah. How about using performance software? There's software you can buy out there to help you perform performance reviews. What do you think about the use of those tools and when might it be appropriate and when would it not be appropriate to use something like that?

[C]

Well, I know you've used it, or you certainly know more about them than I do. I've seen them used a couple times. I've never used them myself. Part of the reason for mine is I'm not necessarily the best person to ask because I like writing, and I prefer not to let a machine Write for me. What I have found is that when they are used, they are going back to that fundamental issue of we're going to write the review rather than actually doing the hard work of preparing the review. If you're really well prepared. Writing is easy, so I generally don't recommend it because people use it as a crutch coming up with good words and phrases, adjectives and adverbs that are powerful. But I'm not going to say to a manager, if you've got all your data together and you're just not a great writer, you're really struggling with writing, I don't think they'd be a bad idea. I just don't think they can make you a great reviewer if you haven't done your homework, collected the data, evaluated the data, and know exactly why you want to send John this message and Terry that message. You can't make a great review just by writing it. Well, you might impress somebody in hr. So would I rule them out out of hand? No. In fact, for the right manager, I would say it'd be great. But not every manager is the right manager to be using them.

[B]

Yeah, I'm not. I've used them in the past. Matter of fact, one particular year, that was how the entire organization did reviews. And it was more of filling in the blanks than it was using it to generate the text. So it was useful in the sense of formatting the review and printing out the final document. That was pretty nice in terms of use. In terms of generating the text, I'm kind of mixed. In some cases, it was useful to give you a structure for. I think it's very similar to the. The SEAR technique that you talked about and that it would kind of generate something in that form. And then you end up doing quite a bit of extensive editing. And in the end, I'm not sure it saved any time at all. Although if somebody simply had the SEAR technique, I think they would have been just as far down the path and probably saved a lot of time and created something more effective in the end.

[C]

Well, I'll tell you if I can. If we have time, this may end up on the cutting room floor. But I'll tell you how I came up with the SEER technique. And then I essentially adopted somebody else's SUMX method because people said they didn't want to write four sentences. I started reviewing a bunch of managers evaluations and I realized that what they were trying to do in a very small space was tell a story. Look, I mean, I love Stories. Stories are how we learn. It's an important part of our culture. But it's not. But reviews are not a place to tell a story. They literally would start at the beginning and they would say, well, back in March. And I'm like, wow, there's. Back in March are three words we don't have time for in a quarter inch vertical space. On a review form, I had this flash of what other times am I asked by clients to teach them to communicate more concisely when a story, a whole story may not be effective? And what hit me on the head was the SEER technique actually originally comes from how to answer questions. If you've given a speech or if you're talking to the media. It's a way of structuring your answer that's clear and crisp rather than telling a story and getting a reporter irritated that you're not answering their question. You've almost said, I don't want to tell you what you want to know. I want to tell you what I want you to know. And the SEER technique makes it crisp and easy and fast. Fast. And yet it definitely delivers on the question. And so I essentially adopted the SEER technique for this. And the SUMX is just a sort of a slimmed down version of the SEER technique. And usually what it boils down, you know, good writing, really, really good writing is incredibly concise. There's a famous story about the two poets that were writing letters to each other. I'm sure somebody will write in and tell us who they were. One of them may have been Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And the note, at the end of the note, one said, I'm sorry I wrote so long. I would have written you a shorter letter had I more time. Because a good writer would figure out a way to cut out the extra words and get rid of commas and be more declarative and more simple. So if you find yourself writing too long, jump on the SEER technique or the SUMX technique, and that will crisp up your writing and get rid of the commas.

[B]

Good. Talk to me a little bit about the balance between creating an objective review against some specific, well defined performance measures versus a relative performance review, I.e. performance of the individual relative to their peers in a similar position. A lot of folks run into this kind of dilemma where if they were to be objective, the individual would get a less than average review in the sense that there's a lot of organizations where reviews are pretty. What's the word I'm looking for? Inflated.

[C]

Inflated.

[B]

And if you were to give and you as a more careful manager were to give an objective review, you would in fact end up hurting a good performer.

[C]

Yeah, okay. That's an answer we could talk about for probably half an hour. I'll give you kind of a high level at some point here. I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do, But I don't recommend everybody do that. One school of thought would be you would essentially accept whatever natural inflation the company does and you'll essentially write a review that goes to that and you're essentially protecting your employee. And the review is everybody in HR and your boss likes it and it fits in. Correct. While secretly you all know that probably you're not being as strongly positive about your top performers and you're probably not being as strongly negative on your bottom performers. Inflated systems not only help people at the bottom, they hurt people at the top because there's not a lot of room for them to be distinguished from people in the middle or the bottom. The evaluation. So one school of thought is you just write to the system and it's not, I guess it's what you call relative in that you're writing relative to everybody else. I find that egregious but acceptable. Another technique, the other end of the spectrum, is to say to heck with the system. I'm going to write absolutely objective evaluations and I'm going to spread my team out if in fact they deserve to be spread out. And usually most teams do. No matter how good a manager I am, I've had good performers and bad performers and I'm going to be very direct about it. I'm prepared a little bit more than most. I'm certain to poke my finger in the eye of the organization that says, well, we really can't give somebody that evaluation. Now the reason I do that is because I've spent the last year gathering hoards of data that nobody else has. I've got all my one on one forms, I've got all the emails that I've sent categorized, printed out in a form that's probably. I've probably got a file 2 inches thick and I'm going to bury HR in data. I do this because not only do I want my bottom performers, not only do I want to send a message to the organization, my bottom performers really are that bad and I can prove it. But you're going to have a hard time taking away my top rating from my top performers and therefore they're going to get a top raise and they're going to want to continue working for me because I'm the one that truly proves how good they are. Now, all that said, I don't recommend the vast majority of managers do that because they usually don't have the data to support it and they end up caving and accepting whatever HR their boss wants. And look, if your evaluations don't fit into the larger bell curve, if you will, or the rankings that your boss has to produce, your boss will tell you change them, period. And I'm not suggesting anybody get fired over writing an annual review. I think there's some middle ground that I can recommend. I really can't feel very strongly about recommending just go along with whatever the company says. What I can recommend is what amounts to writing two reviews or satisfying the organization by making sure that whatever you write fits in with the inflationary system that you have. But make sure that there is additional data covered to allow a poor performer and a top performer to know how well they're doing. Now, the problem with this is that it tends to hurt your top performers more than it hurts your bottom performers in that the bottom performers feel like they got a pass. You better make sure that when you give them the second part of the review, we say, look, this is a review. The system is inflated. If I told you, if I put down on paper how you actually did, you'd be over here. And I'm not prepared to tell you in one year that you're 10 years with the company where you've been given above average reviews are grossly inaccurate. I'm going to tell you that you've just had a warning shot fired across your bow. I've been your manager for one year, or maybe I was your manager for 10 years, but this is the first year. I'm telling you next year is going to be different. And I'm going to be collecting data to support my different evaluation next year. And you got to pass this year, but you're not going to have 10 more years of passes. If I'm your boss for 10 more years for my top performers, I'm going to say, you know what? The system is very inflated. Here are some things I'm going to do next year to make sure that you get highlighted a certain way. And I'm going to fight these particular ways for you. And I'm also going to put a memo in the record to the boss which says, you know, the system doesn't really give me a chance to evaluate Bob as truly great as he is because everything's inflated and so here's some things I want your help on next year to give Bob the kind of visibility to top people that will help him or her be perceived more effectively. To make it easier for me to give them a fully exceeds expectations, the top rating that our company gives. Now, I'm also very willing to make relationships with everybody else in the organization and to know where HR's stand is, to talk to HR in advance, to give them three months notice in advance that one of my top performers is truly going to be a fully exceeds and this other person is a bottom performer. And I want to give you some sense of the data that I've already got over nine months. Like maybe I'll show them the third quarter annual reviews that I just got done giving everybody and say, you know, I've got one of the guys that if I gave him a review equivalent to the previous three quarters, he would do terribly. And I want you to know that I've got data to support that I'm doing those kind of things all along. Because I don't consider the annual review to be just something that happens at the end of the year. I consider it to be nothing more than the end result of a year's worth of work. I mean, I know that's kind of a long answer. Did I?

[B]

No, no. That makes a lot of sense. My experience is, and my question was really more directed toward making sure that your top people get an accurate performance review in the sense of they understand what they need to work on the following year, but doing it in a way in a manner such that they don't get unfairly punished by the system because it's not, quote unquote, a perfect review.

[C]

Yeah. In that case, where I've got a top performer who, you know, he's clearly doing well, and I think there's a chance that he could get the top possible number. But if I truly evaluate him objectively, I might take him off of that. And that would be like the kiss of death. If the system is that inflated, then the last thing I want to do is going to hurt my top performers. I might take a different approach to one of my bottom performers. And it just depends on the system and how inflated it is and so on. But the last thing I want to do is say to myself, I can't irritate anyone, or, you know, I have to take care of everyone, so therefore I won't irritate anyone. The people I'm most interested in taking care of is my top performers, my bottom performers, you know, the top 20% of my staff tend to do 80% of my work. Like it or not. If I get in trouble with my bottom performers a little bit, I'm okay with that. I don't want to be in trouble with my top performers.

[B]

You know, in my 25 years of doing this or whatever, I've never lost any sleep about the effects of an objective evaluation on my bottom performers. That's never bothered me. And clearly my bottom performers, I want to encourage them to seek other forms of employment. So that's frankly never bothered me.

[C]

It's know when we talked earlier about this, I had a thought. One of the ways we started talking about this was of course the army system. At the time when we were officers, there was a non commissioned officer system and we had a lot of great NCO's work for us. We were very lucky. And the system was basically they had to get 125 out of 125. The system was so inflated that if you get 124 out of 125 points, you must have done something terrible like inadvertently killed somebody. And my thinking about that is if an NCO worked for me and really literally had done so poorly, but I couldn't justify firing them, I would say to them, I'm going to give you a 125 this year. If your performance stays the way it is, I will fight for you to get a 124 next year. And what they knew that meant was that would be the end of the career. What ended up happening was what I would say is if I am your boss at your next review and it's longer than 90 days from now and I don't see any improvement, I'm going to follow my sword to give you a 124 rather than a 125. What would happen then is they would both get very motivated to do better, which is sometimes all that I needed, or they would figure out a way to leave my team. And that's a good thing too.

[B]

Right? Right.

[C]

So yeah, I don't, you know, I now I'm not going to help them go somewhere else. I think that's another problem with annual reviews, people. Well, let's send him over there. He hasn't been doing well here. Let's send him another team. And nobody's willing to say, boy, he's really a problem. I would never, I'd fall on my sword and quit before I ever did that. I wouldn't say, well, I really want you to take this guy. He's really pretty good. Got some issues, but you'll like him. I wouldn't do it.

[B]

I can't imagine you doing that. I'll tell you, we're running out of time here, obviously. But one thing that's been terribly effective for me is I have always tried to spread out the curve. I've tried to have people at the bottom as well as people at the top. And the act of doing that has encouraged the poor performers to leave, and it's encouraged the best performers to stay. And my success in my career has largely been a result of the kind of people I have working for me.

[C]

Let'S be more precise. Not just the kind of people you have working for you. Yes, of course that's true. But the kind of people who want to come to work for you. You end up getting a better recruiting class, if you will, every year internally, because people know you take care of your top performers.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. There was a period of. For a couple years or so in my old information technology job that it was. I think it's pretty safe to say that folks thought that if you wanted to get promoted to a director, if you wanted to be an executive in the company, then you'd go to work for Mike. And the reason being is in the previous two years, the only executives, the only folks that got promoted to the executive ranks came out of my organization. And I will tell you that those folks absolutely deserved it. It wasn't a matter of my persuasive abilities to get them promoted, but it was a result of what you just said, which is you get people promoted, then the best people are going to come, want to come work for you. The only way to maintain credibility, by the way, in terms of getting your best people promoted, you have to highlight the worst performers as well. You can't put everybody up into the top quartile. It doesn't work.

[C]

I remember working for you years ago when you were a client of mine, when we first started this whole discussion about manager tools and leader tools and so on. I remember saying to you once you have got some superstars working for you, and people really hadn't officially noticed it yet, the. The promotions hadn't yet quite occurred. That happened a little bit later. And you just kind of raise your eyebrows to say, oh, yeah, you noticed I got some good people working for me. And you know, you said, look, you know, you told me, I remember very clearly, you said, look, if you ever need two hours of my time for us to just go noodle about things, I can do it. And that was one of the first times that an executive director or senior person in an organization ever said that. And the reason why is because you had great people working for you and you didn't need to be in their shorts all the time managing their work because they were so good. They were doing it themselves. That was a great, true moment of executive knowledge.

[B]

That's good. Alrighty. Well, I suspect we'll have broken this up into two podcasts of the length, but it's good stuff. It's a big topic and an incredibly important topic. So thanks for sharing this with us. This is great stuff and I hope this gives folks some information to think about over the holidays as they prepare for their reviews coming up.

[C]

We really. If you do this well this year, it will catapult you next year you'll change your relationship subtly with your folks and it will remind you how important it is to gather data throughout the year and do the reviews quarterly. So next year, this time you don't even need to review this podcast because you're all over it.

[B]

Absolutely. We're going to come back at the beginning of this coming year and talk about performance management systems in a much broader context so that when you get to this point next year, you'll be. You'll be golden.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

All right.

[C]

Thanks, friend. Alright, see ya. Bye. Bye.

[B]

Alright, everyone, that's it for today and thanks for joining us. I'd like to send some thanks and appreciation to those folks who care to leave us feedback on the website. We always appreciate that we've got a couple people who've left us comments on the audio voice line as well, so we're gonna be sure to include that in one of these podcasts. When we get to a subject that doesn't quite take up all the allotted time, we try to get these things done in 30 minutes. And if you've been with us for any great length of time, we're fairly poor at reaching that objective, probably closer to 40, so we won't add these audio comments to that. In the meantime, enjoy the holidays and we'll see you again next week.

[C]

See y'. All.