Ch 28: Performance reviews and feedback

Companies differ in lot of ways! Most people think that all corporations are a monolith! They aren’t. One of the ways that companies vary are the times and how they go about promotions and performance reviews.

Now, I do believe in performance reviews. However, I have an inherent issue with the concept of a yearly performance review. Most of the time managers and leaders aren’t giving feedback throughout the year.

At few of my performance reviews, I was blind-sided with topics that my managers brought up. Mainly because these topics or things I could improve upon or mistakes I could learn from happened a long time ago. I didn’t remember the exact situation nor what happened. I was being held accountable for something I didn’t quite remember.

Performance reviews shouldn’t be the only time to bring up all the growth areas for an employee. In smaller organizations, I requested that I meet 1-1 with my manager at least 1x a week for the first 6 months and then we could push out the frequency.

This was a place to share my growth areas and also get feedback about things I’m doing right. You might not need that level of affirmation, but I know myself and I did at that time.

Whether it’s you as the employee or you as the leader, 1-1 with your supervisor is key. Every leader might not be able to meet with their directs every week, but it should be frequent enough.

As an employee looking to grow in your career, you should figure out how you like feedback? There are many ways to receive feedback, if you don’t know how you can constructively receive feedback you’ll always feel like you’re being on the defensive.

I’m a straight-forward person! You have feedback for me, positive or negative, tell me directly. I don’t need a feedback sandwich.

You might want feedback sandwich. You could be a person who doesn’t do well with direct feedback AND that is totally okay. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with needing a feedback sandwich.

You will need to figure out how you like to receive feedback. It’s not going to be an immediate thing either. One way to do this is to ask for feedback from different people in different ways.

You could set up a 1-1 with your supervisor and ask them for feedback sandwich. Your peer could give you direct feedback.

Every time you receive some actionable feedback, I want you to sit with it and figure out how receiving that type of feedback made you feel.

Did you like the feedback sandwich? Or did it make you feel anxious because you were waiting for the other shoe to drop? There is some academic research around feedback sandwich that suggests that it’s not the most effective for a lot of people as this method creates anxiety.

You’ll identify very soon how you like to receive feedback. You can take this information and let your supervisor know how you like to receive feedback and you can also use this information with your peers.

You as a leader, need to be adaptable to how different people like to receive feedback. Remember communication is about the other person. If you can’t adapt to providing feedback based on different styles, we have a much bigger issue.

Ask your employee how they like to receive feedback. If they don’t know, try different methods and ask them to give you feedback on what works for them.

There is an emerging type of leadership called Situational Leadership. I’d say that Situational leadership is by far the most encompassing leadership style that will separate the bad from the good and the good from the great.  

Until next time,

Stay Caffeinated.