May 2023 - How to have brilliant performance conversations.
Conversations about performance should be the norm. They should just be part of the fabric, embedded into the routines with your team. Almost every interaction is a performance conversation.
Why do I say this? Because even your small interactions on a morning check-in or as you pass each other at the coffee machine is an opportunity to understand if your team member is at their best and in a place where they can do their best work.
For this month’s Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders, we are going to focus on 1:1 performance conversations, not every interaction, but I would encourage you to get into the mindset of considering every interaction as a performance conversation. If you do this, they become less of an event and more of a continuation, just part of how you lead your team.
The aim of this edition is to enable you to build your own structure for brilliant 1:1 performance conversations. This isn’t about the ‘annual performance review’ if this is something your organisation has, but if these 1:1 performance conversations are done really well throughout the year, you’ve created great foundations for that process too.
Everything you do as part of the leadership of your team is linked. By seeing every action, behaviour, and mindset as a point on a web, you can visually experience how everything you do is connected and part of holding your web together.
If you create a poor connection on your web because you don’t pay attention or give it the correct amount of attention, then it weakens the whole thing. Keep this in mind when you are leading your team – everything you do is connected and impacts the overall result.
Let’s start by reflecting on your own experiences.
You can use the Activity Sheet provided or use your notebook to capture your thoughts on the following.
Activity 1
Think about when you have had conversations with your own leaders, either currently or in the past.
1) Think about a brilliant performance conversation you’ve had:
What happened during the conversation?
What type of relationship do you/did you already have with the leader?
How did the conversation make you feel?
What was the impact of the conversation?
2) Think about a terrible or less brilliant performance conversations you’ve had:
What happened during the conversation?
What type of relationship do you/did you already have with this leader?
How did the conversation make you feel?
What was the impact of the conversation?
Our own experiences are important reflection points. They can help guide us in understanding the type of leader we do and don’t want to be. Using our own experiences as power and inspiration for the ways we do and don’t want to behave with our own team.
I’m not saying everyone you lead will want to have performance conversations in the way you do, but if you think about the outputs of your reflections, I predict most of what is going on centres around the behaviour of the leader and how psychologically safe you felt.
If you’ve found completing this exercise challenging because it has opened experiences that caused you harm, please take some time out from this activity and seek some support. Even if you have resolved this, and it’s just a spike of something uncomfortable, still consider doing something mindful and restful for you.
If it’s something you haven’t resolved, then I’d ask you to look at dealing with this. Residual pain from your own experience with a leader may be having a deeper impact than you realise. It may be worth considering counselling to address the emotional impacts and possibly coaching to understand what you can learn about it and what plans you can put in place to respond to it. If you don’t have access to counselling services through work, then consider engaging with your GP or services such as Mind.
Your well-being is critical for your capacity to lead well, and taking care of yourself is a priority.
Sharing my own experience.
I have personally experienced the impact of poorly handled performance conversations. Those conversations would have been detrimental to most people, but as someone with underlying issues with anxiety and moments of depression, this was incredibly damaging to me. I ultimately ended up having to take a period off work to recover.
I now understand I felt low levels of psychological safety; my new leaders just didn’t know me, and I’d been asked to take on more than I had the capacity for. This was not a good combination. I wasn’t performing badly, but perhaps I wasn’t achieving the high standards I set.
The good news was that I recovered. I had counselling and medication to get my anxiety under control, and as soon as there was an opportunity to leave, I got out! Sometimes, you just can’t be at your best in an environment you don’t feel safe in, no matter how much counselling or coaching you have. This is why we’ve focused so much on building strong foundations with your team and the importance of how you understand your team and behave with them. It matters.
We are now going to look at some of the things you need in place to help you have brilliant performance conversations. These are core to brilliant conversations about performance, some are practical, and some are about your mindset.
Clear goals and expectations.
You can’t expect anyone in your team to perform well if they aren’t clear about what you need from them.
Ensure your team has a clear purpose, and there are clear goals with priorities identified against those goals.
Help team members to get clear about their contribution to those goals and priorities. This is what you’ll be reviewing their performance against.
We will focus on this topic in August, but here’s a resource to help for now from LinkedIn.
Mechanisms for gathering and understanding feedback.
Whatever role your colleague is performing, there will be opportunities to gain feedback on their actual performance as well as their mindsets and behaviours.
Identify the key stakeholders of your colleagues’ performance and work out ways to gather valuable feedback to add to your performance conversations.
It’s important to celebrate what’s going well and identify opportunities for action and development.
Here are some tips for gathering feedback.
Understanding your own observations and preparing.
Make time in your diary to prepare properly for your focused 1:1 performance conversations.
It’s important to demonstrate to your team that these conversations matter to you. This is all part of role modelling and being committed to them, which underpins psychological safety.
As well as preparing your 1:1 template as part of Activity 2, why not also create your own preparation template. This will help you structure your preparation. There is a section in the Activity Sheet for this.
Focus on a coaching style – spend more time listening than talking.
One of the most effective ways to develop and empower your team is to take a coaching approach; this is especially important around performance conversations.
Taking a coaching approach means spending time listening to understand rather than respond. It’s about switching from advice and problem-solving to using open questions to help your colleague figure things out for themselves.
Watch out for more tips on leaders as coaches in an upcoming blog.
In the meantime, here’s a resource to help you understand it better, so you can practice implementing it.
Now, let’s look at the important focus areas for how to have your brilliant performance conversations.
Having brilliant performance conversations.
1. Start with well-being.
I’ll give you the first item for Activity 2 and your 1:1 template. Focus on their well-being first.
It is critical that you understand how your colleague is and what they have going on in their world. This is especially important if you have some more challenging topics to focus on.
If your colleague is not in a good place to be open to the conversation you intend to have, it could be more beneficial to spend the time planned with them to focus on supporting them.
I’m not saying, you don’t address performance issues if they exist, but you do need to be mindful of their state of mind and approach your conversation accordingly for it to have value and impact.
If they share that they have an issue preventing them from being at their best, then this is a good opportunity to supportively share the concerns you have and explore if the issues are impacting their performance. You can then show support and work with them on how to address the issues. If they are not obviously linked, address the issues impacting the colleague first.
Let’s look at a couple of examples:
Example A:
You’ve had feedback from the project manager of a project your colleague is working on. They haven’t actively engaged in the last few project team meetings, and they seem uninterested. You start the 1:1 meeting with your colleague, and you focus on well-being first.
As the colleague trusts you, they share they are having difficulties with the project they are involved in. They find the project manager unapproachable and feel quite stressed having to deal with them. There is likely to be a correlation between your colleague’s feelings and how they are showing up in those meetings.
Now you have an opportunity to take a coaching approach to help them figure out how they can handle this. You can also weave in the feedback you’ve had and highlight it’s unlike them, and therefore you want to support them in overcoming it, so they can show up and perform at their best. You can also discuss how you can support them with the project manager.
Example B:
You’ve had the same feedback from the project manager and intend to bring it up today. You’ve been on leave for two weeks and haven’t had any personal time with your colleague since returning. You start your 1:1 focusing on well-being, and your colleague shares how their child is being bullied, and although they thought it wasn’t impacting them, it’s been causing them to be distracted.
You can now prioritise your time working on how best to support them. Based on how the colleague is during the meeting, this just might not be the right time to share direct feedback; you have to judge it. By focusing on them first, the issue will either resolve itself or they’ll be in a much better place for you to raise the feedback and look at how best to address it in a few days’ time.
Take the time to understand what’s happening with your colleague before jumping into giving feedback. This is so that you have enough information to judge how to deliver the feedback, but it’s also essential for understanding the impact the feedback will have. I always recommend giving feedback, but you must do it in a way that is kind and helpful.
2. Don’t take a one-size-all approach.
Adjust your approach to each performance conversations based on the uniqueness of each team member. For example, if you have a reflector which is less comfortable responding in the moment, it may be useful for them to think about aspects of the conversation beforehand. Why not share with them ahead of time the areas you want to focus on for the conversation.
If you are unsure about what works best for your individual team members, talk to them, and find out. Something else you should discuss, and keep under review, is how frequently to have these focused conversations and where to have them.
It may be that for a new starter, weekly and in-person is useful as part of a successful onboarding experience, but for someone more experienced and needing less support, monthly and virtually is just right.
3. Focus on the wins – where are they succeeding and why.
Strengths-based conversations are a way to highlight and emphasise the positives. By focusing on what is working well, you give them an opportunity to shine and an opportunity to recognise their wins.
When we are busy, ticking something off a to-do list feels good, but sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to it and don’t absorb the energy of their achievements.
In addition, it’s important to give the colleague an opportunity where you recognise their good work and acknowledge what you’ve liked about their work. It’s good for them, and it’s a good chance for you to reinforce what good looks like in terms of their performance.
By using your coaching techniques, you can help them to understand those wins so they can replicate them. You can gather these insights as wins for the individual but also for the team more broadly. Celebrating wins has a positive impact on performance but also on the culture you are fostering in a 1:1 setting and across the team.
4. Understand the barriers and challenges they are facing.
Taking the time to understand and figure out the challenges is an important part of this conversation. This is where you will get an opportunity to understand where they are struggling and where team goals may be at risk.
Picking up on these risks early is important. It gives you the opportunity to support them in overcoming these barriers and challenges.
You’ll be able to use your coaching style to understand the barriers and challenges and enable your colleague to come up with solutions to overcome them. Encouraging them to take ownership of the solutions, this will empower them to take action.
You may need to provide advice or share your own experiences to add to the options your colleague considers but try to let them lead this.
5. Time for self-reflections – what are they learning about themselves?
Once they have explored the strengths (the wins) and the barriers and challenges, what are they learning about themselves from the conversation.
This may be something they take away and reflect on and bring back to the next session.
This is where they can identify things they want to keep strengthening and their learning opportunities. This can feed into conversations about career development.
To really unlock the benefits of your performance conversations, ensure that this reflection piece takes place at least once a month.
6. Explore how you can be most helpful to them.
Another consideration for your 1:1 performance conversations on an ongoing basis, and that’s gaining feedback about you and seeking their advice.
The purpose is to sense-check that you are not causing barriers or challenges to their performance and to understand if they have any observations about improvements you can make for the whole team.
Questions you could consider are:
How can I be most helpful to you this week/month?
What can I do to help you achieve your goals?
What could I do differently?
Is there anything I’m doing or not doing which isn’t helping?
Do you have any advice for me about…. (Choose something specific you’d like their perspective on).
7. Focus on the future.
When closing the session, take a moment to look forward.
Based on the goals, expectations, and the conversation you’ve had, where are they going to be focusing their attention and effort.
Clarify that they have what they need to achieve the focus and outline what actions you are both taking away based on the conversation.
Thank them for the session, and take a moment to connect personally. Show them you care about them as much as their performance.
Activity 2
Now you’ve considered those important parts of a brilliant performance conversation, build your own 1:1 template so you can help yourself to have brilliant performance conversations every time.
Reflect on the points above and build the key sections or questions into your template so you have a structure for future 1:1 performance conversations.
Your Activity Sheet has a section for you to put this together. There is also a section to help you put a template together for your preparation for these conversations.
Once you are happy with it, start practising it, and after a few goes with it, review what is working and tweak the areas for improvement.
Avoid seeing your 1:1 template as a tick list; it is there to guide you. The more familiar you become with it, the easier it will be. It will become a habit for your conversation.
I would encourage you to get feedback from your team a few weeks into you using your revised approach and see how they are finding it. You may need to take a slightly different approach for different team members.
