How To Conduct A Great Performance Review: Make Your Team’s Job Easier

Take stock of your team’s strengths

Your first job as a manager is to take stock of your employees’ strengths. There’s no point in measuring progress if you’re unaware of what you have to work with in the first place. If someone on your team has a top-notch skills, you want to ensure they know you recognize them. If an employee’s strengths benefit a particular area, you want to ensure they know that too. At the same time, you want to ensure you don’t take the good too far. No one likes to be micromanaged, including managers. So while you want to recognize your team’s strengths, you also want to remember to keep a level head. Your employees might be top-notch in a particular area, but that doesn’t mean they’re top-notch at everything.

Focus on improvement goals.

Once you’ve taken stock of your team’s strengths, it’s time to take stock of their weaknesses. And, more specifically, their areas of improvement. You can’t expect your employees to know what they don’t know, so the best thing you can do to help them improve is to help them understand what they might be doing wrong. Start by focusing on the areas your team needs to improve the most. First, develop a few tangible ways to help your team improve in these areas. Next, make sure these goals are specific, realistic and achievable. If everyone on your team isn’t 100% focused on their areas of improvement, they won’t be able to reach their goals.

Set achievable, specific targets.

Once you’ve identified your team’s weaknesses, it’s time to start setting specific, measurable improvement goals for each member. First, develop a few tangible ways to help your team improve in these areas. If someone on your team has a top-notch skills, you want to ensure they know you recognize them. If an employee’s strengths benefit a particular area, you want to ensure they know that too. At the same time, you want to ensure you don’t take the good too far. No one likes to be micromanaged, including managers. So while you want to recognize your team’s strengths, you also want to remember to keep a level head. Your employees might be top-notch in a particular area, but that doesn’t mean they’re top-notch at everything.

Make sure everyone knows what you want to see happen.

Once you’ve set specific, measurable improvement goals for your team, you must ensure everyone knows what you want to see happen. Start by having a quick, one-on-one meeting with each team member. During this meeting, know precisely what you want to see happen. It’s easy for everyone to talk about improvement goals, but nothing will change if no one is making sure those goals are being reached. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure everyone understands exactly what must happen to achieve the goals.

Hold everyone accountable for their part in the plan.

Once you’ve made sure everyone knows what needs to change, it’s time to hold everyone accountable for making those changes happen. All too often in this day and age, managers don’t have their employees responsible for improving. It’s one thing to set specific, measurable improvement goals but another to hold everyone accountable for reaching them. If you don’t personally hold everyone responsible, you can be sure they won’t hold themselves accountable. Rinsing and repeating aren’t going to help your team improve. All it’s going to do is make everyone frustrated and tired. Your employees need to see results, and they need to see results now. It’s that simple.

Wrap up with some tough love.

There’s one final thing you should do at the end of your performance review. Make sure you end the meeting with a strong dose of tough love. Simply telling your employees that you’re proud of them isn’t enough. Your employees need to know that you will hold them accountable for improving, and you need to do it yourself as well. Likewise, you need to make it clear to your team that you’re serious about improving, and you need to do it yourself. This tough love is essential, especially if you’re the manager. You must make sure your team knows that you’re serious about improving, and you must make sure you hold yourself accountable as well.

Conclusion

While performance reviews are often seen as one-time events, they happen every six months to a year – so you have plenty of time to conduct a great review. Whenever you’re ready, follow these seven steps, and you’ll be well on your way to completing great reviews from now on. Nothing discussed in the review should be a surprise to the participants. These conversations should be happening regularly and proactively. The six or 12-month review is simply a formal record of your discussions with your team during the year.