Performance Review: 10 Magic Steps To Remove The Dread And Inspire Progress HR Don’t Want You To Know
What if you are mistaken about your ability to get what you want?
Do you know how to face the reality without the dread of someone’s judgement, control what you feel and see how far you can go with what you have?
You know that profound sense of dread in the pit of your stomach that someone may judge your inadequacy? Or when you have to shatter someone’s illusions about their underwhelming performance? Welcome to the reality check called Performance Review.
You can either embrace the dread or change the way you do it and help yourself perform at the peak of your abilities and opportunities, then use your experience to help others do the same. I’m talking about the other side of performance review HR won’t tell you (especially if you are the one who owns the business)
The annual review process in corporations is a prime example of good intentions leading to less-than-ideal outcomes. While it can benefit organisations, it rarely serves all involved in the most potent way. And the reason for this is that the generally accepted way of performing this ritual has a fundamental design flaw – an inbuilt judgement that triggers the primal areas of the brain to overtake the cortex (for both sides to the party). To make matters worse, many managers wait until the end of a period to “rate” an employee’s performance, creating a rather awful experience.
Finding oneself lower in the evaluation rating than expected can be a difficult and painful experience, leading to feelings of anger, frustration, and a loss of self-esteem. If a person is not trained to convert this energy into fuel to grow it turns into a negative force ultimately diminishing opportunities for both, the reviewee and their reviewer.
In addition, if you manage others, you get to experience the thrill of being both the judge and the judged.
It works the same, by the way, with all business relationships including giving feedback to suppliers or facing the reality of your own mistakes made public through customer reviews.
The problem with evaluations is that they are set to happen between biased parties and objective feedback can become tricky on both sides.
On the flip side, if you can get feedback and incorporate it into your self-improvement process, the opportunity is priceless. Even the most biased feedback is still incredibly useful as our actual problems are usually exaggerated rather than made up. If you absolutely positively do not want to hear any feedback, you’re likely the only one who’s unaware of the issues and, to make it worse, is oblivious to your true strengths.
By understanding where you stand on the perceived rating scale the reviewer is using, you can identify your gaps and work to improve yourself, ultimately rising higher on that scale to achieve greater success. This is impossible without listening for feedback.
And so, there are two major benefits to the performance review despite how we may feel about it:
- it cultivates humility and
- it takes inventory of the assets you have created both individually and collectively
What does it have to do with influence and impact?
The simple answer is everything if you want to find opportunities to grow and change things for people. The only way to do it is to understand what is important to the other side and how it fits into your own plans.
First, we must master ourselves to understand what success even means. That is not possible without self-analysis and diverse feedback. Unfortunately, it’s a sad reality that most people either do not know what they want or have no idea how they fit into the big picture. And so, they walk into their performance reviews unprepared and with the exact wrong mindset.
Second, if you want people to follow you, pay attention to what they say. The difference between a manager and a leader is very simple: managers have subordinaries, leaders have followers. Both are a matter of choice. Want to know if you have followers? It is rather easy to test – change jobs or start a new business and ask your former team members to follow you. Followers follow. Will anyone follow you? Are they the people you want by your side when the wind changes? These are not small questions.
If you have a clear idea of what you want and the right people supporting you, the right doors will open for opportunities to arise. An effective review process is essential to take stock of your assets (and the assets of others you have access to) so that you can see how far you can go with what you have and the gaps you need to cover to achieve more.
How to help yourself perform at the peak of your abilities and your current opportunities, and then use your experience to help others do the same
One cannot control anything, most certainly others, without self-awareness and self-control. There is a way that creates optimal energy and channels it to create success for all involved. It starts with a personal debriefing session.
The science behind this is based on the hard-wired ways our subconscious processes information and the neurochemicals we produce as a result of it. It is very much possible to influence our ability to make things happen and be inspired to take on challenges. The very same processes can also kill the will to do anything. I’ve had performance reviews that made me feel like anything I touch turns into gold and performance conversations that had left me unwilling to move a finger. It took me a while to understand that both outcomes were the results of my own making. There is enough research to show that we are all born with the unique ability to tune in with other people to influence their expectations and their perception of us so we can do more together.
Managing your own mindset is always the first step. Reflection is a good way to stay grounded, it is a powerful, insightful and energising experience when done right. It helps us understand what worked, what didn’t and what we need to do differently next time.
Review Yourself First (Especially If You Also Review Others)
The steps below will help create meaning, condition the mindset and release neurochemicals for achievement and growth. If you want clarity, motivation and a strong direction, focus on reflection and achievement. Performance and achievement are not synonymous. Performance is characterized by endurance and delivering against expectations, while achievement is a more valuable and memorable outcome. Though harder to measure, achievement is easier to feel and is more challenging to control than performance. That is not surprising – it is much harder to control what you feel than what you do. Sadly, what you feel pre-determines what you do, what you do influences what you achieve, and what you achieve affects how you feel. Often, it’s a vicious circle that is very hard to break, especially if you are a high performer.
Neuroscience is a very new field but we know for sure that we can tap into our brain’s potential and release the right mix of chemicals for motivation, focus, and success while inhibiting neurotransmitters that activate survival mechanisms of the brain and shutting down our thinking abilities.
By controlling the release of certain chemicals and inhibiting others, we can keep our thinking sharp and focused. Achievement is more important than performance because, among other things, everyone will remember what you did for them and often forget how you did it
