Appraisal time for busy managers and leaders often brings extra work and pressure. The pressure to have potentially difficult conversations with employees to tackle behaviour and improve performance. For regional and area managers who work remotely from their team members, perhaps only meeting face-to-face on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis, appraisal time can represent even greater challenges. Building a deep enough understanding of your employee’s performance, to be able to quantify their appraisal grade within the context of popular ‘forced-ranking’ systems, can bring additional pressure.
Here at www.regionalmanagerdevelopment.com we have compiled our favourite tactics for handling appraisals and reviews when leaders and team members spend much of the year apart, and come together infrequently for the review:
1) INFORMALLY CONTRACT AT THE BEGINNING
Start the year by agreeing how you’ll give and receive feedback with each other. There will be numbers (KPIs) to achieve and a way of achieving them (values / behaviours). If either of you deviate from these standards (positively or negatively), agree up-front how you can best have the conversation to bring either party back on track.
2) PLAN AHEAD
Plan the moments in the year when you will meet for personal development conversations. First hand feedback is always the best, so maybe there’s a big meeting or opportunity for the line manager to observe their employee ‘at work’ to enable the line manager to capture some quality ‘What Went Well AND Even Better If’’ feedback to help the direct report improve. A regular performance discussion avoids the emotional shock that one solitary annual performance review can bring, by nipping issues in the bud much earlier.
3) BE A GREAT COACH
There is a close correlation between the remote-ness of the relationship, and your coaching quality: the more remote, the greater the coaching skill necessary. Using character judgment skills over quality feedback, it can tempting to take the de-motivating management approach of stamping your authority on an appraisal. Resist the temptation to tell & judge based on limited awareness. Instead develop strong coaching skills and practise questioning and listening. The most powerful question I’ve had from a remote boss during my annual review, was “so how will you step your performance on in the next 6 months?” Coaching is a great way to empower your direct report to find their own solutions, and self-reflect on their own performance, which is ideal if you’re not close enough to them to share high quality feedback and observations.
4) APPROACH WITH POSITIVE INTENT
Feedback conversations are scary if we think the conversation will be critical, emotional, blaming. Conversely, believing that the appraisal is a chance to help someone get even better, to improve, to help them achieve even more success, makes it less scary and maybe even motivational. Start with the end in mind, and ask yourself this question: “if they leave this review knowing their successes and improvements, feeling like I care about them, thinking that I’m a firm and fair manager, then what will I have said and how will I have said it to make that happen.”
5) SPECIFIC FEEDBACK ONLY (WHAT’S BEEN ACHIEVED & HOW THEY WENT ABOUT ACHIEVING IT)
When it comes to feedback, specific works best. General feelings or glib statements like ‘everyone thinks you…’ simply don’t work. Without specific feedback, there are options: ask someone who works closely with your team member for specific feedback, or ask the employee themselves to collect specific feedback. Information on what has been achieved (the KPIs / numbers) is usually easier to collect. The specific feedback on how the employee behaved whilst achieving their numbers is often harder to collect, but more valuable. Avoid attacks on personality such as ‘you’re lazy’, ‘you’re obstructive’, ‘you’re negative’, ’you slacker’. Only feedback on what has been said and done. Just like effective parents reprimanding their kids, it’s not the child who is bad - they may have made incorrect decisions or behaved in the wrong way, but they are still intrinsically good people.
6) ARTICULATE YOUR CLEAR VISION & STANDARDS WITH PASSION
As remote leaders, it’s how our people work when we’re not there that determines our quality as their manager. Enabling them to make their own decisions and find their own solutions is important. Explaining our standards of excellence (or what-a-good-job-looks-like) will enable them to operate knowing what you expect. Standards of work output are easy (usually £ or %). Standards of behaviour are trickier. Many organisations have developed behavioural standards / competencies. Here’s a useful example from the Civil Service, which makes the conversation slightly easier when behaviour falls outside the standard:(https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/436073/cscf_fulla4potrait_2013-2017_v2d.pdf)
In summary, regional and area managers often meet with their direct reports on an infrequent basis. Much of the discussion during these compressed meetings centres around operational needs. As leaders of remote teams it is essential for us to make time for regular performance discussions with our people, ensuring that they receive high quality feedback on what has been achieved and how it was achieved - potentially preparing them to take on a regional role themselves one day !
To reduce your stress of effective feedback conversations, and build an inspirational culture of improvement within your team, Contact Us for a chat !
