Try THIS Performance Review Prep Step to Ensure a More Equitable Process

Ah, the annual performance evaluation - that formal assessment of an employee’s performance that is often dreaded by managers (who have to give measurable, not always positive, feedback), and employees (who often worry about what that feedback will entail.) Throw in today’s rocky landscape, replete with news of layoffs, and there’s a huge risk for the annual review process to be a source of stress for employees.

There are a million factors that can contribute to a strong performance review, including the basics: conducting them face-to-face, providing concrete work examples linking to your feedback, ensuring the feedback is about the person’s work and not about the person…we could go on. (And please do make sure that this isn’t the only time you’re getting and giving your staff feedback.)

But where we really want to push pause is on a simple step that is often overlooked by managers as they prepare for the performance review process.

Effective Managers Plan to Navigate Lines of Difference and Power

If you are managing someone - and are in fact responsible for their development, success, or failure (not to mention firing) - then you come to every conversation with positional power. Positional power exists with all managers because, let’s be honest, managers have significant influence on an employee’s time, energy, and happiness. To complicate this already existing power structure, there may be differences in social power or identity power between managers and their direct reports. Social power and identity power refer to the degrees by which a person is or is not a member of a privileged identity group (white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, etc.)

Talking about and navigating differences in power and identity are complicated, and it can be easy to pretend they aren’t there. The problem is that when we ignore difference, we don’t make it go away, we just make people feel like they can’t fully be themselves. This is a recipe for unhappy employees…at best.

The Prep Steps You Need to Take

To take your performance reviews to a place of equity, here some smart preparation steps that you can implement now.

1) Consider the identities at play

You already know you how positional power over the person for whom you’re conducting a performance review. What other power differences exist? If you haven’t engaged in creating identity circles in the past, it’s helpful to consider the Big Eight socially constructed identities: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, religion, nationality and socioeconomic status. How do you identify in each of these? Are those identities primarily ones which are not subjected to marginalization? What about your employee? What do you know about their identities? Which identities do you share, and where do you hold power that they do not?

This work of thoughtful consideration and acknowledgement is an incredibly important piece of navigating power, privilege, and identity differences.

2) Practice curiosity questions

Most of us fall prey to using questioning strategies to prove our own points. It’s always critical to approach a feedback conversation - and that’s what a performance review is - with genuine curiosity. We shared a list of some of our favorite probing questions last week, including:

• What makes you think/feel/say that?

• How did you engage stakeholders here?

• What do you think went wrong?

• Are there any inclusion or equity issues at play here?

• What are some options you can think of to address this growth area?

• How will you measure success?

If questioning from a place of perspective-taking is new to you, genuinely practice saying these questions out loud. Do they sound authentic?

3) Prepare to land the plane

In all this preparation, don’t forget that your role is, in fact, to be a manager and to deliver real feedback to your direct report. Don’t lose sight of that fact, or overcompensate for lines of difference by not holding the line. Plan the concrete, measurable feedback - both areas of excellence and areas of growth - for each report in the same way: by using strong examples, focusing on impact, and crafting support plans that will enable every employee to grow and develop.

Need more?

We offer practice and research-based trainings for managers and teams looking to sharpen behaviors of inclusion or feedback skills. Learn more about how we help by clicking below.