In this episode of the Future of Team podcast, hosts James Giroux and Dee Teal emphasize the importance of celebrating wins in an open, people-first culture. The episode transitions into a discussion about creating effective feedback systems, highlighting the significance of a failure-friendly environment. James and Dee share best practices on setting up feedback cadences, documenting successes and challenges, obtaining and giving permission for feedback, and ensuring no surprises during performance reviews. The hosts also touch on the critical aspects of delivering feedback, including separating performance reviews from pay negotiations and the importance of understanding and owning feedback before passing it on. Tune in for valuable insights on fostering constructive and inclusive feedback practices in your team.
Transcript
James: everyone, welcome to another episode of the future of team podcast. Today’s a very special day for us because we’ve been pre recording these episodes and getting ahead. a little bit before we officially launch but today is like the first full day after launch and So d and i’ve been you know, just looking at the different things celebrating a little bit celebrating and that’s a really important thing to do in and open people first culture is not just to do the work, but to celebrate the wins.
So today we are celebrating a win that our first episode went live. Yay. Public. We launched the future of team website. We did the full rebrand. It’s all out there. I don’t have a ton of metrics on it yet, but I can say that it was the number one viewed blog post on, on my personal blog which, coincidentally only started a couple weeks ago, but still it’s good.
The numbers are good. So congratulations to us. D awesome. So glad that we’re able to do it and get it out there.
Dee Teal: I’m so glad to be a part of it and so thrilled to see. It’s I, it’s, I haven’t gone back and listened to the episode yet. And it partly it’s Oh, cause I, there’s a cringe in me going, Oh, that was our first episode.
And I know that, it’s got all of those. First day fives, because I look at our conversations now, even just from the experience I’ve been in, and I’m knowing how much more comfortable we are. So I’m like, Oh, I don’t really want to go back and listen, but I’ve had good friends listen to it and come back and say, Hey, D it sounds really great.
So I’m, I will, and I’ll get up the nerve to go and do it or listen or watch the YouTube video.
James: I had to edit the episode. So I’ve listened to it about 12, 000 times. And then I had to upload it, the audio version, to the website, so I had to listen to it there. And then I had to do it for YouTube as well and listen to it there and run the whole thing.
So I’m quite familiar with at least the sound good, you’re happy
Dee Teal: with it, you’re happy with it.
James: There is a little Easter egg at the end. So if you go to the last 10 seconds, when we sign off, there is, you’ll laugh. You’ll go, Oh no, James, I can’t believe you kept that in. But there’s this moment where we end and then we stop and then you go, we did it.
Dee Teal: I’m so cute. Well done, James. Congratulations. I know it’s been a labor of love and commitment and me getting up early in the morning. I congratulate myself for doing that because of course we’re on the opposite sides of the world, but yeah. It’s a thrill to be a part of it. And I’m so glad that now people actually get to hear our conversations because I’ve been loving them when it’s just been an audience of two, it’s going to be great to hear other people getting a listen as well.
James: I’m really curious what they’re going to say like how people are going to contribute to the conversation. Yeah. Feedback we’re going to get because now. That it’s out there. We’re not just going to get the positive vibes, the people who care about us and the people who care about what we’re doing.
Are going to be listening with a bit of a critical ear going, okay, you, good plot. Or I wonder if, like all of those things that I completely
Dee Teal: disagree with. Yeah. I’m so ready. I’m mostly ready. I think I’m ready. Yeah.
James: Which is probably the best way to segue into our topic.
We are starting a three week mini series on the concept of feedback. Now, I call it a three week mini or three episode mini series only because like we’ve got three kind of like feedback episodes in a row. Are we starting? No, I guess this is like week two. Maybe I don’t know we started in the last episode with cultivating a high performance culture, which is a good foundational layer for this and this week we’re talking about feedback and performance reviews and Then in the next episode after this it’s about performance improvement and what those conversations are like So we’ve got a lot to cover and but just to give you a sense, the whole idea of this episode is really talk about not just, feedback and performance reviews, but like how to make the whole experience constructive, safe, welcoming, inclusive, not this high pressure, high stress, high anxiety experience for both the person giving the feedback and the person receiving the feedback.
So probably tall order, but we’ll at least. it, I think a little bit, at least I hope.
Dee Teal: I hope so. I think you when I hear that how to reduce the anxiety around it, I think like the first element that we want to talk about is that feedback thrives in a failure friendly environment. So I can immediately, if I’m thinking around those lines, I can immediately Get that sense of if it’s okay to fail, then that anxiety disappears. So that whole sense of, Oh crap, pardon me. I have to tell somebody that there’s some adjustment needed. What is the environment that I’m doing? That look like
James: amazing.
Absolutely. So we’ve F feedback thrives in a failure friendly environment. And the reason why we say that and we’ve discussed it a little bit, is that it matters how people feel going into it and the environment that you’re creating. I have I’m highly perfection oriented. I have a lot of stress around perfection.
Not getting the details right and not having people perceive me the way that I hope that they will perceive me and so I naturally create a failure Averse like sense just in myself. I get really anxious about all of that kind of stuff and I have had experiences with leaders where They have told me to my face, hey, I, it is okay if this doesn’t go well, or it is okay if you make a mistake.
We are doing this together. We are navigating whatever is happening together, and it’s learning for all of us. And for me, Because I already work myself up that has been hugely valuable and I mean we see it like we see it in a lot of other environments, the example I’ve seen others uses, if you’re a swimmer and you’re swimming, Professionally or as an athlete to do that, you have a coach and the coach is literally there telling you to shave your legs a little bit closer to your skin so that you can shave off those 10 extra milliseconds from your time.
And if you miss a spot, it shows up in your time. And if you do your stroke wrong, it shows up in your time and you both have that shared goal, that shared mission of what you’re trying to achieve. And you create that, that failure friendly environment or that, that space to do that.
Dee Teal: It’s failure friendly.
And it’s also that sense of. I think you nailed it too. When you said we are all learning, this is an opportunity for all of us to learn. So it’s that this, these, all of these things have become embedded in the company culture, right? What is our culture? Are we talking and motivated by and driven towards.
Which is the same thing as motivated, right? Anyway continuous improvement. If we have the sense of, hey, there is always something that we can improve, that we can do better, that is going to get us closest to our goal. And that’s not a sense of, we need to continuously improve to be perfect, but we need to continuously improve because there are Spaces that we want to take up that we haven’t been able to or that we, areas that we want to get into and I having worked in various different places with various kind of levels of failure friendliness, I think It’s critical.
I think all the times that I’ve been given feedback or that I’ve given people feedback that when you’re in that space where, hey, this is something that we’re all in and we are all not encouraged to fail, but we are all supported when things don’t go the way that we are. Just makes a massive difference to a people’s ability to experiment, right?
If that it’s okay to screw this up. You, there’s so much less rigidity in what you’ll be inclined to try. And so in being able to do that, being also able to be course corrected is also mission critical to be able to move forward. That’s where the feedback comes in.
James: The first spot for you as a leader or for you as somebody receiving feedback, cause this is the other thing too.
You cannot receive feedback if. You are stressed or it’s psychologically unsafe or, you’re afraid of failure or whatever it is like you as the person receiving the feedback, aren’t going to receive it well, or aren’t going to be able to. internalize it the way you need to. So as leaders, and as people receiving feedback or whatever that dynamic is, the receiver and the giver, you both have to assess your environment, and really do that check, and set that up properly.
For some folks, it may not exist throughout the rest of the organization, and that’s something you have to be aware of, but you have control over the dynamic, of the relationship that you have with the person that you are giving or receiving feedback with.
Dee Teal: Can I also I want to caveat that. I think the other thing that we, what it feels like we’re talking about at the moment is a dynamic between manager and report.
But this is, but there is also in a failure friendly environment, is there also not that sense of, can the leaders Receive feedback as well. When you see this working at its best, this is something that applies to everybody. This is not just in a hierarchical top down sense. This is, Hey, we’re all open to this.
We’re all open to learning from C suite down to whatever the, most basic level is in the company. Being able for this to thrive this sense is. is something that crosses all of those boundaries. This is not just a manager report situation,
James: in my opinion. We’re spending a lot of time, I think, quite intentionally on environment and setting up the right conditions because without that, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t work.
I
Dee Teal: just have this vision of, Somebody listening to us and going, Oh I need to be able to give feedback, reading radical candor and then blasting their team. And I would hate for that to happen to anybody. And which is why it’s so important to go hang on. We just need to set this stuff up first before you actually start diving in.
Because. Yeah. I don’t want anybody to get hurt.
James: That’s right. And then come back and say I heard it on the future of team podcast. And they told me,
Dee Teal: I know, I need to describe it
James: in the real world.
But yeah. Okay. So
Dee Teal: if we’ve got that, if we’ve got that set up, what happens next?
James: We want to talk now, I think, a little bit about setting up effective feedback systems. What does that look like? And the first thing that I wrote down as we were talking about this, was this idea of cadence.
That feedback, good feedback is given as close to the moment of, whatever happened as possible. So that you read radical candor, you read other books about feedback and they will tell you as close as possible to the moment when a situation happened that requires the feedback that you can give the better because it’s fresher in everyone’s memory.
What happened. Sometimes that’s not possible, but I think the worst thing you can do is document the feedback or squirrel it away in the back of your head and wait a year to add that to a performance
Dee Teal: review. I have a story. Do you want a story? I can give you a story. In my very early days of my career, this is long before I ever became a project manager, I was working in childcare.
I was a, an assistant in the childcare center. And in my first three months, I was on probation and the outfit that I worked for save didn’t really want me there. I think they thought very early on D is not a great fit here. And they saved up every infraction that they could think of until my interview for my, and I had no idea what was coming, but it was so funny because I.
Anyway, there’s a whole other story related to swearing around that, that I probably can’t go into when we’re in broadcast, but I had never sworn before using particular words that I used after that event in the car park of this childcare centre, because I was just hit all of a sudden with all of this criticism and all of these terrible things that I’ve done and I had no idea what was coming.
I also had no idea. I was just about to lose my job. But that’s a whole other episode for another day. But yeah, that sense of, hey, if you need to course correct, you need to do it early.
James: And a good lead, right? And a good teammate. will be looking to help you grow, whether that regardless or help you do it well or to the best of your ability.
And of course, correcting. So let’s talk I guess a little bit about where feedback can happen. I, in my one on ones with my direct reports I work really hard to create space for feedback. So I always ask for feedback. And I always, try to make that space where that can happen.
We don’t always use it, but I find it helpful just as a sort of like an indicator and a permission granter to folks that, that lets them know that’s important. I try to proactively set up. Regular meetings with people at the same level as me like what you would call colleagues.
Whether that’s, other managers, if I’m in management or other individual contributors, just to and and those conversations do the same thing. Just try to ask for feedback and try to make that a regular part of things. And but there are other spots and in a cadence that you can do too.
We’ve talked about annual reviews, which I think are really good. But if, again, if that’s the only time that you are giving people permission, to provide feedback, that’s not enough, just even from a performance point of view, right.
Dee Teal: I get why some places would do an annual reviews, right? Because then performance becomes tied to salary negotiation, right? So I can cut, but I think if what you’re trying to do is set up a high performance culture, if you’re a company that wants to continuously improve, that’s just not enough in general, let alone the conversation about whether to what extent salary gets tied in.
So one of the better experiences I had was that we had a, we obviously had fortnightly one to ones or monthly one to one was fortnightly one to ones with My team lead, but also quarterly check ins. Now, two of those would be performance reviews, effectively that would peer review so that we would be peer review conversations.
And so then everybody gets to have an opinion about your about how you’re doing and how you’re tracking. But. initially quite challenging for people, but incredibly valuable. And then on the other, so that was, those would happen twice a year. And then you would have on the other quarters, there were other, I can’t remember what the, exactly what they were called, but the other reviews that would, were much more related.
So it was peer review, performance review. And so every quarter there’s that check in. And the interesting thing is that as it became more embedded into what we were doing, it became less intense and scary because we really got used to, hey, you get used to, okay, I’m going to take all this feedback.
I see all this feedback that is given to me from my peers. I can take every line of it as a personal criticism, or I can go, yep, that aligns. And I think they’re onto something there or, I don’t receive that, because there is always that sense to have, doesn’t all have to be accurate, but that cadence was really helpful.
So every three months there was something structured that everybody was going through that, that gave us some of these course correction opportunities. So
James: that’s good for your personal performance maybe. And then that sort of one on one type thing. And even the. The peer peer feedback is good.
Another spot I always found really helpful or tend to find helpful is sprint retros. Oh, for sure. Creating a cadence where, at a project level or at a team level, you’re having that conversation where you’re all equals. Yeah. And you have that. I love it when it’s facilitated personally, right?
When you’ve got a scrum master or somebody who comes in as a project manager program manager and is sitting there with you going, how did you feel the sprint went right. And for those who don’t know, by the way, I should mention this to you used a word that is very. Ozzy which was fortnightly and for listeners who maybe aren’t in australia that
Dee Teal: Hey people have been listening in the last couple of weeks to taylor swift’s new album Right and what the lead song on that is fortnight if they haven’t got it now Surely it will become part of the vernacular. It’s so sensible.
James: It’s right up there with, it’s right up there with the word whilst.
Whilst is not used in North America.
Dee Teal: But it’s not used here either. I would vehemently disagree that is similar to Fortnite. I used to work
James: in comms. And I had no idea how many Aussie write ups I had to go through and say, we’re using U. S. English, which means we use the word wild, not wildest.
Dee Teal: That’s wild. That’s hilarious.
James: Anyway, I appreciate sprint retros, quarterly reviews, annual reviews, one on ones, the cadence matters. And those are some good systemic things that you as a leader or you as an, at an organizational level, not just at a team level, but an organizational level can really implement to create the kind of feedback structure.
That creates permission. Permission being the next point we actually have here, which is giving permission to your team to actually document some of the things that are going on, both on the challenge side and the success side. And this is one that I added, but it comes out of some things that I’ve seen happen in performance reviews, and I’ve had happen to myself because I’m, notoriously bad at documenting my own successes, right?
I just let them go. But when it comes time for your quarterly check in or your annual performance review or whatever that cadence is, if you’ve not actually been self reflecting, right? Or self celebrating, that space becomes much harder to fill constructively, right? Yeah. And so I think that as a team leader, as an organizational lead reminding your staff, your employees your team to write that down when they do something great, or, you’re writing.
Have you got,
Dee Teal: sorry, have you come across Julie Evans brag document? One of the, when I was at Human Made, one of, I don’t, somebody shared this. And we’ll throw a link to this in the show notes, but Julie Evans wrote a really good article about keeping this whole thing of writing everything down because you forget.
Yeah. And you know what humans are like, right? We remember the bad stuff before we remember the good stuff. Remember those moments where we cringed and did something that we wish we hadn’t. And and she has this whole template for it. And I actually ended up taking that template and I have a notion.
Documents that I keep, basically Notion Runs My Life, but anyway, I have a template of this brag document that I recycle every year and write down all of those things that I, hey, this month we got our team through this month we, we learned this, so that when it comes to my performance review at the end of the year, I’m not scrambling in that last month that goes on scanning through my Asana boards or scanning through my calendar to go, what happened this year?
And so it’s just really helpful. It was just really helpful for me to have a structured document that go, Hey, this is what I, and this is what my goals are. And this is where I’m going to go next year.
James: Because keep in mind, our goal here is to create an effective feedback system. Right and we say this I think every episode at this point We’re like a broken record, but leadership is intentional, you know you’re you have to be intentional about these kinds of things and so um Yeah, it’s just is what it is.
The other thing that we had, on this was getting and giving permission for feedback You had put this down You getting permission for feedback, which I just thought was really good.
Dee Teal: I was talking to somebody that I’m mentoring recently about this actually. And it was she was saying, I’ve got this person he’s proving challenging to navigate around and manage.
And I was asking, and she’s and I’m going to confront him. And I was asking her, Exactly. How are you planning to do this? And of course I come to everything with a sense of curiosity. I ask a lot of questions. I don’t do a lot of telling that’s something that I’ve learned, but one of the things that I suggested to her was this thing that I’ve been doing consistently through my years of leadership is, and this doesn’t have to, is setting up that conversation.
Do you mind? If I make an observation about something and immediately the person on the other side of that question has to go Okay, something’s coming. So they’re giving them just a moment to mentally prepare or a long moment Just this is something that I would often do in text on slack or wherever but and then They consent to it.
They might say no. In which case you just walk away and go, you’d have to navigate how you manage not being able, but I have never had anybody say no, because then they give that consent and then you can have that conversation. I have observed, this is what I’ve seen. This is what the impact of that was.
How do you respond to that? How do what do you think? And so that sense of that moment has. Feedback I’ve received on all of that is just the invaluable nature of being able to say to just that microsecond of mental preparation to go, okay, I’m you know, or I’m coming into a meeting I’ve got a planning, you’ve got a meeting scheduled or there’s an ad hoc meeting.
Hey, I’d like to talk through some stuff would you mind and Changes the dynamic. My experience changes the dynamic immediately.
James: It’s very interesting that you say that, because in Australia, there’s some labor laws around feedback, where my understanding is and I’m not a legal expert, so you cannot take this as, legal advice, but my understanding is that you have to provide at least 24 hours notice to somebody when you’re going to be having a Interesting performance or, related conversation and you have to give them the permission to bring somebody in the room with them, right?
If they want to do that’s a bit more formal. That’s like on a path, which we’ll talk about that next week. But but in that is that mental. Hey, you’re going into a conversation that is going to have elements of feedback, constructive or otherwise that you need to be, able to hear, willing to hear.
It
Dee Teal: can be as simple also though as, Hey I it’s slack conversations. Even, it’s. I’ve been in places where the constant flow of information in Slack is a lot. And you’ll see something I might have seen in reference where one of the things that we worked on fairly early on was eliminating the word guys in general conversation, right?
And when somebody Automatic, on, on autumn, does it without thinking, can’t even remember what the word for that is, but if they drop it in there, I’ll send a DM. Do you mind if I make an observation about a conversation? Sure. Go ahead. Hey, on this thing here, you said this is not something that we do.
Would you be able to correct on that? So this is not just, I just wanted to clarify. Fine. This is all the way through. Not just on those kind of some of those big conversations that sense of, because we have that vibe, that environment where that’s okay to happen.
James: That’s what I was going to say is, like in Australia, they have that built into that process because they recognize the need for getting permission or creating mental space.
And you were talking about that microsecond of mental space to prepare. And I think that’s really valuable as a takeaway for anyone. In any situation where you are planning to give feedback is that granting somebody that mental space to prepare for what you’re about to say can be really invaluable.
In fact, You want to talk about defensiveness, ratcheting up the tension. Don’t give them that mental space. Just jump right in and see what happens, right? The walls go up. The emotions go up. The volume gets louder, right? Yeah. It’s literally the opposite of the result that you want, right? You’re not going to get a behavior change.
You’re going to get a behavior spiral out of that.
Dee Teal: Do you know the thing that we haven’t covered here, I’m sitting and looking at our list is cross cultural feedback.
James: I was just thinking that because like Even between even us cross cultural Canada, Australia.
Dee Teal: Yeah,
James: exactly. Yeah.
Dee Teal: But I’m giving feedback, I’ve worked with people in South Asia, whole different tenor to the conversation.
And I think we need to do an episode at some point that talks around navigating that some of those differences, but I think there’s definitely bringing cultural awareness to what you’re wanting to do and a feedback environment as well. It’s also something that. Should be considered, not considered, should be some part of the, that environment of feedback.
Hey, we just, this is all part of the soup that we’re
James: The last thing I wanted to add to this is not just the getting permission, but it’s the giving permission. And I’ve got a story and I’ve told this story a few times. I don’t know if we’ve talked about it before, I’ve and we’ll talk maybe a little bit more next week about performance improvement plans and then.
The ones I’ve been on and one of the bits of feedback I got in the initial conversation was that people don’t feel safe to give me feedback, right? And my thinking was I’ve got an open door policy. I’m very welcoming. Like people can talk to me about anything. I’m never going to do that, but I had never actually articulated that to them.
To my job reports. I’d never said, hey, you have permission to give me feedback. Do you have any feedback for me? And making that this regular thing, that’s why, when I talked about having it in one on ones, that was one of the learned behaviors that I have just taken with me everywhere I go.
And it’s actually a bit of a tool because I’m so task oriented and not people oriented that I will forget, right? And I will lean into the work without taking a breath. So I use that as a little bit of tool, but we have to not just get permission. We have to give permission, especially as leaders to, that’s one of our responsibilities to create that space.
Retro is being a good example where that can happen, but yeah. So cool. So we’ve talked about the cadence and having different things set up. We’ve talked about documenting your successes and your challenges getting and giving permission for feedback. So that’s a lot on the feedback side of it.
And now we’re just going to take a quick, we’re running out of time. We’ve been talking about all this other stuff for a while, but this idea of a performance review, whatever it happens, we think there are some best practices or we think there are some guides, some guidelines maybe that we can pass along from our experience that would be helpful to you.
As you go into performance review season now when this episode airs, it may. Be just over for the australian financial year, but it may just be coming up for the north american or the western sort of north west whatever Europe and north america. Yeah so Put this one down. So I’m going to let you talk about it, which is how to present feedback that isn’t yours or that you don’t own. Cause you, I remember we were talking, we were planning this, you were like, Oh, you had that. I had a
Dee Teal: moment and and I think once you’re in leadership and in a larger organization, maybe this happens in smaller organizations too, but I had a situation where A really high performing team member had caused some ripples further up the leadership chain for whatever reason.
And I was. charged with giving them feedback about those ripples. And I did as I was charged and gave that feedback and the fallout was catastrophic. And there were two reasons behind that. One, it was a surprise and we’ll talk about that further down the list. And It absolutely should not have been, and they were absolutely right to tear strips off me for that reason.
And I give them full credit now for this having been so deeply embedded in my learning of what not to do. But the other thing that happened in that situation was I was giving feedback that I didn’t believe in. I didn’t agree with it, but I was new to management and management, and I was wanting to do right by.
My boss and the instruction that I’ve been given when what I would do now is really different. I would push back. I would dig in. I would really get to the core of why that feedback was being given and whether or not it was valid and if it was valid, then have different conversations with the report that I was working with or if it was if I didn’t feel that it was valid.
Actually push back on leadership and go, I understand what you’re saying, but this person is a real high performer. They are getting these results. The feedback that they are giving us is valid. And so those ripples might be yours to deal with rather than mine to have to pass back to them.
James: And I think too, I would just add to that
oh, I was gonna add to that, but it’s hard to add, and I’m thinking through all of the situations, all the caveats to it, but there, there will be times when you have to pass along feedback that you don’t own, right?
Dee Teal: And my, and what I would do differently was actually get to that point where if this is valid and work through that and then get it to a point where whether I own it or not.
I buy into it and can then legitimately pass that on. Totally happy to do it and respect that there are times when that is needed. Totally learned that.
James: So we’ll talk a little bit more about surprises cause I think that plays a big role in that. Why don’t we just talk about it now? It’s down the list, but we can just move it up.
So surprises. So you mentioned that in that situation, the feedback that you were passing along was the first time that somebody’s heard it. And my initial reaction to the whole idea of passing along feedback that I don’t own is exactly that. If they’ve never heard it and I’ve never heard it, why would I then jump in and provide that?
I would want to push back on the timing of that feedback delivery and create some runway to assess. And observe and see in their behavior if that was a one off situation or if that is a repeated behavior that needs course correction. If it was a one off and it rubbed people the wrong way, I can take that on and work that into my approach to providing that feedback as well, right?
And do it in a context where that permission for giving feedback has been granted. But. Boy, do I have stories about surprises.
Dee Teal: Are you going to share those stories or are you just gonna?
James: Next week we’re going to talk about performance improvement. So what purpose was it to do? And yeah, maybe this will be a little teaser. Or the next episode that if you want the tea, you got to show up next week with the teacup or the glasses because the library is about to open.
No, I’m kidding.
Dee Teal: I think that from the cadence perspective, the no surprises ever, if you have the cadence built in where you’re having one to ones with your manager and feedback is coming up in that. And for me, it’s this don’t save it up till you get to the end of the quarter. And so the no surprises may well be that if you’re addressing a particular area of performance that should be clear throughout the one to ones and getting to that point.
And hopefully by the time you get to the end of that quarter you, that problem may well have already been three quarters of the way to being addressed. But just that sense of
James: Your feedback is a celebration of exactly momentum. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Dee Teal: Yeah.
James: Great. I completely agree. I think the cadence matters and the, you think about performance review and if it’s quarterly, that’s one thing, let’s most have an annual performance review kind of thing that’s a bit more formal just for whatever reason.
Yeah. And I think that as you’re preparing for that and you’re thinking about your feedback Those things that you’ve been discussing throughout the year, right? It won’t be a surprise. But I also think too, in a failure friendly environment, those things are things you’re discovering and working through together.
So there’s less pressure on that performance review as well, which brings us to the next one. So we’ve got presenting feedback. That’s not your own. Give yourself space and make sure you can at least get behind it. No surprises ever, your cadence plays a big role in helping you combat that. Yeah, if on a performance review, like a very meaningful performance review at a quarterly level or an annual level, that should never be the first time someone is hearing something.
Exactly. Even if it’s new, if it is new, it is a new situation that has come up in the last two weeks or a month. Right and you have not yet given that feedback in a setting outside of in a formal performance review If it was me and others may approach this differently But I would not include that in a performance review because that is not appropriate.
It’s a surprise I would include that in my regular one on one cadence or in another less formal Environment.
Dee Teal: Yeah,
James: but that brings us to the next part, which is actually separating performance evaluations performance reviews You from pay conversations or conversations, because that also happens in a lot of work environments where your annual review is tied to your pay rise, right?
Or your black pay rise or your bonus or whatever. Yeah. And I personally think that those two should be separated. Okay.
Dee Teal: Do you mean the performance evaluation conversation should be separate from my salary negotiation conversation or because or that my performance shouldn’t affect my salary? So
I’m gonna have to disagree if that’s where you were going.
James: No, I think they should be separate. I think your pay negotiation should be a separate conversation. Sure. From your performance. I think It influences your pay negotiation
but pay negotiation is a forward looking conversation.
Dee Teal: Okay.
James: And
Dee Teal: Rather than a reward. This is where you’re going. Okay, yeah, when you put that spin on it, I can see where you’re going with that. It’s not a reward or a bonus or a backwards. Interesting. That feels like a whole other conversation, but
James: yeah.
But that’s it. Like you’re not like, it’s not your bonus. If it’s a bonus, then it’s a it’s based on last year’s performance and what you did. And that would be a different vehicle. Yeah. But it’s about, it actually it’s actually an interesting thing too, you’re no longer rewarding.
The work that you’ve done in that regard, you’re anticipating the work you’re going to do together moving forward and what you need to do to get there. I wonder, oh, you’re right, that is a whole
Dee Teal: other conversation, isn’t it? I know, right? That’s carrot and stick. I’m sitting there yeah, we could be here for another hour.
So let’s, can we put a pin in that and come back to that whole thing. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.
James: Yeah we have to stop because that could be a hell of a conversation. So you’ve got a couple of best practices there. So separating performance evaluations from pay negotiations, no surprises ever, and giving yourself space to own or understand feedback that’s not your own before you actually give it.
In a performance review. And with that, let’s stop there because we’re going to talk about another kind of feedback which is a very formalized feedback which is the idea of performance improvement. When you have somebody who’s not performing at the level that you need and you need to start the formal process of fix it or you’re out.
The dismissal process. Yeah. And some thoughts on that. So that’s going to be a good episode too, and I’ll share some of my stories of that, which, and I’m sure you’ve got some as well. But with that is the end of the episode. Do you have any thoughts? Thank you for joining us. Yeah. If you’ve got thoughts or comments, We now know exactly where you need to go.
You can go to future of team. com forward slash podcast and click on the podcast there. And I think you can comment directly on each individual podcast and leave your message there or find us on YouTube in particular is another spot where you can go is a youtube. com forward slash little at symbol future of team and provide a comment on the episode there.
And with that, we’ll say what we’re always supposed to say. Don’t forget to this video, subscribe, wherever you subscribe to these things, get it into your podcast thing. And we will see you on the next episode. Thank you very much. Thanks.
Dee Teal: Thank you. Nice to see you.
James: Bye.
