Enabling Managers to Sustain a High Performance Culture

Barbra Gago: Welcome everyone to enabling managers to sustain high performance culture. This session is brought to you by Pando and Hone. Pando is a performance platform designed for continuous progression and Hone empowers your managers and rest of your organization with learning, coaching, and development.

This is a recorded session, so we will not have a live Q& A. In our live session, we did leverage a Miro board, which we have shared the link to here as well as an email. In that Miro board, you will find the session slides as well as additional resources that we've curated and provided for you to help you along with this particular topic.

I'm Barbara Gago, the founder and CEO at Pando. Thank you for joining us. I'm excited to have this conversation today. I, a little bit about background on me. I've spent my career at the intersection of people, tech and future of work. So I. As a CMO brought companies like Greenhouse and Culture Amp to market.

And prior to founding Pando, I was a CMO at Miro. So I've spent a lot of time building and scaling my own teams, which tended to be distributed either co located or fully distributed. And I'm very excited and passionate about how do we build more equitable systems in particular around. Performance and driving high performance cultures.

I'm joined here today by Caelan Cooney and Caelan, please introduce yourself.

Caelan Cooney: Hi, everyone. Super excited to be here. My name is Caelan Cooney. I am a learning solution strategist here at Hone. We are what we like to think of as you're all in one employee development platform. So really focused on Providing live virtual interactive trainings to distributed teams on skills that are going to help everyone be successful in the workplace.

We're trying to democratize access to learning. So making sure that there's high quality offerings available to your ICs, your new managers, your middle managers, and your VPs. My team is ultimately responsible for helping to craft really meaningful learning journeys for our customer partners for each of their populations.

My background is an industrial organizational psychology. So I love the numbers and the science behind all of these things. So I'm really excited about that for this topic. And then I've also spent 10 years in the learning and development space. I've been a facilitator content creator and worked on the client side.

So really excited to be here and to bring some of my experience to this amazing topic about how we can make managers feel more confident and successful in their performance review process.

Barbra Gago: Thank you, Caelan. So what are we going to talk about today? We're going to be covering the fundamentals for setting managers up for success. In having performance conversations and having continuous performance conversations and we're going to dive into how do you actually train managers to do that and what that looks like in an ongoing way and how we really drive that always on performance.

It's going to be a combination of setting up foundational structures as well as ongoing development and coaching for managers. So to kick us off the pandemic really was this inflection point and I know it seems like ages ago at this point and yet it was very recent and something that really shifted how all of the organizations in the world really think about the workplace and what that means for the future of work.

And it really sort of triggered this perfect storm and, and increased a lot of complexity in the workplace and in the dynamic of managers and reports and how we collaborate. How we think about how we make decisions, how we move, how we operate as companies. So remote work became much more at the forefront.

So it was already a trend that was growing, but it was more in certain teams or certain types of roles that could be remote. And at that point, everybody had to become remote. And now we're seeing which roles are good remote, which roles do better co located, et cetera. There was a rapid shift in redefining fundamentally what the workplace means now that talent has scattered and changed that dynamic and all of the diversity, equity and inclusion, and really the social injustice that sort of continues to bubble up and continues to brew has led us to a lot of legislation and from employee perspective, much higher expectations around what organizations should be doing from an equity perspective and whether or not they feel the systems and approaches within the company are fair.

And then there's been this power dynamic sort of pendulum swing. Swinging which has gone back and forth between employees having more power to organizations having more power I think in general we've moved towards employees and companies are really Thinking about how do they retain their their best talent and build these high performing cultures But there's also these generational shifts and sort of values of what employees think about work and what their relationship to work is, how much purpose they feel they have.

And now we're introducing AI and figuring out how to navigate that and what that looks like between employees and these new technologies. And at the end of the day, we're seeing that. still to this day, even though we know that we've had challenges with performance programs, we're seeing companies literally getting canceled for this process.

So this last year there was a lot of news around one firing in particular Where the woman who was fired went on TikTok and essentially became viral over this firing and it at the end of the day, the company had every right to lay this person off and in the end, she wasn't performing in her role.

But at the same time, they didn't communicate to her what she was doing well, what she wasn't doing well. She didn't have an idea of what the expectations were. And on top of it, her manager was giving her positive feedback. So there was a lot of mixed signals around whether or not she was performing, how she should be performing.

And it ultimately resulted in her getting laid off because the company didn't feel like she was performing. The problem wasn't so much her getting laid off as much as it was how the company did it. And this is led to a lot of organizations reflecting on what their practices are and whether or not we're actually setting employees up for success.

So managers of course need to be set up for success and everybody at the company needs to be set up for success. And we see that managers are really struggling to talk about performance for a number of reasons and it's the same reasons that employees are surprised when there are performance issues that they didn't know about.

So, One of the biggest challenges we see and hear from many of you is that there's a lack of clearly defined structure and expectations. So what do we expect performance to be? What does that look like at each level for each job? How do I communicate that? What are the behaviors? How do we measure success?

How do we even set goals? All of those things constantly come up and is a huge opportunity for us to help enable managers more consistently. Unconscious biases creep into the process, so if we're looking at giving performance feedback only on an annual basis, for example, then there's a lot of things like recency bias, rater bias, all of this type of stuff that if managers haven't been trained, they aren't even aware, and if you don't have the structure and process, then it just goes rampant.

Managers aren't really equipped to observe behaviors or contributions, so either they don't have the time, they haven't been trained, they don't know how, they're remote. It's not the same situation that we used to have where managers could, you know, walk the halls or check in with their, their folks at their desks or whatever it is.

It's really a challenge now to understand if people are actually performing and how do you assess that, especially when you're not together in the same space. More often than not, we also hear a lot of times that managers are still afraid to give feedback or disrupting dynamics. This also comes with lack of training and understanding for how to, you know, give direct and productive feedback or radical candor.

This is really a skill that managers need to develop. I think one of the things that we tend to do is, you know, managers get into a manager role. And then we just assume that they're good at managing. But there's actually a set of competencies, a set of skills that they need to develop, and they need to continue to develop those.

And we as organizations also need to hold them accountable for being good at those skills, not just it. Also being good at the job that they were doing before they became a manager. So these are really some of the challenges that we've heard from you, from the rest of the community around really where do we have the biggest gaps and opportunities to enable our managers.

So in order to set managers up for success and really set the whole company up for success, we need to build a strong foundation for how we're going to measure and unlock performance. There's a several foundational elements that we talk a lot about at Pando. And when you think about performance management, we kind of have glossed over a lot of this stuff in the past and jump straight to.

Based on your start date, you're going to have a review, or we're going to review everybody annually. And we went from hiring people in a very rigorous way, we got really good at recruiting, competency based recruiting, building a pipeline, comparing employees, reducing bias and subjectivity in that process, but then we kind of stopped there, and at that point you just throw people over the fence, so to speak, and Okay, now you're at the company, go perform and a year we'll check in.

So we kind of miss the boat on all of these foundational steps that kind of connects the dots between hiring people and how we're hiring them and what we're hiring them for and what level are we hiring them in at. To what that means from a performance perspective, and how is that going to look over time on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis when we're looking at performance and setting expectations?

So starting with standardized job leveling and architecture, I think this is something that more and more companies are working on because there's also that legislation that means We need to have a clarity around our compounds and we need to have better explanations as to why people are in certain levels and how they're paid.

But from a performance perspective, this is sort of step one. Career tracks by role. So really thinking through and fleshing out the manager role, the IC role. I think we've seen a lot of change in dynamics. for managers versus individual contributors and reducing the number of managers within organizations.

And if we do that, that's okay. But we also need to redefine that role and make sure that it's really a manager role that's focused on manager activities like coaching and developing those individual contributors. And if you are an individual contributor, do you have a career path at the organization?

What does that look like? Can IC without becoming a manager? Competency based frameworks are the thing that we've seen as the most effective for giving contextualized, structured, and relevant feedback around performance in a way that is less biased, less subjective, and more action oriented to how are you aligning behaviors with outcomes that you're trying to achieve.

And we're going to talk a little bit more about what that looks like, but that all. Standardized job leveling, career tracks, and competency based frameworks really lay a strong foundation for setting clear and aligned performance goals. This can happen at the organization level, but it can also happen at the individual level and be tracked at the individual level, assuming you have these other pieces.

documentation and training. So where does all this live? Is it visible? Is it accessible? Is it integrated into how I'm working? And am I getting trained on a relatively regular basis? So individual contributors might be trained during onboarding whereas managers are going to be trained on an ongoing basis.

And Caelan's going to be talking a little bit more about that. So standardized leveling is sort of the, you know, baseline where we need to get to when we think about performance because this is one of the biggest challenges that I see with organizations who haven't done this or they're trying to evolve it.

It becomes like an organic thing that happens where you just hire people based on title or what the manager thinks they need to hire at based on level because this is what the comp ban is or whatever. But at the end of the day. Leveling is what creates growth opportunities within your organization.

It's a low hanging fruit. If you add more levels, for example, you create more career steps. You don't have to add the budget. You can just, you know, cut the levels into smaller pieces, but that's really creating the growth paths, either for an individual contributor or manager. It's what creates equity.

So having structure around that, that's clear and articulated for individuals so they understand what level they're coming in at versus what level they can get to as they grow in their career. This is something that's helped us at Pando, for example, we don't negotiate compensation, but we do clearly articulate what level somebody is and how.

their map to that level, and then this is the pay band for that. And it reduces a lot of anxiety that individuals have when it comes to whether or not they're paid fairly. It helps you hire better because when you're basing it on levels and that's standardized across the organization, managers in different departments are going to be hiring people at, at the same level, even if the comp is different, because that's market driven based on role.

So if you're an engineer or. a marketer or a salesperson. It might look different, but you're going to be hiring people at the same level with the same expectations. So you're going to be basing how you're hiring people on expectations for performance and behaviors that are consistent across the organization to begin with, rather than figuring out how to do that post, you know, review calibration.

Longer term, it really helps mitigate risk against pay equity issues and that kind of thing because you're really focused on putting people in the right place to begin with. So you're not so much falling into the trap of title inflation or people who are really good at negotiating their compensation getting paid more at the same level.

It does keep you competitive as well because people are more and more familiar with this kind of thing. I think you know, 10 years ago employees probably didn't even know they have a level. Now they're very aware of it and they also want transparency around it. So having those and then the way that you're going to get those thought through and define is going to give you a lot more of a competitive edge when you're recruiting.

So this is just an example of some of the types of leveling frameworks that we see. There's those that have too few levels, and that may be because you're small, but we tend to see larger organizations also with very few levels because they think it's easier to manage. At the same time, you end up with very wide comp bands in this case.

So if you have too few levels, You end up updating people's comp every year, and then, you know, your level three, for example, might be very, very wide, the highest paid person versus the lowest paid person, and then it gets pretty complex to understand, like, How do you really have pay equity in that case?

We also see stacked levels where individual contributor goes straight into manager, which means the only way to make more money is to take that next step and be a manager, which forces behaviors that we don't necessarily want because people might not be great at management. And then there's different levels.

and different titles for different teams. So this is the way to make your life the most complicated and painful because it's very hard to calibrate performance when everybody's at different levels and different titles. So again, standardizing that leveling upfront, getting everybody leveled into a consistent leveling framework.

This helps with pre calibration. So We're already calibrating managers as well as individuals against a set of standards that they're going to be aligned to. So role based frameworks are essentially competencies that can be then layered onto your leveling framework. So we recommend that you have the same structure across teams.

There's often a combination of soft skills and hard skills. We sometimes see values integrated. In this visual here, you can see the top visual is just an example kind of like of a brainstorm of what a rubric could look like. The second visual is what it looks like in Pando, so you actually have competencies that are rated and ranked so that you have a lot of clarity around where you have a delta for growth.

So it gives a lot more flexibility for the individual to have clarity around where they are and what do they need to focus on specifically for them. It also helps managers give the right kind of feedback. So We recommend sometimes starting with company wide, starting small. Maybe you start with four competencies, get people used to it, and then you start to layer on role specific competencies.

This really helps with pre calibration, as I mentioned. So this is just an example to show you what a standardized leveling framework would look like. So here we're looking at level three. How does that compare to level five? Each level will have its own description, the scope, and business impact. So again, it doesn't matter if people are in different functions or different roles, leveling should still be consistent so that everybody at a level 3 within your organization is held accountable for the same things, regardless of that role.

Competency based, as I mentioned, really drives the right kind of behavior. So, it's highly, highly contextualizing. everybody's individuality in terms of where they're strong and where they're having opportunities for growth. And it also gives managers a lot more clarity. So if I'm a manager and I'm rating somebody, instead of rating them once on their overall performance, I can rate them across a set of competencies so that we can very clearly see generally how are they doing in their role at this level.

And also, where are the areas that they're excelling versus where the areas that they're still building competence at that level or that they're still improving and sort of developing in Pando, we always have the competency tied to the ratings in the assessments, as well as any relevant things that folks have done over the year.

So you always have that high, high level of Of context, this is an example of what it looks like to give feedback in a competency based manner. So on the left is how you might rate somebody. So like I said, instead of rating on a one five point scale. Here you can look at, okay, this person is research is one of their competencies.

They're a level six. This is the definition for what level six research looks like in this role. Now I can rate them based on that context. On the right side, you have feedback. So again, if I want to give them feedback on their research skills. I can see on the left the rubric so I understand exactly what the expectation is.

And in Pando, we also have templates baked in, which I know Caelan's going to talk about this format as well. We use SBI, which is Situation, Behavior, and Impact. So this really helps people develop the skill and develop the muscle around giving proper feedback. So in this situation, I saw you do this.

These were the behaviors I observed, and this was the impact. So it really helps to create objective feedback. Anchored in competencies. We've heard many, many times from most managers and also peers that it's much easier to give constructive feedback. So you get away from just having kudos when you have competencies because people then are anchored in what the expectations are.

They have example behaviors that they can reference and they can give a lot better feedback to their peers or managers can give more feedback to their peers. Objective feedback to people who might be at different levels but have the same competencies. And then, in terms of connecting the dots with performance, you have your competencies, which is how things are done, and the goals, which is what is done.

So, In Pando, we connect the two the two things we, we let employees track their goals for their role. And we also will monitor how that's done through the competencies. So this is really how you can intersect. What are you actually achieving at the organization? What are the expected achievements and how are you doing that?

Which will be based on those competencies. Again, if you have values or core competencies for your role. You need to be able to show up in those in certain ways to achieve those goals. And this is a way to ensure that you're doing both of those things. And together, all of this really drives what I call the employee growth loop.

So getting feedback in a structured way, having. And you're like setting goals around that feedback, being assessed on those goals, having progress, setting new goals, getting more feedback, all in this kind of continuous flow. We're going to talk a little bit more about what the structure of that can look like and what you should do on a weekly, quarterly, monthly basis.

And right now I'm going to hand it off to Caelan to talk about how we're doing training and manager development.

Caelan Cooney: Alright, thank you so much, Barbara for really setting the stage in terms of all of the important components that need to be in place before we start training on performance review systems. Really where kind of training comes in is that I think you can have all of the building blocks of a great performance management system in place and still be wondering why it's not working.

And I think that's because without training and enablement on number 1, why it's important for employees. Teams and the business to care about doing these things and doing these things well, and also how to properly use these things that we've created. They're going to fall flat for your managers due to lack of alignment, lack of buy in and user error.

So we have a lot of opportunity as HR and L and D teams to come together and make sure that this experience is really meaningful through training. So you can see kind of the buckets of training here on the screen. We're going to talk about what we can do to pre calibrate. around these different tools that we've created.

How we can actually train around having a meaningful performance conversation, and then also what's the continuous management training that's going to continue to support these efforts over time.

Alright, so the first type of training we're going to talk about is our performance dimensions training. So this is training on. what is actually being rated. So you've worked really hard on defining your competencies that Barbara was talking about. You've leveled them appropriately. And so now it's time to make sure that your managers are actually familiar with those things and how to use them properly through training.

Here. I think it's really important to know like a one pager or an email is probably not going to cut it. These things are sophisticated. They take time to understand deeply. And so, especially if you are launching new competencies, if you are updating your competencies, or if you're finding that people are misusing them in your performance system, this is the type of training that we want to come back to.

So you can see some samples on the side of the things that we recommend would be included in this type of training. The focus really being on what are the dimensions and the measures that people will be rated on, and I think it's important to include both the work related measures, so the really tactical job related things, the numbers, the things that we can physically measure, but then also the worker related Measures which are going to be anchored in really strong behavior rated scales.

And that's going to provide you a really complete picture of performance and all of the dimensions included here. So, again, the goal here is really to improve just the conceptual understanding of the competencies that we've built as a foundation for our performance management system and the best way to get people familiar with those things is going to be through different case studies.

Able to actually practice seeing how these things are leveled across the models that you've created.

Next, we've got frame of reference training. This is all about taking the time to pre calibrate your managers on the standards and the scales for different levels of performance. So if we think about performance dimensions, training is the umbrella. This is all of the pieces underneath that umbrella that they need to be able to understand to improve both the accuracy and the consistency of their ratings.

So this is really best to bring in as a training opportunity when you're seeing variability in the way that performance is measured, whether that's across teams or across specific leaders, that's an indicator that we are not calibrated. People are not considering their measurements in the same way across teams.

They don't have the same level of understanding or understanding of how to rate those things. So, here we're going to use case studies again with with actual or hypothetical performance data and ask managers to provide rating. So, as an example, on the right hand side of this slide, we've included our behavior behaviorally anchored rating scale, our bar scale that shows 1 through 5, some of the behaviors that have to do with adaptability and flexibility.

We're going to give that to them as a tool. We're also going to make sure that they have some sample performance data to work with. So that's what's included below. There should be an individual rating that they do kind of on their own. And then there should be discussion and dialogue between these managers, just deciding kind of where they're rating disagreements.

How do we reach resolution and understanding about what is a certain level of performance? And you may need to come in as an expert and help clarify some of those things throughout the process. So ultimately this form of training is going to be kind of your best friend when it comes to making sure that if you're doing post calibration that there's a little bit more alignment between managers and, and their measures over time.

We're just front loading some of the work here and making sure that this understanding exists beforehand and we're not having to do so much of it on the back end.

Next is our our reader error training, which is just a fancy way of saying bias training. This is how we're ensuring that we have fair evaluations. We're avoiding bias in practice. And so this type of training has been proven to show a decrease in the presence of really significant reading errors that have to do with bias.

So we're going to be concerned with biases here. Things like affinity bias, recency bias, opportunity bias, leniency bias, right? And we see this all too often where a manager might unconsciously favor an employee that they have really strong personal rapport with. That would be an example of affinity bias.

Or they might inflate the scores for someone who has a project they completed that had high levels of visibility, right? And that's going to be an example of recency bias. And these are all things that we are subject to just because of our faulty memories, the ways our brains are programmed. It's, it's nobody's fault.

And so we just need to know that those things are present in Rader. In rater performance, essentially, and make sure that we're providing training on how they can be aware of those things, number one, and number two, overcome them. So these types of classes and training should focus on how to self assess for bias, which might mean teaching them about the different types of bias that exist, providing them with case studies like the one you see on the right, this is from a Hone class on evaluating performance fairly and accurately.

So they can begin to identify places where bias may come into play. In their reports, especially so not only in like kind of their subconscious evaluation of performance, but particularly in like, you evaluate the things that you've written down. I know that there are AI tools now that are available to help assess for bias, and I always caution people for leaning on those tools too heavily, and that's because we know that these language learning models are only as unbiased as the data that they have been trained with and the data they have access to.

And we just don't have a truly unbiased data set, you know, for these A. I. tools to learn off of at this point. So while I think it's a really cool idea, and I'm excited to see where it goes in the future, I think it's something that we all just can be aware of at this point. So starting with awareness and then second, how to prevent biased evaluation.

So this is going to be all about encouraging documentation of behaviors throughout the year, and that's so that we can avoid those faulty memory things that come into play that result in bias, right? So when you're writing those things down as they're happening, you're going to be less likely to pull wrong information, misinformation, mismemory on some of these things for performance, and that can help to reduce bias.

Coupled with that is going to be the use of behavioral observation training, and so I think this is really interesting as a form of training because we assume that managers know what to look for when it comes to performance. But for those of us who have been doing this for a really long time, we know, too, that.

People are not always good self raters of their own performance. And so if it's hard enough for us to evaluate our own performance and point to things that are really concrete, then how can we expect managers to do that for other people? So the root of this type of training is how can we actually improve the way that managers observe and interpret behavior?

So they need to have a good understanding of what behaviors to be looking out for and how to document those things really accurately. So an example of ineffective evaluation or documentation might be you know, they didn't handle the presentation. Well, six months from now, when you're doing your official review, it's going to be really hard to remember exactly what components made you write that down.

So something more effective might be that they struggled to address audience questions as they came up, even, even with thorough preparation, right? That's so much more specific of a behavior and something that can actually be coached on as well. So this is all about pointing out the types of behaviors that are good to document, helping people actually practice rewriting behavioral observations so that they are better giving them some samples that are really bad and asking them to make them better through the process.

And then also training them on how to use documentation tools, maybe like Pando where they make it really easy to track performance conversations, the feedback and the notes that you're taking throughout the year. Even if you don't have a tool in your tech stack for this, you can be teaching them how to use a behavior journal similar to the one that's on the right hand side of this slide so that they're documenting in whatever system you use.

If that's a Google drive, if that's. Anything that they have access to that and that they can keep track of all this information in really relevant ways. And encouraging them to have this be a continuous and iterative process. And what that looks like in practice is that we have different critical points where people should be measuring performance, right?

And this is where I think it's really interesting, because I've heard managers say, like, I don't really see why this is a part of my job having to document these things. But if we look at the things that we're asking on this slide to do weekly, biweekly, quarterly and monthly, it actually becomes a pretty major part of their role as managers, right?

We need to condition our managers that this is actually a critical component of that role. Yes, they have work to do, but they also have people to develop over time. And part of that is through continuous performance management practices. So what should we be documenting and when? You can see we've got some suggestions here on a weekly cadence.

We can be tracking our employees on specific project deadlines, specific tasks that we've prioritized and specifically doing that through one on ones. I think this is a really amazing way to kind of recondition or retrain our managers on how to leverage their one on ones as well. They should be checking in on progress on these things and providing continuous feedback, documenting these things so that Feedback when it comes six months from now during the formal review is not a surprise, right?

If we're using our one on ones to measure performance over time, then we should be taking really good notes during that time, both on our end and encouraging our employees that there's documentation and nothing is a surprise. Another way that you can work is with bi weekly sprints. This gives us really time bound ways to look at what has been accomplished, what type of work, the amount of work, what has worked well and what hasn't worked well.

Even if you're not a product team or a engineering team, that kind of sprint like style can provide some really awesome like check in points for different types of performance. And then on a quarterly basis, we should definitely be checking in on things like OKRs, how those have trickled down to our team and our individual goals, and comparing those to our expectations or previous quarter's performance.

And then finally, every six months is when you might be doing those really formal reviews and hopefully all of the work that you've done previously up until that point will make the process really easy.

Next, we're going to get into the actual conversation. This is the part where I think it's like, we can go through as many case studies as we want on, you know, leading up to this point, but unless we provide opportunities for actual practice on a conversation, then. These conversations are not going to be utilized to their full potential.

So, this training means that we need to go so much further beyond just the what needs to be measured and give people the time and the space to practice in a low risk environment. So, something that is controlled, not with, you know, their employees the first time they're having a performance conversation.

And that they're able to get coaching and feedback from their peers or from us as a team on how they can improve those things. So we like to think of here at Hone that your performance conversation should be both a presentation of information, which I think is a pitfall where our managers get stuck is sometimes it's like, okay, here's the information that I wrote down.

I'm just repeating it back to you to check off the box that I've had this conversation, right? And so the way that we train about performance review conversations is that they should be that a conversation. We often miss that part of asking for reactions. You can see the formula that we use in our class on how to run effective performance review meetings here on the slide.

It incorporates different ways and times that you can ask for reactions depending on your style or the type of information that you're providing. How to navigate really emotional or defensive reactions, and how to ensure that you are action planning and that you have really. You know, clear follow up steps, right?

Because the performance review conversation should not end here. There should be clear points where you're checking in over the next couple of months. So we can arm our managers in this type of training with a very clear framework on how to lead these types of conversations. I'm a huge fan of frameworks.

I think that they're really beneficial for a number of reasons. They're going to standardize criteria, which we have done kind of throughout this entire process. They're going to clearly define a process for consistency and experience across your managers and their teams and the way that their employees experience performance reviews.

It's going to reduce confusion. It's going to be a better use of time and it's also going to help reduce bias. So leaning into a specific framework that you can teach and not letting people just kind of free for all how they're going to have this conversation can be really impactful. And then, like I said, the most important part of this.

situation is going to be allowing time for role play. So give them real or hypothetical performance data and ask them to lead a performance review conversation with, with a willing volunteer and use that time for them to reflect on what went well, what could be improved and also to get coaching from other people.

It's important for them to get feedback on kind of how things landed from an outside perspective. This will help make sure that they are more than ready to go into those performance review conversations and have a really great. time.

And last but not least, this is where we have the ability to sustain really long term growth and development and, and build our managers into performance coaches that can do this work year round. And it's not something that they're just viewing as a documentation component, something they have to do. It becomes a part of just the way they manage and the way they work.

So beyond those really technical components. How are we training our managers to manage performance over the course of the year? Are they trained to be effective coaches? Are they using a model like grow? Like you can see on the slide here. That's one of the classes home offers is the coach approach that teaches this this formula for for coaching, but beyond that, are they also able to manage the strengths of their team and delegate stretch projects to people so that they can continue to develop in in their own careers?

Are they actually having career conversations and managing those things well, especially in times where it's slow or we don't have a lot of vertical growth, you know, in a hierarchy, how do we get people bought in into their careers and retained over time? Do they know how to support their lowest performers beyond just documentation of performance issues so they can try to get them out the door, right?

Are they going to be good supportive managers to all of their employees across the spectrum of performance? And we have to provide training on how to do that. I think we see time and time again that new managers, even if they were high performing ICs does not necessarily mean they have the skills to be effective coaches, to give effective feedback.

And to provide effective motivation techniques, all of these different things that are going to help them to create a really high performing team. So this is really where I think we have skills that are critical to your manage, to your managers to, to man, I, whoop, you can splice me. So this type of training is where they're going to get skills that are really critical for year round.

Performance in the organization, right? Rather than just every six months or once a year when we're documenting performance. This is how we're going to drive high performing teams moving forward. So evaluating where the gaps that your managers need to develop in some of these areas and then providing them again with opportunities to practice these things in safe situations where it's, you know, having a coaching conversation is is so out of the norm for how we operate.

You are asking questions and not giving advice. And that can be a really challenging thing for people in, you know, as a mindset shift, especially when you just came from doing the work. So really making sure that people have the opportunity to practice these things, get really good at these things and have continued support from learning and development teams and from their peers and how they can do these things better moving forward.

So.

We rattled through a lot of training opportunities here. I think they're all really important in their own way to supporting performance management in your organization. And I want to be really clear that I also don't think you have to have all of these things right out of the gate, right? If you are just standing up a performance review process.

You know, you're maybe just trying to get people to have the conversation. Right. And so that's where we're going to start is just teaching you how to have an effective performance review conversation. And so I think, you know, we provided some specific use cases on when and how you might want to leverage some of these different types of training.

And I think that's important that you don't feel like this is all something you have to be doing or standing up all at once. Think about what the needs are of your. Performance management system as it as it stands right now and choose the training that is going to help you to better launch that system or iterate on that system into the future, and you can always build on that moving forward.

So it's a lot of information to digest between everything that Barbara covered and everything that I've talked about. But again, as we can start to pull in even just 1 or 2 of these things over time, they're going to really have an impact. On your performance review processes and also on your organization and how it operates and the impact it's able to make.

So hopefully all of this has been really helpful information to you.

Barbra Gago: Thank you, Caelan. Everybody, thanks so much for joining us. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to myself or Caelan. You can find us both on LinkedIn. As I mentioned, we shared a Miro board. That link is in this document as well as the email that we sent you. Feel free to explore and get access to further resources.

And thank you again so much for joining.