Rethinking Performance Management for 2025 and Beyond

Speaker A: Treating an individual as an individual, the person behind the performer, and the idea that you as their coach, you co perform. You can't have a superstar player without a superstar coach. When you get better, your people get better.

Speaker B: Welcome to Voice Activated, the podcast dedicated to unlocking the power of employee feedback. I'm Sean Fitzpatrick, founder of Telemap and your host. In each episode, we'll dive into real world examples and best practices, as well as some lessons learned from employee surveys, pulse checks, focus groups, groups 360s and more. If people are at the heart of your business, you're in the right place. Expect open conversations, practical advice, inspiring stories from companies that are getting it right, and some reflections from those who've hit a few bumps along the way. Tune in, listen up, and let's activate the voice of your employees. Well, welcome back to Voice Activated, the podcast where we explore how organizations can better hear, understand and act on the employee voice. Sean, I'm your host, Sean Fitzpatrick, and today I'm joined with Dr. Christopher D. Lee, a seasoned HR professional who served as CHRO for five institutions, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and now managing director of Storbeck Search. We'll unpack how decades of experience in leadership search and higher education has shaped his approach to building real listening cultures, one where feedback drives action and trust grows stronger. Christopher, welcome to Voice Activated.

Speaker A: My pleasure, my pleasure to be with you.

Speaker B: Over the years as a chro at institutions like William and Mary and Virginia Community College System, how did you structure formal listening systems beyond surveys to keep, you know, real time pulse of employees? How did you go about thinking about that and working with those institutions?

Speaker A: Uh, that's a good question. Uh, you know, Sean, um, I'm going to talk to it at two different levels. Obviously, having been an HR professional, it is hard to think about organizations without thinking about yourself as a leader as well as the leaders you support. Right. Uh, and so, you know, as far as formal listening systems, I would describe, you know, my work obviously on my book on performance conversations was built upon this idea of having rich, robust conversations with employees, you know, that are really kind of a 21st century view of performance management. You know, I'm one of those leaders, uh, who, uh, or authors who early on, as early as 2006, made the argument that traditional performance management did not service intended ends and that having robust, enriched, two way dialogue with employees was close to the management holy grail. So we can kind of, you know, unpack that a little bit later. You know, you had asked me a question in writing or sent me A note earlier and it said it's about a formative moment and let me give you formative moment. So I'm the chief H officer at Bates College in Maine, uh, had a veteran admin assistant, her name was Lucy, who was amazing. She, she was a plus. And I noticed that like this the third year we were having uh, our performance kind of, you know, management, uh, discussion and she had a handkerchief with her, right? And she, and she cried. Now she cried at the first two as well. But it took me, I was slow to catch on, right. She came prepared to cry and I was thinking why? And we talked about it and she said, because I know that I'm going to get negative feedback, it's going to be hurtful or whatever. Now Lucy was a plus, so I didn't have much constructive feedback to give her. But because of the trauma from her career, she came to those events prepared to cry. Now the first two went really well. It was kind of like saying, hey, I'm new, you're amazing, I've learned a lot from you. Here's how we can tweak getting better together. So it wasn't negative, but she cried anyway because an ounce of negativity. So I would say to you, Sean, hey, you know, hey, let's have a uh, performance discussion on Thursday. And you spend the whole week knowing and planning, expecting to get negative feedback. So that propelled me to create the performance conversations method.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It's like this didn't make any sense. An a employee who's traumatized by getting feedback, something's wrong. And so that's how I went there and then from there, from 2002, you know, you know, for 20 years I, you know, had a Tuesday afternoon conversation with someone on my team. One on one conversation. Performance conversations method evolved from that, uh, about how to create a new dynamic of listening and working with and bringing out the best in people.

Speaker B: Well, it's interesting because, you know, when you talk about employee listening, you know, a big part, a big part of it that we encourage it and how we think about it, it's really, should be a two way dialogue. All right. Listening is just not about collecting data. How we talk. Yeah, it's a starting point. You got to collect the data, get there. Um, but that's really the starting point. Now you can have a dialogue as a leader or manager once you have a starting point. And data is often useful to have that touc off point. It certainly doesn't tell you everything, but it'd be interesting to hear because yeah, I've Heard about that, like years ago, a number of years ago, you know, maybe, maybe five, ten years ago, you heard of different companies getting rid of their performance, you know, feedback. Oh, it's not working and it's not effective. It's just really used for compensation. It wasn't really used for improvement, coaching, performance. Uh, it'd be interesting to hear how you've thought about that because it sounds like you've really, you know, writing books on it, uh, really starts to make you, uh, crystallize your thinking, I'm sure, as to what works, what doesn't. So I'd like to hear what, what is it about performance commerce and how they're different from what you might consider traditional ones.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. So, so, so thank you. For me, that's a lot. So, you know, but to me, let me kind of go into it. So I published Performance Conversations, an Alternative to appraisal, in 2006. Early scholar to make the argument traditional appraisals don't exist. I, at the time I was looking for a publisher, uh, and the Society for HR Management. You know, they were like, hey, Chris, we really like this, but we can't publish it because in our catalog we have 24 books that say they do work right now, 2020. Right. You know, after the revolution that you Talked about in 2015, 16, when Accenture, Deloitte, you know, all of these other companies went away from it. They're like, hey, Chris, this is timely. So, you know, Performance Conversations 2.0, you know, you know, where I expanded upon the model, uh, they were happy to publish. So it just tells you what happened in that ensuing 15 years about how the world, you know, thought about it different. Now, I'm going to say here as a kind of clarification, the Performance Conversations method is not an appraisal. It is a performance improvement system. Right? So that is what changed. So what changed was people realized that it was something you need to do more than just ask for feedback and really spoke to what you just described, Sean. And the whole idea of it has to be two way. It has to be at a certain amount of employee involvement and engagement, because after all, it's their work, it's their output, is their career, is their income. Right? All of those things are in play. And if they're not fully bought into the conversation and the results of it, then you're probably not going to make progress. Right. Uh, and one of the words I use to describe once you get to that point is rapport, because here's where the biggest gap in the management literature exists, so you got all this management literature about a variety of things to include performance management. But what it misses is one key thing, and that is relationships. In order to have a relationship that's productive, you have to get to rapport. And that rapport means that you and I have an open and honest and fruitful conversation to the degree to which I'm willing to tell the truth. Because it goes like this, Sean. If I'm sucking when, if I'm not doing well, if I don't understand, I'm not likely to go to the person who's going to evaluate me, judge me and give me a performance rating and say, I don't know, I'm confused, I need help. And you use that information to make economic decisions. So we have to have a relationship so rich that I'm willing to say, I don't know, I need help and trust that you're not going to use that information against me, that you're going to use that information to help me. And that's what a performance conversation is designed to do.

Speaker B: In theory. That's really good. Right? Uh, it's, you know, I think even if you talk to a manager, say, yeah, I'd love to get. A lot of them, would love to get there. But if you think about how do they go about doing it? So sometimes you, uh, we get feedback on and we do a lot of employee feedback, a lot of surveys of different types. Often when we ask, you know, does your manager clarify your goals, does your manager coaches support your work and stuff. I have not talked to my manager in, you know, weeks or months. You hear sometimes and it's like, or I've never had a performance review. Or uh, sometimes they'll often use performance review or performance appraisal, whatever system or terminology they're using using in that organization. So that's quite elite to, to be able to have a rich, deep, trusting, psychologically discussion from an environment where I barely know my employees and don't. Are they married? Are they not married? Do they have kids? Are they not, you know, what, what's their, what are they doing for free time? Like that's a, that's a deep investment that they have to put in. So how do managers go about that? Or what do you, how do you actually implement something like that?

Speaker A: Simply, uh, uh, uh, Sean, I know it sounds, you know, kind of a pie in the sky, but that's what the performance management method was designed to do, exactly what you described. And you used the word I love to use, which you Know, comes from crucial conversations, which is psychological safety, right. Do I feel comfortable in telling the truth? And you know, uh, and that we have uh, a fruitful and nurturing conversation. So here's as simple as this. Stephen Covey, you know, the second, right. He has that book, the Speed of Trust, right. You know, how do you build that? So I'm, you know, I'm just going to, you know, offer that. The performance conversations method is simply this. It is a series of brief structured conversations about things that matter the most. Simple as that. A series, a planned series of conversations at some interval. And those intervals I would recommend are uh, between four and 16 weeks depending upon two factors. The first is the individual involved and the type of work that's being performed. Rookies need more attention than superstars or veterans. So more often could be monthly, uh, and you know, superstars could be quarterly. Then the type work you're doing, if you're doing work that is fairly consistent and stay, you know, predictable, then the period of time can be longer. But if it's changes often it needs to be shorter. So between every four weeks, could be monthly, could be every six weeks, could be every 16 weeks. You need to have a planned, you know, pre planned series of conversations. Now by having more conversations you get to the speed of trust idea. Trust can be summarized into a word that ah, uh, this gentleman who was a college president here in the States, a friend of mine called Ted Raspill, he was at Bright Point Community College. He says, uh, trust is about predictability. Cannot predict how you react or what you might do. Right. So by having a planned series of conversations, I know what's going to happen in those conversations. And those conversations, hopefully of refueling stations, they're pep talks. They're opportunities for us to work on things together to wake the sort of conversation. So that's the series and it's planned. The employee knows that I'm going to get my leader's undivided attention every other month. If you buy month, right. And that's an opportunity for that meeting to be about me and what I need to be successful. All right, so brief structured conversation, so 20 to 30 minutes. And it's going to be a structured conversation. Not just any conversation about the weather or even whatever. There are ways of getting there. I have three, you know, key questions that I ask. They're uh, different methods to use in a performance conversations method or different techniques. That is one of them is just simply asking questions. I have three questions that are kind of the, you know, uh, uh, the magical Three. And then you get the magnificent seven. So seven questions that get to kind of the core issue of, you know, what's going on in the workplace. Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, well, share some of those, share some of those questions. Okay.

Speaker A: So the easy, the easy ones, you know, Sean, is to simply what's going well and how can we replicate them, what's not going well and what can we do to, you know, address those? And then what else is going on in your work life that's important and that's an opportunity to diagnose, uh, and troubleshoot potential problems or to seize opportunities. Now the importance of that is you're asking people what's wrong. And if you develop a relationship, it's kind of hard to say. I'm, um, four months behind on that, on that report when you weren't two months behind the last time we talked. So it's an accountability opportunity. Right, but it's not a punishment opportunity because, Sean, I'm going to ask you, are you late? What's the problem? And my goal is to say, how can I help? That's really what it's about. It's not about gotcha, you know, it's about we're in this together and that's about building that relationship. And so then, uh, on the things that matter most means that conversation is going to be different for everybody. Chris needs something different and the type work that Chris does is going to be different. So the point is that we're not going to talk about all these other esoteric ideas that might build on a performance appraisal. We're going to talk about the things that matter to this work right now that you and I are trying to kind of co perform because that's what a, uh, supervisor and employee relationship, they co perform. Right. A great leaders create great employees. So it's a series of plain conversations, you know, that we're going to get together every 12 weeks or every other month. And we know what's going to happen in those conversations. We're going to talk about these kinds of things which are important to our work together. And I'm going to be expected to do certain things. And if we do it well, you're actually going to come prepared. So not just the manager prepared, the employee's going to come prepared because we know what the meeting's going to be about and it's not punitive. Right? So series of, uh, brief structured conversation.

Speaker B: So it's not tied, it's not tied to compensation or like that's, that's a separate discussion. You're really dislocating it from that, you know, review around comp and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's designed to do one thing, improve performance. It's not designed to measure performance. It's not designed to rate performance. It's not designed to set compensation. It's designed to help you be at your very best. Now here's the truth of it. We can use a Performance Conversations method as your performance management system. Right. And. Or you could use it to supplement your system because if you look at the literature which, you know, which is what Produce Performance Conversations 1.0, they all said the same thing. Oh, this didn't uh, you know, preclude normal feedback or whatever. And so the point is that managers don't have a habit of doing that and so giving them a management system that can be used as a performance management framework. And as a matter of fact it improves it because you have those conversations needed. Now three different techniques for the Performance Conversations method. The original basically says collect artifacts and of uh, work examples of work reports, you know, thank yous, emails or whatever, bring them to the conversation we might talk about. That's kind of 1.0, you know, uh, 2.0 added two additional techniques. One is the questions that we offer, right. So three questions or seven questions that kind of get at things. And then the third is kind of a checklist method which basically says here are the most important things that happen in our work environment and we're going to make sure we cover these over the year we have conversations and in some meetings we talk about all of them. And then some meetings we want to talk about some of them. But the point is you have a planned series of conversations over the year.

Speaker B: How have you seen organizations capture, provide the script, the forms, the info, like because managers come from all stripes and backgrounds, some of them will be very organized and have a binder or digital notebook or whatever. Some won't and uh, they'll just wing it. Uh, so I just wondering uh, how you and for employees do they, you know, do you have a constant sort of place where you can share collaborator? What have you seen? Is it is as simple as a Google Doc that you put up and share or is there, you know, things that get a little more formal around some of these things?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's both. And you know, uh, and, and you're right. Performance Conversations 1.0.0 said essentially use what you use now and if you don't use something, you should be as a manager, which means you have a journal that's What I have within my arm's reach, you know, Sean, for my entire career. There goes my journal, right? And I can go back and, you know, talk about what we talked about last time. Some people use a calendar system where they have a calendar, they keep notes on a calendar and stuff like that. Some use a spreadsheet, right? You know, some have a kind of a digital folder, right? The point is, as a manager, you should have some routine or some system keeping track of important things, such as conversations with employees and the things that you need to follow up upon. And so 1.0 said use a system, you know, period. And here five or six different examples, 2.0 says, hey, you know, we. There's a pattern of what needs to be covered here. Here's seven questions to get at the. The typical pattern that most organizations, you know, uh, will have. And then the method is the same thing. You're going to design a checklist that speaks to your particular work and your particular work environment. If you're in a sales environment, man, we're going to talk about leads, sales and patience. If you're in a manufacturing, you know, manufacturing environment, we're going to talk about productivity, safety, you know, efficiencies, machine maintenance or whatever the case may be. The point is that there are patterns and we create a system because that's all management is, right? And processes. We're going to create a system to kind of, uh, routinize, if you will, how to do these things in an excellent manner. And that's what on conversations, method is designed to do.

Speaker B: So you've talked about the magnificent, magnificent seven. Uh, the key seven. What are those? You've touched on the three big broad ones. And tell us a little bit about the seven.

Speaker A: All right. I'm have to grab my book because that's why I wrote them down. I can't remember everything.

Speaker B: Or at least five out of the seven.

Speaker A: So the three, obviously, that we've talked about, uh, goals. What about action plans and goals? One.

Speaker B: Yeah, like for. For work for the next quarter or next exact year or whatever. Yeah, okay.

Speaker A: Things that are important, relationships, how are your work? Uh, you know, uh, uh, relationships. And then, uh, there's a, There's a, A, uh, sixth one in there, which I, I can never remember.

Speaker B: I'll.

Speaker A: I'll figure it out. But the seventh is the most important one, which I think, which is what can I do to help you, Sean, do your very best work? That's the last question. It's not to help you do your job. It's not to help you work, to do your very best work. That is the ultimate accountability question. Because as Sean says to Chris, what can I do to help you do your very best work? Then Chris has no excuse to not produce excellent work because he got all the support and guidance he needs. Now, here's the tricky part. It's also the ultimate accountability for the leader, because if Chris says to Sean, you know, I need a better computer, I need clear instructions, I need more realistic deadlines or whatever the issue is. Chris has said the reason I'm underperforming is because I don't have everything I need. And I'm telling you specifically what I need. Right. And so it's really the ultimate accountability question for both parties. Right? So that's the whole idea of asking a series of questions that are designed to move folks, you know, uh, uh,

Speaker B: for what about training for managers? Like, how do you. It sounds simple, but, you know, you got to help manage because sometimes you'll ask questions and employees will go in all different directions. They might get into their personal life, might get into all kinds of things. Uh, what's the level of training needed for, you know, frontline leaders? Frontline. I'm not talking about executives that have maybe gone through various programs and initiatives over their years, but someone who's fairly new into the management role or how to manage enroll, but never had to really do these types of, you know, relationship building, trust building work with their direct reports.

Speaker A: Yeah, very, very good and very prescient thinking there. Uh, uh, Sean, the seventh question is, how are you? And I asked that last, right? And you know, some people would disagree with that perspective, but the book offers lots of reasons why that's last, because you're right. Sometimes if you get chatty employees who like to get off subject, sometimes you can start with how are. And you find out about the grandkids, the vacation, uh, and they're prepping you by throwing in little things along the way that, that are excuses for not performing. So I found that to check in becomes, you know, on the person because you need to check in on the person as well, because the performance is done by a person, not, you know, uh, in addition to a professional. So the book talks a lot about that. The performance conversation method manages both the person and the professional. Because you cannot manage me if you don't know me. And that's what you were mentioning earlier about getting to know your employee, right? As giving this feedback to Chris. An exact same, uh, feedback to Sean gets you different results because of the people involved. And the relationship. And that's the big gap in management literature. It speaks to the performer, but it ignores the person. And that's what relationship and rapport is important. So how do you get there? Uh, and that's why those questions were created, to create the structure so that those things are done in a uh, predictable uh, and more efficient and effective manner. It helps to manage relationship, it helps to manage the workplace. It gives you a certain rhythm and timing it and a focus on the structured part of the conversation. And then you kind of get to uh, how's a person performing, how the person doing, what do they need, you know, other things that we thinking about. So it kind of, it kind of uh, again routinizes things that are in that milieu that you just talked about. Right. It's not catch as cats can, it's a, a structured conversation. Now the, you know, The Performance Conversations 2.0 has a long subtitle and I have to read it too because you know, the joke is that uh, you write the book, the editor determines what the title is because they say you can write it but we have to sell it. So it's how to use questions to coach employees, improve productivity and boost confidence. Right. So asking questions is an art and the book talks about that and how to do that better. And so here's an example. So the Performance Conversations method is a series of brief structured conversations about things that matter most. Every manager uses a series of brief structured conversations with questions. And we call that uh, not a series but rather, but a one off. And that's an interview. Same idea. It's a series of structured questions in a one time scenario to find out if a person has the goods, the capabilities, the experience. So we use the same method, flipped for how well you've done at the job we've hired you to do.

Speaker B: Interesting. Um, if I think about this, if I pick a you know, thousand person or 5,000 person organization, you know, you got hundreds of managers. How do you uh, how do you introduce something like this? How do you ensure um, the different departments are somewhat consistent? Because if you have, you could have one department, you know, that's really embraces this and does it because maybe the, the VP or you know, executive VP or whatever is really deep into this. Another one just doesn't think it's so good, doesn't do it, so it doesn't happen. How do you, how do you go about thinking about, you know, just rolling this out and getting it used, you know, systematically across the whole organization?

Speaker A: Yeah, I've Done it for a lot of organizations. Uh, and there's an art to it and that art is related to the mission and purpose of that enterprise. So how we quote sell it to managers is this is not a performance management system. This is a performance improvement system is designed to help you as a manager achieve your objectives. So in some organizations, uh, one uh, organization, I think we called it Conversations about the Future, right? Because or a growth oriented organization, it's

Speaker B: always future, future focused, all the conversations.

Speaker A: Or generally another organization we use it, we call them retention conversations because they were in an environment a lot of non exempt employees and you know, uh, people might leave, you know, for another organization for another 50 cents an hour, whatever. And it was about understanding and knowing your employees, them coming to you with a possible account or say hey I'm thinking of I need to make more money, I'm about to have a kid or whatever. And you. The point is that how would you know they're thinking about it unless you had an opportunity for the employee to come raise their hand and say I want promotional opportunity, I need to make more money or I'm having problems with my coworker. The performance conversation creates the opportunity. So the point is that as I've worked with different organizations, we've crafted the methodology around the primary needs of the organization. What are the three big issues around managing people and then we build a system around that. So works easy in a professional knowledge kind of profession, right? Accountants, lawyers, you know, IT people, HR people, whatever the case may be. But then you know, I've also worked with organizations here with a lot of non exempt employees. And one as an example they had uh, uh, employees uh, in a kind of a factory, bakery, uh, sort of environment. And so you had individuals on basically lines producing goods, you know, uh, that sort of thing. And the method we use for them was to have the uh, leader have a five minute conversation with every employee essentially over about a two week period of time. So at 4:30 every day the manager would go from person to person and check in and say there's two or three questions, you know, you're going to be asked, how you doing? Do you need anything, whatever. Uh, the point is we structured it around their work and five, only five minutes off the line, right. But over two weeks period of time he touched everybody between 4:30 and five. Right? Retention. Because we caught the problems, we caught the issues, the friction that made people want to leave, right? So we design it to the environment that's appropriate.

Speaker B: We talked about managers and preparing them, uh, how do you help prepare employees for these conversations? Like, what do they get? Because, uh, all of a sudden, if my manager starts coming asking me about all kinds of things that they never asked me about before, I'd be, what is going on here? Maybe, should I be looking for another job? They're asking me all kinds of things. And, you know, how do you prepare employees?

Speaker A: I know you ain't had a chance to read the book, you know, uh, yet, uh, Sean, but you, you keep throwing me lobs, which is really cool. Right? So, questions to ask my manager. Right. Uh, interesting, you know, questions to ask myself before I talk to my manager. Right? So you're absolutely right. Because, uh, we're preparing the dyad for a two way conversation. It's not a one way conversation. A, uh, conversation can't be one way. I'm not giving you a rating, and I'm not telling you what you've done good or telling what you've done bad. It's a conversation. And so the whole method is designed to prepare both the employee and the manager for the conversation. Right? And, you know, and really good employees. And, uh, I did it for 20 years. You know, my pattern was 1:30 Tuesday afternoons I had a performance, uh, conversation with one of my direct reports, right? So I had six direct reports every six weeks. If I had eight, it was every eight weeks or whatever the case may be. And I had that conversation. The star employees, man, they ran them the meeting. They knew that I was going to get Chris's time. And that purpose of that meeting was to help me perform better, to help me grow, to help me stay on task with my whatever. And they would come and say, here's what I want to talk about today. Now, I structured those conversations different ways. You can structure those with different questions or different prompts. But the point was, the good employees reveled in the opportunity to get their leaders undivided attention.

Speaker B: Sure, yeah. Uh, because they're thinking, okay, here he's a, uh, or she, or they're a tool that I could use to help perform better. How do I best leverage this upcoming opportunity? Meeting with them to get more information, training tools, resources to achieve what I want to achieve as an employee. Yeah, I like that.

Speaker A: Absolute sharing responsibility for outcomes. The traditional method is the supervisor's responsible. We train employees to say, hey, this is your job. This is your career. This is your livelihood. Right. This is your, you know, your growth opportunity. This person, their role is to help you do that. And so when we train the leaders, right? And then the managers and the supervisors and the employees, we train them slightly different, but with all the same idea. And so if we do, uh, it well, then the employees, they hold their leaders accountable because what they say is, hey, Chris, we haven't had a performance conversation. When are we going to have our performance conversation? Right, right. Because they know it helps me. Right. And that, and there's a protocol in the book about what to do because your managers are busy and about should you postpone, you know, read, you know, or cancel, you know, meetings. Right. There's a protocol, uh, you know, around doing that you don't want, you want to give employees the latitude to do that. But not all of them, because sometimes they're canceling because they don't want to be held accountable. Sometimes they're canceling because they're working. Right. And so the point is, you know, there's like six or seven scenarios. It's like in this situation, you reschedule this situation, you postpone, you know, this one, you cancel. Right. Depending on the employee and the work involved. But the whole point is that 20 years perfecting the methodologies, right? How to engage employees in a way to bring out the very best in them.

Speaker B: What percentage of organizations you think out there now, uh, approach it like this, this performance conversation. So whether it's this method, your method that you've walked through, which is great because it's simple, it's easy to picture, it's eas, Easy to understand. Um, but something like that. Is that. Would that be 50% more than. 50% less than what, what do you, what's your. Yeah, and maybe you've got some research or data on this. I don't know.

Speaker A: Well, you know, I don't have any, uh, any research on this and, and there's no data to be conclusive. I've seen some, but, you know, it's not kind of universal. I would say it this way. Uh, the vast majority of organizations still use traditional method because the managers haven't got, got into the 21st century yet. But it's changing every year. But I will tell you that approximately one third are doing some elements of the performance conversations method. Right. Meaning that they are abandoning ratings, you know, uh, you know, that sort of thing, moving more on a conversational basis or requiring some sort of more, uh, frequent thing versus the annual thing. So good organizations that are doing it well are, ah, obviously places like Google's, they call them one on ones. GE calls them pulses. Uh, you know, Kelly, you know, Kelly Services calls them. I can't. I just lost the Thought here. But the point is uh, Adobe, you know, as a matter of fact Adobe, I shared the platform with them as early as 2010 or 11 we kind of co presented at a conference at the World bank, uh, on the methodologies that are different. So the point is enlightened organizations are doing some of the elements. My contributions to the literature is that I've created a formal structure and way of doing really just a great management technique. Many organizations are moving in that direction of how to create feedback systems that are designed to be more conversational and interactive.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's something that I think uh, um, managers are starting to embrace but you don't see it everywhere yet. Um, if you think about, you know, I just got one or two more questions. One is just you know, if I tie it back to employee listening mechanisms and tools like surveys and pulses and you know, because a lot of organizers do that. In fact often performance management or performance feedback is sort of one of the topics on our survey. Standard survey that we use often comes up as a key issue, uh, that are cited by or brought up by employees. How can you integrate, synchronize, tie together sort of that broader anonymous or confidential employee surveys that organizations do to this type of one on one work. Where's the integration or alignment where you might see that could be useful for, for uh, both of them. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, uh, I think your surveys uh, become your report card on if managers are basically managing right. Performance conversations gives uh, them a way of managing. So the surveys ask you has someone given you feedback? Has someone given you recognition? Has someone given you instructions about what to do and what to expect? Has someone who's that someone? Right. You know, I mean you get some from your peers. Right. But by and large it's the relationship with the leader. And so when the surveys tell you it ain't happening, then the managers are not doing it or they're doing it the wrong way or in a pro forma way. They're having meetings but they're not listening. Right. They're talking and telling. They're not really listening. Because what Sean is saying is hey, you know, you know I just had a newborn and I'm going to give you 100%. I'm um, used to giving M you 110 but hear him, there's something else is going on. Right. You know what I'm saying? So just lay off for, you know, for six months or a year until he gets used to this new thing in his life or whatever. The point is if you're not Listening and you don't know the person, then you make silly little mistakes. So for example, I worked in higher education, you know, for, for most of my career and that was a pattern. I knew members of my staff, you know, at hr, largely women, I could tell you exactly when they were going to take leave every year. Their primary responsibility for them in their life was to be parents. And I get the local school system schedule and I knew when spring break was, whatever. And ah, then of course, if you're smart manager, you know when their anniversary is and things because you see a pattern over time and you can just put it on the calendar. And so I used to have this thing where I'd say, um, you know, there's no work hours, there's no, I don't approve vacation. You decide because you know what your work is and what the requirements of the enterprise are. You have to be there on game day, substitute, whatever. But I knew in game days we had presidential searches or we had this thing going on or whatever and I look at and go, uh, oh man, she's going to be out and I'm going to give her an excuse for that. She didn't have to ask because I knew that this was something was important to that person. And then you have to explain it to the rest of the staff, right? You ask. I decided, you see what I'm saying? The point is you knew your employees. How are you going to know your employees? You're going to have a series of brief structured conversations with them over a period of time, right? So that's what it's not. It's not magic, it's not rocket science.

Speaker B: It's a management system needs a system and discipline. Uh, uh, last sort of question of this and then I want to ask you just one other, just one broad thing that you'd like to leave with listeners. But um, what about the executive team? Is this something that you start at the top and then roll it out, or do you start in a department, you know, and is working with like the present CEO and the direct reports are they, do they view this differently than let's say, uh, you know, shift supervisor, frontline manager, that type of thing?

Speaker A: Well, uh, I found that the star managers, and I mean the star executives, they do it already. They don't necessarily do it in this manner or in a structured way, but that's why they're successful, because they figured out how to get this out of people. So they have some methodologies that are similar, A B, intuitively, once you explain it to them, Most, uh, you know, kind of get it, right? So, uh, you know, uh, uh, which is. Which is good. And then the other. Some people are relieved because they're like, oh, you've given me a tool to use and I could follow that, or whatever. Right? And then you got the introverts, man. They're relieved. Right? It's like, oh, man, I know exactly how to have that conversation. Right? You know what I'm saying? Like, I just have to follow these questions here. Whatever. So, you know, the reactions are different. But we sell it to executives by the basic thing that every executive wants. Performance improvement. That's what it's about. This is not about checking a box. This is not about, you know, doing that. This is designed, uh, to improve performance. It's a performance improvement system. That's all it is. So we found executives, and then we train them differently, of course. Right? You know, we talk about. We talk about the culture that they set. We talk about the system. We talk about supervisors and how those are integrated. But the point is that we found executives to be early adopters, and we tell them, hey, have, uh, the conversation. Or they will also say, well, you know, I wish I'd had that when I was coming up.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's important to get them on board because they often, uh, act as a role model for the rest of the. You know, if they're showing it, doing it, then the next level down does it well. And it just cascades nicely often in an organization. So seeing that leadership team buying in, either. You're right. Either with a system that they've used over, that they built themselves because they know it works, or adopting one or whatever.

Speaker A: And one additional thing for executives is that at a certain management level, you don't really have to manage the system because you have senior enough people to do it for you. So you basically say to executives, if you don't want to write the notes and stuff like that, just have your directors do it because they can, because they're doing it for their people, and they're doing it for you because you're more busy than they are. That's kind of how we design bureaucracies, right?

Speaker B: Uh, tell, tell. Uh, I think the readers would be very interested in this book. And the worst work that you've done here, how do they. How do they get in touch with you if they wanted to reach out to learn more? And, uh, you know, where do they get. Do they go to Amazon or they go to the, um, shrm or where do they get copies of this or where they can learn more about it.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's widely available. I mean, you know, SHRM is a publisher. So you know, obviously they're the biggest HR organization in the planet. So it's easy to get it, you know, uh, Amazon, et cetera, et cetera. Performanceconversations.com is the website and I'm simply Chris performanceconversations.com I mean, so easy, easy, easy to get to or whatever. So happy to help folks in any way. I'm a little bit of an hr, ah, evangelist. Right. You know, in that, you know, I think we do better by our people and have a more productive work environment. Uh, with the key, if we treat employees like people, uh, developing rapport, we forget the person inside of the performer. And I think you unlock human potential by focusing on that coaching approach, which is to get to know that perform performer and their quirks and their needs and their, you know, kind of maladies or, you know, you know, or just the thing that makes them tick. And the only way you do that is to get to know them through a series, uh, of brief structured conversations. Right. Over time you get better and better at tweaking how you work and relate to the other person. The 20th century model is over that. I'm um, firm but fair. I treat everybody the same. That's for the birds. It's 21st century model. You tell the whole team, go get them and the same thing. 21st century model is like the tennis coach or the golf coach. No, I'm coaching Chris or Paul or Susan, and Susan is different than Chris and I gotta tweak myself to give her what she needs. And you get there by learning that person, interacting with them and hearing what they're saying. Right. What, what they beat.

Speaker B: I like that analogy of a golf coach. Uh, everyone has a, you know, a unique swing, something slightly different. And they all can hit the ball and you know, get them into the hole and maybe get a par or bogey. But everyone does it in a different way. There's no standard out there. So, uh, that's a really good analogy. If there's one last thing, if there's anything you'd like to leave our listeners with one last sort of idea or suggestion, Just what would that be?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I think I should just share that with you. Is treating an individual as, um, an individual, the person behind the performer and the idea that you as their coach, you co perform. Right. You can have a superstar player without a superstar coach. It's a dyad. When you get better, your people get better. Right. You know, so focus on the idea of co performance, uh, and I think that helps to unleash the collective's potential.

Speaker B: Well, Christopher, that's an excellent way to wrap up, uh, this podcast. And, uh, well, thank you very much. And I, uh, think there's some great nuggets in here, really, like, uh, that idea of working together to achieve the goals, not the manager. You know, driving performance through metrics and, uh, punitive type of approach, but trying to work together to achieve what makes sense. And some of your approaches are so simple for managers. I think it's an easy tool to adopt or a process to adopt, whatever. And, uh, I'm glad you have some resources where some of our listeners can learn more. And all of this will be in the show notes. So thank you very much and looking forward to improving performance, uh, one step at a time. Thanks, Christopher.

Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening to voice activated. If you've heard something that got you thinking, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, talk about it, put it into play. That's how better workplaces get built. When you're ready to move from insight into action, head over to telematics. Map.com you'll find tools, resources and strategies to help you lead better with clarity, empathy and impact. And make sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss any more real conversations with leaders who know that some of the best ideas for change don't come from the top, but from those employees closest to the work.