How to give a performance review your team won't dread

Lia Garvin (0:00)

For your employees, one of the most dreaded, dreaded moments of the year or twice a year or quarterly, whatever frequency you do them at, are employee reviews. Like literally fill people with dread. They feel like, God, if I get this wrong, what does that mean for my career? Is it done for me? Do I cut off the future that I have been dreaming about?

And I say that because if you are not taking seriously how stressful employees can feel about reviews, then you're not going to set them up right to demystify the process. And it's going to be this whole thing that takes everyone's focus away from the work for like weeks at a time. And so today on Managing Made Simple, I'm going to talk about how to demystify the employee review process and structure these conversations in a way that instead of being stressful, really allows you to come away with a plan that your team member is owning and they feel accountable to. All right, let's do this.

Welcome to Managing Made Simple, a Real Talk podcast about the ins and outs of leading a team. I'm Lia Garvin, your host, and bring a decade of experience driving team operations in places like Google, Apple, and Microsoft on a mission to make leading your team easier. From delegating to feedback to one-on-ones and more, each week is a mini master class on making leading your team easier. Whether you're managing one person or a hundred, everyone is welcome to hang out on Managing Made Simple.

Coming from working in Big Tech, at Microsoft, at Google, employee reviews were like the literal most stressful thing ever. And if you're in a corporate company, you might have experienced this too, where they are this major milestone where they, if they happen twice a year, you're building a...

Anybody listening that works in a corporate team understands the perils of the employee review. I remember when I worked at Microsoft and at Google, the employee review would take people offline for weeks, trying to write the perfect self-assessment, trying to capture every little granular achievement in the right way so that they wouldn't feel like they missed an opportunity to showcase what they did. Then managers would meet for weeks to calibrate people to make sure that they really vetted them against other people and there'd be decisions made on promotions and ratings and all sorts of things. This kind of system created so much stress, so much anxiety. In companies like Microsoft or Google or other places, they constantly looked at how can we improve this process because it is so stressful. And I'm sure whatever kind of company you're at, if it's a large one, the employee review process is this thing that creates a ton of dread. Now, for you as a manager, why does it create all this dread? Because you're preparing these, you're writing your own assessments, you are having to give feedback to someone that maybe doesn't want to hear it, all of these things. And if you're a business owner, maybe you haven't even thought about how to have an employee review. Maybe you haven't done it. Maybe you've done them inconsistently. Maybe you are just the same of not wanting to have a conversation with an employee, and then kind of not see eye to eye on where things are netting out. So employee reviews are so stressful because there's like the ultimate moment of feedback. And if it doesn't go right, it's like we had this one moment of giving the perfect feedback and the person didn't hear it, now they're mad and now they may quit. Like, yuck, okay? It's spiral central.

Now, one thing I learned from working in a company like Google, where the review would take people, like it would be all consuming for weeks. And actually they did change the system before I left. So, you know, I don't really even know exactly how it is now, but there was a time when it would take, like people would be focusing on it for weeks to get the perfect kind of, everything written up in the perfect way.

And when I saw that at Google, what I did was I got really passionate about working with employees, working with my peers, I should say, and helping them write their self-assessments. So helping them own their impact, own their achievement, articulate their accomplishments in a way that wasn't a laundry list of bullet points that nobody cared about, but really land the impact. Now, ironically, this became one of my signature keynotes, Owning Your Impact, that I give all over the world for people to really feel like, hey, I'm gonna teach you a method for how to nail a performance view by landing the why, not just the what, right? The impact, not just the effort.