Milan: [00:00:00] Under the day, under the afternoon in Vancouver, under the morning in Sydney. Right? And that means another episode of Card Cast. So you’ve been here before, you know what’s coming. If not So, you know next time. We’re going to shuffle some cards and see what is it to talk about today. Shuffle. Shuffle, shuffle. Shuffle. Why don’t you take this one?
Ged: Views, ratings and feedback. I, I love this card. This is, this is actually very topical for me, so I’ll. I’ll tell you a story about about what’s come up with me and my coaching business with one of my clients quite recently. But what do we mean by reviews, rating, and feedback. So this card is all about the coaching reviews that we use to assess the performance of a function, not the individual.
[00:01:00] And let’s, let’s, let’s get the elephant out of the room straight away. We don’t like the term performance reviews and no one else does either. They normally serve no purpose.
Milan: Reviewed,
Ged: Indeed, they, they serve no purpose. They burn a huge amount of organizational energy and time, and they effectively. Fulfill or create nothing of any lasting value.
So let’s, let’s get that out the way straight away. These are not performance reviews. These are coaching reviews that are designed to coach the individual to better performance, to improve themselves, to achieve the outcomes that the organization and the leader and the individual wants to achieve from the function.
So not performance reviews, they’re coaching reviews now in metronome software. The software that we use with our clients, this has [00:02:00] been set up to fall to follow on straight from scorecards. So if you’ve got a scorecard, you can very, very easily create a function review, a coaching review and it literally is one or two clicks.
Milan: And if you don’t have a scorecard, you better start with scorecards, but that’s another card. That’s another episode.
Ged: And if you, as, as Milan says, if you don’t have a scorecard, there is another, another edition of this card cast that goes in deep onto how to put a scorecard together. So, question from me, Milan. What’s the thing that you see most often that trips up the teams that you work with around coaching reviews?
Milan: The experience of. I know it’s a dirty word, but performance reviews from the past, especially in established organizations, it’s a chore for everybody. It needs to happen. Really, the outcome of it is for the [00:03:00] member, like, okay, what kind of race am I getting this year? Right? It’s just, everything’s wrong about it.
It’s absolutely ridiculous. By the way, we should be talking about compensation as a, as a, maybe it’ll be a separate card, but maybe we’ll mention it later today. But that is the biggest part. It’s like are used to they hear the word review. It’s a performance review and it’s criticism, it’s top down.
It’s, you know, what is it that you’re doing or either, Hey, you’re great, awesome. Here is your 2%, or whatever. Or you know, it’s something to be dreaded. And now, it’s dreaded, it doesn’t happen more often than, you know, once a year. So it’s. Completely meaningless, and as you’re saying, a huge, huge expenditure of, of energy.
So switching people into the thinking that no, it’s a dedicated time for a three-way conversation. The leader, the person who is accountable for the function or who holds the scorecard. [00:04:00] And the scorecard itself. Because the scorecard is a subject of the review as well, because we need to look at does it still fit?
You know, did we put the right accountability there? Because the fact that some accountability is not working might be that it’s on the wrong scorecard, right? So it’s a open conversation on what is it that we can do better the next quarter. That’s what makes it a coaching review because we are collaborating of improving everybody’s outcome and experience as we go, and we do it every quarter because here is just way too long time.
Ged: Absolutely. Absolutely. So there’s this conceptual barrier that PE, that most people have in their heads, particularly if they’ve worked in large organizations, that this is a performance review. Now, I’ll say again, it is not a performance review, it is a coaching review now. The, the, the story I alluded to earlier on is is an experience I had with one of my clients recently, and we’d got the scorecards in [00:05:00] place.
The whole leadership team had their scorecards and they were starting to cascade them down to the next level. So the next step as we moved into the next quarterly was, okay, let’s start going through the coaching review. Process and they were blocked. They couldn’t get there. So in the end, I, I recorded a video and I circulated that, and that still wasn’t cutting through.
So at the quarterly meeting, what I decided to do was actually do a live. Coaching review in front of the whole of the leadership team. So I, I sort of asked someone to volunteer and they were very forthcoming and they were more than willing to do it. And I said to them, okay, before the session, you know, let go through the coaching review and, you know, rate yourself, you know, make it a bit of fun.
Now, maybe you put some super green in there, maybe you put some red in there and I’ll go through separately and assess you as well, you know, and we’ll just go through as if it was a normal coaching review in front of everyone else, but let’s make it fun. Let’s make it a learning experience. So that’s [00:06:00] exactly what we did in the session. We, we had a lot of fun. We had some laughs, you know, I put some things down as super green and he put them down as red. And but the point here was that we wanted to make it a conversation around the differences. You know, in the scorecard assessment for each individual area. So if I put someone down as.
Super green and they put themselves down as red. Well, okay, well, you know, why are you being so hard on yourself? You actually, you knocked it out the park this quarter. But the point is there is a difference of opinion. There is a difference of expectation. So there’s a lack of clarity about what someone thinks they should have done and what they actually did.
And that can go both ways either. So having the conversation around, well, I think I didn’t perform and you think I did perform so. Reconciling that expectation live in the moment in the coaching review. That is what a coaching review is all about. So we had a lot of fun and it was very instructive and people [00:07:00] walked into that session.
Hating performance reviews, and they came out understanding what coaching reviews were and how it could work to their advantage, and how they could cascade it down to their teams positively to their advantage also. So that’s a practice that I’m gonna adopt with all of my clients from here on in.
Milan: I think that the important piece is that, no, this is not a different version of performance reviews. You do this so you don’t have to do performance reviews, right?
Ged: Yep.
Milan: With that concept that’s wrong. And it just, you know, shut and let’s forget about it because again, it’s, it’s super, super unhelpful. Other piece is, you know, as you were, as you were talking, I think that this is not just about reviews. This is, I think about Metronomics as a whole. Like I would say that 90% of Metronomics is the removal the element of surprise from our daily life, right? [00:08:00] And this is it, right? Like, because you don’t want to go for a year to realize that.
To go back to your example, the assumption of how good, like the good look, like looks like, sorry.. Differs and they differed for a year, know, and the person was stressed because they were thinking that they’re not doing a very good job, and their leader was like, oh, everything’s great. I don’t need to interact.
So, and they, you know, people feel like they’re not being supported, or it could go the other way around, right? Like, that’s the worst scenario when the, when the team member believes that they’re doing a bang up job. Leader is. Not there with them on it. And then, you know, if you would hey, you know, you are actually been doing something else then I expected you to do, like, it’s, it’s ridiculous.
Right? The one thing that it’s not in the cart, or maybe it is actually, is the close [00:09:00] interconnectedness of the review with the coaching one-on-ones,
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: We do
Ged: What’s, what’s the distinction there? I mean, it’s probably worth just clarifying the difference between those two things.
Milan: What do you think?
Ged: So for me, coaching reviews are things you should do quarterly. Some of my clients do them monthly. I’ll leave it to them. Some of them do it every six weeks, which I think is a good, good compromise. But the important thing is it’s not every year. You know, it is every quarter, sometimes more often, whereas a one-on-one coaching conversation or chat is how they’re going in the moment. So feedback is like fish. It starts to stink after two days. So if you are not giving regular one-on-one feedback positive and performance improvement as and I, I mean that as a positive term, not a negative term.
You know, you did this, you would’ve achieved a better [00:10:00] outcome. Had you thought about this and you know, how do you think you could have done better on this sort of. This sort of thing, you know? So those things happen in the moment, you know, and it might be, you know, weekly scheduled or review, or it might be actually in the moment when the opportunity arises.
And I, I actually think it should be both. So some of my. Clients do sort of the one-on-one chats, you know, every week or every fortnight, but it’s, it’s supplemented by that in the moment feedback, because as I mentioned, feedback is like phish. It stinks after two days. You gotta tell people in the moment.
Milan: You know, a weekly one-on-one is really how are we progressing? What help do you need? Right? In my in my way of explaining it to my client is that the weekly one-on-one is the time that you as a leader, commit. To make yourself available to your A players for whatever it is they need. So [00:11:00] they set up the agenda, they set up what they need to talk about.
Again, it’s a great time to provide some timely feedback. It’s a great time to you know, open a new discussions or whatever you need to bring through that person as a leader. But the primary goal is I, as a team member, I know that I have. Access, guaranteed access to my leader on an ongoing basis. You know, sometimes it’s weekly, sometimes it’s, as you say, every fortnight.
But you know, I definitely prefer weekly because even if it’s short, even if it’s about, it’s in the calendar, you know, it’s there. That also pre preserves or protects that leader calendar because you know, we’ll be talking to them in two days. So maybe you don’t need to send that email. You don’t need to send that slack message. You just put it into a discussion item for your one-on-one that is coming up anyway. Right. That, that helps everybody. So I often see the one-on-ones as the major, major [00:12:00] productivity boost for the whole organization. And then all you have to say is that every 13th or every sixth one. Is the coaching review where we are bringing the scorecard into the conversation on the weekly basis.
We don’t necessarily talk about the scorecard. We might be talking about the priorities, the things that are important within the context of the
Ged: Yes.
Milan: But when we are talking about reviews, we go step further, right? We are literally looking at okay how does this sit structurally? Right? Do we have. Right accountabilities. Do we have, are we trending well towards our you know, longer term goals? The, I’ll add one more thing, Ken, is that, you know, the, the scorecard, sorry. The scorecard, the card’s title is reviews, rating and feedback. Use the word feedback a couple of times.. Leaders often hate to give feedback, [00:13:00] especially the negative one because it’s hard and it’s emotional loaded, but it’s a skill. This framework for coaching reviews that, you know, Metronomics has that, that we are coaching, is actually practicing that muscle in a very, very safe way. Because all you’re
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Say, Hey, here is the expectation. Is it green? Is it red? Right? Or you can use a numbering scale. It doesn’t really matter. I like the colors because it’s pretty damn obvious. You don’t have to decode whether the number is off by one or off by three. It’s either it’s different, so we need to talk about it, or we are aligned and we can talk about the solution together.
Ged: And maybe this is a good time to actually go through that scale. ’cause I, I really love the way you categorize that scale. And I know, I know you say it’s not you, it’s someone else that came up with it. But to talk us through that scale.
Milan: Well, I think I did I did steal it from Kim Scott’s Radical Candor. So here is the credit given but you know, we have four colors in, [00:14:00] in well metronome. But if you choose the colors as the as the method, by the way, I have a story about that.. And that is a we have red, yellow, green, and dark green are what we like to call super green. We have to agree of what it is. People hate to put a yellow in, right? Again, it’s like, it’s conflict avoidance, but no, just think about it in the way which is described. So green is good. It’s okay. It’s awesome, right? We don’t necessarily need to talk about it. Like if we agree on it, it is just fine. Super green is beyond expectations like holy smokes.
We probably need to recognize that and we need to talk about it from that perspective. Yellow is good for now, meaning it’s all right, but we probably need to talk about it to make sure it stays [00:15:00] good. Right? There is
Ged: I like. I like that.
Milan: About.
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Right.
Ged: Yeah. Good. Good for now.
Milan: It’s good for now. It’s okay. Right? Is, hey, we need to talk about if something is not working And again, it is an invitation to a conversation. It’s not a criticism. And going back to the removal of the element of surprise. Team members shouldn’t be surprised to see red. They probably know it’s coming and after a couple of cycles with your LA players, the differences in the color coding are going to be few and far between. It becomes a collaboration of how can we improve this? We are working together like early on, you know, it can come because we are aligning the expectations, we are aligning the definitions. But once you get there, it’s a 15 minute conversation that we do once a quarter or once every six weeks. I love that, by the way.. We are just saying, Hey, let’s [00:16:00] just have this checkpoint to make sure we are on the right track from the bigger perspective. Right? And then we’ll bring the ICP into the conversation, which is a or, or right. Individual
Ged: Yeah. Yep.
Milan: No.
Ged: Yeah, and, and you mentioned that you know, if it’s red, they probably know it’s coming. How do they know? Because they’ve had the coaching in the moment. Either in their one-on-one reviews weekly or fortnightly, or actually in the moment as it happens, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Now, if someone turns up to a review and they’re getting a rating that they are surprised at, it’s too late, they should know in advance.
So just, just picking up the point you made earlier on. Yep.
Milan: You know, most likely there is a metric that is already showing that there is something that we will need to talk about, right? Because again metrics are playing a big part of it. But again, you have the accountability in the scorecard. This is something that needs to be, and here is a way, you know, which we understand whether that works well or not.
Ged: Yeah. [00:17:00] Yeah. One of the things I look out for in, in coaching reviews is, you know, where there’s a wide range. You know, if someone is super green, but they’ve also got some red, now maybe they’re focusing too much on a specific area that they should maybe come down on. Come down because I ev everyone has the same number of hours in the day, and if they’re focusing too much time, too much attention, too many resources on a particular area, and that is causing a deficiency or a lack of resource in another area, then the super green is great, but not at the expense of a red.
So sometimes it’s about, yeah, maybe you just need to reallocate your resources here. Maybe you just need to move things around a little bit.
Milan: Just had that conversation is actually quite interesting. You know what happens very often in engineering organizations or sometimes in sales organizations? Surprise, they have something in common. And that is the same mistake. You take your best salespeople and you take your best sales engineers and you give them a [00:18:00] managerial role because it’s kind of the next step up, right? And then what usually happens is that you still want them to be the, the great engineers or the great, great salespeople, but you have to realize that there are two different scorecards, two different
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Right? So when I see this big spread. Something is super green and something is red. My first question is, is the scorecard right? Does the red stuff belong here? Or is it, should it be somewhere else? Is it here for historical reasons because nobody else was available to take that accountability. It needs to travel somewhere. It might be that, Hey, we know it’s not great. We’re doing what we can here. We’re gonna fix it with this new hire next quarter. Right? But we have a plan. That’s the important piece.
Ged: I like that. That’s good. That’s good. So, so it’s not so scorecard conversations are not just around where there are [00:19:00] differences. Obvious if, if both the reviewer and the reviewee rates it as red. Then you need to talk about that. It’s not about where there’s just differences. Yeah, yeah.
Milan: I
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: When there is a difference, it’s usually much more interesting.
Ged: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. Because the mismatch and expectations. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Does this
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Like, it’s great.
Ged: Yeah. Yeah.
Milan: From that, from that tension comes solutions and comes improvements, and comes innovation. And I love that process. I loved it as a, as a leader. Right. And I think that, you know, going back to your previous point, Our leaders that we are teaching this process, they underestimate one thing and that is how freaking simple.
It’s how easy it is, right? Because they have the baggage of, oh, review’s so hard. Right. It’s easy. It’s collaborative. It helps with cohesion. Right. It helps with the understanding of what it, it allows for the conversation of what a person [00:20:00] wants, where do they want to go, where do they want to be when they grow up?
And is this card helping them to get to get there? And again, back to an individual development plan, how does it fit on their journey? Right. You know, I, I just cannot, I cannot overstate how, how important and valuable this is.
Ged: And we shouldn’t we, we can’t understate how easy it is unlike the normal performance review process. So we may have mentioned in this. In addition that these are not performance reviews. Now they, they should be really simple and they are really simple. They take a little bit of preparation, but if you’re spending more than 30 minutes preparing for a coaching review, you’re probably doing something wrong.
The scorecard is probably not right for you, or you are not right for the scorecard. So minimal preparation. And the review itself should be done in 20, 30 minutes unless there is a particular topic [00:21:00] that’s gonna need a real deep dive. And again, that probably comes back to the scorecard or the individual.
Maybe you haven’t got the right person in that functional role.
Milan: You know, I was just thinking about how many cards, you know, we have, you know, over 50 of them, right? There are actually quite a few cards that are dealing with a topic of feedback in some way,
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: You know, whether it’s talking about clarity, whether it’s talking about framework of how to deal with hard truth, right? There is a lot of that because, hey, as a leaders. This is our primary thing is to. Provide feedback to people, provide help, provide assistance right through that. This tool is just so powerful if you can make it of your organizational habit across the whole organization. Such a huge lift for us, for the whole team. And again, you [00:22:00] remove. You remove the element of surprise, you detect only that there might be a misalignment of expectation between the team member and the organization. You can deal with it in a proactive fashion. You don’t have to do you know, anything drastic and then everybody knows what’s coming.
And it’s, again, those were usually the best times is when we could, you know, shake hands after the, you know, after the review and say, Hey. We have a plan that’s great, regardless of what colors we showed up in the morning. In, in, into the conversation, we end up with a plan and we know that we are aligned going forward.
Ged: ’cause things are not always super green and sometimes, you know, you need to readjust and reshape or sometimes something’s just hard. There’s a big thing that needs to get tackled and it’s gonna take a while and it won’t be green or super green for a bit, but that’s just organizational development.
That’s just business.
Milan: I would almost say that if everything is super green, you are not trying very hard,
Ged: Yeah. Yeah. Or your expectations are too low. [00:23:00] Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Not
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Yourself very
Ged: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Wrapping this card, cast up coaching reviews. Absolutely critical, not performance reviews. They’re really easy. They take minimal preparation time, and they shouldn’t take long to run. If you’re not running coaching reviews, you’re missing out on one of the key aspects of the metronomic system.
Okay. Should we keep going and do, what did we talk about?
Milan: Yeah. So,
Ged: Do you want me to You go. You go.
Milan: Reviews, performance reviews, reviews, coaching reviews. What are the difference? Why do people hate them? How to do it better, right? It was one of our longer episodes, at least in the raw material. Maybe Luke is going to cut it down a little bit, but. If you’re not doing reviews, if you’re afraid of them, if that [00:24:00] word is creating some anxiety definitely look at this episode.
And there is a lot of practical tips and a lot of of what you should find in doing your reviews and doing their them right and doing them often. I forgot to say that.
Ged: Yep. And key thing about this, what we talked about in this, this episode is these are not performance reviews. They are coaching reviews, and they are an opportunity for people to come together in agreement on how the function is operating. If you’re not running coaching reviews, you’re missing out,
wrap.
Milan: So last, but.
