Performance management is not working

Performance management isn't dead. But the way you're doing it right now, that is what is killing your company. I'm Thomas, and over the last five years I've helped scale companies by changing one critical process that they were doing completely wrong. Here's what I've learned. Your managers are struggling. Your employees are disengaged. And it's not because people don't care. It's because you are focusing on the wrong thing. Let me ask you one thing. When was the last time one of your managers came to you and said he or she was excited about her performance review? Exactly? It never happens. Here's what I see in companies with hundred to a thousand employees. Managers avoid performance conversations. Especially the difficult ones. And when they have them, they're surface level conversations. How are you doing? Any issues? Okay, I'll see you next quarter. But in the meantime, your employees are thinking to themselves: Is somebody considering what I'm really capable of doing for this company? And you know what the real problem is? Skills are evolving so quickly, especially with AI and all these new things that are coming up. What got somebody here two years ago is most likely not going to get the person where he wants or she wants to be. But nobody wants to have a conversation about that. So here's what we discovered. There are only three things that separate people with high engaged, high performance employees to the others. First one. Focus on the manager. Don't focus on the tools. Don't focus on the process. Focus on the manager. The real value happens in that one-to-one conversation. That's where the magic happens. But here is the thing. It's not about making the process or the conversation go faster. It's about making that conversation meaningful for both the manager and the employee. Most companies have invested tremendous amount of money in tools to make the performance process go faster. That's the wrong move. What you really want is have your manager being prepared to have constructive growth focused conversations with their team members. That's what you really want. You don't want speed. You want quality of the interaction. You want quality of the conversation. Secondly, competencies above everything. Stop talking only about goals and objectives. Start to talk about competencies. Competencies of your team members. That is what is the key. I actually don't care if somebody hits their quarterly goal but can't work autonomously or can't do the complex analysis I'm expecting from that person. These are the type of competencies you want to invest in. So focus on core meta competencies like autonomy, complexity of the tasks, project management skills, interactions with others. Those meta competencies have passed the test of time. They are not short term, like the competencies you could require from team members. They pass the test of time. Those are the competencies you want your team member to grow on. And this is your role to make sure your team member talk about those competencies. Thirdly, a common language. That's where almost all companies fail. And without a common language, everybody has their own definitions of what good looks like. Depending on your background, you can be a very harsh manager or a very nice manager. Make sure you create a common language to define these dimension. With a shared language, performance conversations become really meaningful for the team member and the manager. Now here's where I'm gonna be excited because this is where the magic happens. We created something called the DOT meeting. Develop the Organization and Talent. Picture this: Before the annual review, managers spend seven minutes, seven minutes, not seven hours, seven minutes to prepare the DOT meeting. They use a common language to describe their team member strength, performance, competence, potential, using a single definition for each of these dimensions. And what happens afterwards. It's magic. It changes everything. When January arrives, your managers aren't winging it, aren't guessing it. They have a structured set of talking points to discuss with their team members to have a very meaningful conversation. Let me give you a very concrete example. Marine is an HRBP at Eggo Kitchen. Eggo Kitchen has about 400 employees over multiple locations. Sound familiar? Probably very similar to what you have. Before, she was an admin pusher. Hard for her to get her managers to complete the performance reviews. Hard for them to do it. And the ones who did it, was very superficial. After implementing the system, managers actually wanted to have the conversations. Employees engagement score skyrocketed. Performance discussions became development discussions. Stop asking your manager to do evaluations of performance. Ask them to enable performance. Okay, now I hear you thinking: But that's even more time for the managers. Actually it's less. Because after the DOT meeting managers don't need to prepare anything anymore. They have clear talking points on what to say to each team member. They know exactly how to develop the competence of the team members. So it's not more work. It's less work for your managers. So here's what I'm gonna do. This Friday, I'm organizing a webinar session titled: How to Transform Your Managers in Performance Enablers. In 45 minutes, I'll walk you through the whole DOT framework. How you can use a common language, how you prepare your managers to have meaningful conversations. But here's the thing. I'm limiting it to 20 people only. Because I wanna be able to have the proper interactions with all of you. Talking about multi-locations, remote, and all of the things that are happening in your companies. I want this to be for you. So I wanna have the discussions with you on how to implement these DOT meetings. This is not theory. This is a proven framework that works in a lot of companies like yours. Look, your managers are struggling with the performance reviews. Your employees want evolution. Evolution of their competencies. Not evaluation. And every month you wait, the gap between what your employees need and what you're giving them is getting bigger and bigger. So you can keep hoping that your current system will suddenly start working. Or you can join me for 45 minutes and see if the system could be working for your company. Click below to save your spot. And don't forget, there's only 20 spots. I'm Thomas and I'll see you on Friday.