“Doing Good” but What Does Good Look Like?

I started my first full time job just after turning fifteen years old and, as they say, the rest is history… But that history makes for a good story every now and then! In this case, the story won’t be all that funny but it’s certainly relevant why it’s so important for us to remove the ambiguity that too often surrounds our core values, and can just as often keep our team members from understanding how the work they’re performing connects directly with the compensation they receive.

Over the years, I’ve worked with supervisors, managers, and business owners to improve or even implement formal performance review processes to provide their team members with specific feedback on how they’re doing in their roles. I don’t remember ever receiving an evaluation like this until about 90 days into my first job in manufacturing, nearly five years after joining the workforce. That may be because my first job at fifteen was just for the summer, or because several of the positions I held over the next few years were with small companies. Even through my last two years of high school while working for a large grocery store chain, I don’t recall ever sitting down with a manager for input on how I was doing. That may have been because I took on new positions within the company as quickly as I could earn them, and those “promotions” were what they considered as reviews, or it could be because I spent most of my time away from work and school doing all I could to cull my weaker brain cells… Either way, I could only assume the effort I put into my job was what my bosses expected since they allowed me to continue showing up and I kept receiving a paycheck for it.

That first real review in the manufacturing facility was a bit intimidating. I had been through for around three months and was one of the youngest people in the building. That company worked on a stepped pay grade system and missing out on a bump to a next step would extend the time it took to reach the top of the pay scale by around six months, and that took around five years in a best case scenario at the time. I remember my supervisor reviewing the single sheet of paper he had filled out in advance, pointing to the dozen or so bubbles he had filled in and telling me whether each meant exceeds requirements, meets requirements, or needs improvement. That took him all of about a minute. I don’t recall much about that but I’m sure the “exceeds requirements” marks were scarce; being so new to the manufacturing world, I was still trying to figure things out. On the next payday though, I saw a slight increase in my hourly rate - but I didn’t have any idea how I had earned it.

The decade and a half that followed wasn’t much different. I received “raises” on schedule and had plenty of opportunities to take on new roles, but I still don’t recall a single review where I heard how any specific tasks I did made a direct contribution to the organization’s goals or what I could do differently to achieve better results. While that changed slightly when I moved from an hourly role to a salaried position, the feedback was still abstract and tied more to big-picture metrics that my work had little (if any) impact on.

Even once I was in a human resources role within that large company, there wasn’t much I could do to change this. But when I took a position with a smaller company, I had the chance to help provide the team members being evaluated with something I had gotten very little of through over two decades of employment: direct input on how their effort tied to the results we achieved as a company! I was excited about this because I never got much value from hearing that I was doing good when I didn’t have a clear picture of what good looked like or what it would take to go from good to great. Just like providing feedback after a behavior-based safety observation, this required the me and the supervisor or manager leading the review to be familiar with the actions the team member had taken and be competent enough with their role to explain how those actions contributed to or took away from that oh-so-necessary productivity. With this kind of specificity, even a dreaded “needs improvement” mark provided valuable insight.

I’ll bet you can relate to some aspect of this. Hopefully it’s the latter but I’m guessing you’ve experienced the former at some point in your career too. If you have any involvement in providing evaluations for team members you work with, which example would they connect with most? In my experience, I’ve seen far too many who only see which dots are filled in without understanding why. And if they don’t know how their performance led to or prevented a pay increase, what are the odds of them having any real idea how they’re supposed to be living out a set of values printed in a handbook or painted on the wall? We’ve got to remove that ambiguity - and we’ll pick up there next time!