Removing the Ambiguity

If we want to have any chance of removing the ambiguity that too frequently surrounds the values listed on our conference room walls and detailed through the first few pages of our employee handbooks we’d better be sharing specific examples of what those core values look like in the workplace. To ensure our team members know exactly what those values mean, and how each relates to what they do daily, it’s up to us (as leaders) to share examples of what our company values look like in action.

Never one to set an expectation without providing a clear explanation of how we could achieve it, John went on to teach those of us in that small group a short but powerful lesson on how he works with each organization he serves to be sure he understands exactly what they expect from him and how he identifies ways he can deliver more than they expect. While the first step was simply asking the client to share their expectation, he went on to detail the specific questions he asks around their response to develop a clear picture of what results they hoped to achieve afterward. Understanding their goals, and learning key information about their organization, allows him to tailor his message to be more applicable to everyone in the audience. If you’ve seen John speak with various groups, using similar stories or points to connect in different ways, you can bet those tweaks have been based on what he learned from his host in advance when he asked what they expected from him.

That quick lesson has served me and Cindy extremely well over the last decade. Without having a specific understanding of what someone expects us to deliver (in writing), we’ve found that it’s rarely worth providing so much as a ballpark price structure. Even if there’s an initial agreement on price, it’s incredibly hard to hit a target that has yet to be identified. While this can be a bit abstract with what we do, it’s certainly not in most businesses. Think about it, would you ever ask a contractor to price a building without providing the size, location, and at least a rough idea of the materials involved? 

With all that in mind, let’s think about what most organizations do when sharing their core values… How much detail do we provide for the folks we’re onboarding to ensure they understand how they can uphold those values? And what are we doing to help the folks who have been with us for years stay dialed in on those values? Unfortunately, I’ve seen far too many scenarios where team members aren’t even provided with clarity around how their work stacks up against performance metrics. If that’s unclear, I can’t imagine they’d have much chance of tying any of it to the organization’s values!

“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 of any kind 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 while working for a large grocery store chain through my last two years of high school, I don’t recall ever sitting down with a manager for input on how I was doing. That could have been because I took on new positions within the company as quickly as I was able to 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 was left to 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, which took around five years in a best case scenario at the time. I remember my supervisor reviewing the single sheet of paper he had prepared in advance, pointing to the dozen or so bubbles he had filled in and telling me which ones meant that I exceeded requirements, met requirements, or needed 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 so we could 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!

Providing Specific Examples

Before we walk through a few steps we can take to remove every bit of ambiguity we possibly can from the core values our organization operates on, let’s tackle an issue every leader faces at one point or another: even when we detail exactly what “doing good” looks like for each of our team members, it can still be tough to address performance that just isn’t meeting expectations. In many cases, a minor issue is completely overlooked, over and over and over again, simply because addressing it directly seems more difficult than working around the issue. While I know I’ve been guilty of this too, choosing this path only reinforces the less than desirable behavior, compounding any issue we’ll inevitably need to deal with down the road.

Not long after I started what turned out to be my last full time position before transitioning to self employment, I worked directly with the owner of that company (who was my immediate supervisor) to implement a more concise performance evaluation process. While the one page sheet I had suggested was streamlined from the five page report the company had in place - but rarely used - leading up to that point, the key to it providing any measurable value was based on the specific detail provided for each topic it addressed. Since I was somewhere between 60 and 90 days into my role with the company, I suggested he use me as his guinea pig. The first section addressed “Job Knowledge” and he rated me as “Meets Requirements.” Before he could even provide any details, I told him that I didn’t agree with him. He looked a little puzzled but quickly offered to change it to “Exceeds Requirements.” For perspective, I had been in safety and human resources for around fifteen years at that point and had dealt with close to ten times the number of employees in other roles. That said, the bulk of my experience was in a very different industry and I felt like I had a ton to learn to perform at the level I wanted to for his organization. I explained that I thought “Needs Improvement” was a much more realistic rating and detailed the areas I knew I needed to grow in.

I share that story, not to criticize the owner of that company (I truly enjoyed working with him), but as an example of how daunting it can be to provide what the other person may receive as criticism. In Know What You’re FOR, Jeff Henderson quotes Dr. Tim Irwin as providing an alternative approach: “Alliance Feedback is where a manager aligns herself with the employee, helping them live out who they truly want to become.” Henderson goes on to compare the two seemingly similar ideas by saying, “Constructive criticism is top-down. Alliance Feedback is peer-to-peer.”

I realize performance reviews are, indeed, top-down, but there’s no requirement for a supervisor or manager to treat their team members as minions; we most certainly can build strong relationships and work with them as peers. Having different responsibilities or job titles doesn’t mean either role is any more important than the other.

When I pushed back on the “Meets Requirements” rating, I knew enough about the position I was in to have a clear understanding of the gaps I still needed to fill to provide what he needed from me in that organization, and that’s why it made sense for me to be the guinea pig for that new evaluation approach. The tweak we were able to make from then on was to provide specific details for each team member being reviewed, covering exactly how their performance exceeded requirements, met requirements, or needed improvement based on where they were in the pay scale for their current role AND we were able to provide Alliance Feedback (although we didn’t call it that then because I’d hadn’t met Jeff Henderson yet) on what they needed to work on to reach their next goal.

When we only give general feedback, be that as approval or constructive criticism, we leave our team members to fill in the blanks with how each particular action they’re taking ties in. The same thing happens when we’ve only listed our values in the policy manual (that nobody ever actually looks at anyway) or somewhere on the wall in our office. Even the most articulate definition can be very difficult to connect with each individual role. Just like specifics matter in the performance review process, this same kind of clarity about how each value ties to the work each of us do can prevent things from going wrong like in the scenario we looked at earlier! We’ll dive into how simple that can be soon.