ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we meet to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  We’re into project management certification, doing the job of project management, and we get inside the brains of some of the leaders in the industry.

I’m your host, Nick Walker; and beside me are the resident experts Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  Now, in a perfect world you could look up “project manager” in the dictionary, and you’d find their pictures right beside the definition.  They are the epitome of project management.  They’re project managers themselves.  They instruct other project managers and those working to become one.

Now, guys, we decided that this topic deserved a double header.  So we’re going to pick up where we left off last time.  The subject, Andy, performance reviews.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, Nick.  In the podcast number 12, the last time, we dealt with this topic kind of generally.  And this time we’re going to get a little bit more specific.  We’re going to get into some best practices, some practical tools and techniques.

But to me, one of the things that we can do here is look at other organizations who are doing it right.  Last time we talked about a couple of ways that were outmoded, maybe that didn’t work so well anymore.  Now we want to look at the ones who are doing it right.  What are they doing?  How are they approaching it?  You know, because things change.  The same techniques that worked in the 1940s maybe don’t translate so well today.  A lot of organizations are doing some of the things the same way we did them in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and it’s time to take a fresh look at it.  So we’re going to try and update that.

But the bigger point here, this is one of those areas that causes project managers a lot of anxiety in giving performance reviews.  They don’t want to do it.  They get torqued up about it.  And a lot of times it’s even worse when you’re on the receiving end.  You know, you sit there, and you and I both know, everybody, everybody who’s listening to this podcast has probably had the experience where your manager gives you a performance review.  You hear several things you’re doing right, and then maybe one thing that you’re not doing so well.  And what do we walk away and focus on and obsess about the rest of the week is that one thing.  So we’re going to look at all of this today, but we’re going to get a lot more practical.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Before we get into some of those best practices, let’s rewind just a second, talk about maybe what sets a good performance review apart from a bad one.  Last time we talked about the old school we’re all familiar with, the annual review, the bell curve.  Now we’re talking about a new way, less formal, more frequent reviews.  We talked about some of the companies that have been involved in this new way, Bill.

BILL YATES:  Right, companies such as Accenture, Adobe, Deloitte, and GE.  Those are some places where we can take a peek and see what’s working for them and distill some best practices from that and share that.

NICK WALKER:  So some of the things we want to get into today are how to give a performance review; when to give a performance review; how to receive a performance review.  So let’s talk a little bit about some of these.  Let’s spend some time talking about when.  When is the best time to do this?

BILL YATES:  Yeah, and this was interesting.  So we talked about the breakaway from the annual review and how, like the companies I just mentioned, they’re ditching the annual review and saying this doesn’t make sense.  There’s too long of a gap between the performance and the review, the feedback.  Let’s make it more frequent, and let’s make it less formal.  Quarterly seems to be the rhythm that is coming out in most cases.

However, we talked about in our first episode some of the Agile practices and some of the things that we saw with that.  Andy mentioned some of the rhythms that are built into Agile, and the retrospectives that are done there, and even the daily stand-ups.  So I think the challenge for the project manager is to look at their business, to look at their projects and think about, all right, what makes sense?  When is a logical place for me to stop and have a review, have a conversation with team members?  That can vary; right?  Kind of depends on the projects, the length of the projects that we have.

And even, you know, I think about our own experiences, Andy.  The reporting cycle that we run into, some organizations have a reporting cycle that lends itself really well to a quarterly review.  Financially, for instance, we may do a review then.  So depending on the type of project setup that you have, or the key metrics for your organization, you may find an ideal time to hit the pause button and have that performance review.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, Bill, I had an interesting interaction with a company that’s deep into Agile.  And it was at a project management event I went to recently, and we were discussing the podcast in general and discussing the fact that we were talking about this.  They said, you know, we do Agile.  And so really with the level of Agile transparency that we embrace, everything’s on the wall.  All the performance metrics are on the wall.  We don’t really do reviews because it’s all publicly reviewed all the time.

And that sounds good at first, but really you don’t assume that people are going to get it that way.  You don’t assume, A, that people are necessarily going to take away – some people have blind spots.  And even though they can see that they’re lagging behind, they may not understand completely the impact on the organization and some of the reasons why.  So that needs to be discussed.  But then there’s another reason for compliance.  So you have to do reviews.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  You have to do them for HR purposes.  Big organizations, small organizations should do reviews.  And I agree with you.  I think quarterly, making them smaller, making them more frequent, little bit more manageable is a better way to go.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

NICK WALKER:  And I love the NFL illustration that you gave last time about how the coach gets in there, gets into the player’s face right away.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, right.

NICK WALKER:  Makes an impact.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  And, you know, in Atlanta, sometimes the owner gets in the NFL player’s face right away, too.

BILL YATES:  Dallas fans can relate to that, as well.  Yeah, but Andy, to build on your point, you think about that in an Agile world, maybe the team sees.  They can look at the kanban.  They can look at the burn up, the burn down charts and see how the team is doing.  But they may not have a good sense for how they – they may not know the personal impact they’ve had.  So again, back to that sports analogy.  Hey, the team won.  We came back in the fourth quarter and won the game, so everybody’s excited about that.  But the coach is still going to have that review for each position player as to how – what was your performance?  What was your contribution to that?

ANDY CROWE:  You have to because people do not always construct the same narrative for their performance or lack thereof than the team or the coach does.

BILL YATES:  Right.  That’s true, yup.

NICK WALKER:  There’s probably some managers listening to this, though, who are saying, okay, this sounds great.  Sure, that’s ideal to do these reviews immediately.  But isn’t that going to cost me a lot in terms of time and money and productivity?

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Great question.  Sure.  Yeah.  I think about a colleague I ran into recently, and he had a team of 25 or 30 under him that he had to review.  And he had been – “Hey, I haven’t seen you for a while.  Where you been?”  “I’ve been on the road doing performance reviews.  It’s that time of the year.”  And, “Oh, wow, how many you reviewing?”  “Twenty-five, 30.”  “Really.”  And so he was telling me the hours and hours he put into this.

ANDY CROWE:  There’s a flag on the field right there.  That is absolutely too many people to have to manage and review.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  So it was interesting.  But because this is less formal, this should be less costly.  And I think, again, doing the research, I think Accenture had a great example.  The CEO of Accenture had a quote.  They determined that they would disband rankings, their old system, in 2016 and go with a more fluid system of ongoing feedback.  And in doing that, there’s a great quote.  Nick, you’re the professional.  You can actually handle these tough names.  You can pronounce them correctly.  So I’m going to toss this to you.

NICK WALKER:  Sometimes I can.  But this is a French guy.  And my French is so bad that even my French professor in college made fun of my accent.  But CEO Pierre Nanterme.

BILL YATES:  There you go.

ANDY CROWE:  We’ll live with that.  And Mr. Nanterme, if that’s incorrect, you’re welcome to contact the podcast, and we will issue a correction.

NICK WALKER:  Might even get a mug out of it.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, he might even get a mug.

NICK WALKER:  But CEO Pierre Nanterme said, “Imagine, for a company of 330,000 people, changing the performance management process.  It’s huge.”  He says, “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past.”  Yikes.

BILL YATES:  Ninety percent.  That, see, to a manager, to someone who’s – again, I think of that guy that I ran into, the colleague who had been on the road.  I think if you said, hey, guess what, next year you’re going to spend 10 percent of the time on this.  Really.  Well, huge savings; right?  It frees him up to do – and project managers, you can relate to this.  It frees you up so you can actually do your real job.

BILL YATES:  Right?