You will feel a lot better after you have taken some time to breathe, collect your thoughts, and make a plan. Let's talk about the approach in a clear and logical manner. With all the information at your finger tips you will be able to create a plan while you will refine over your career but become the basis of how you operate.
“By failing to plan, you are preparing to fail.”
– Benjamin Franklin
First thing you need to understand is what your business performance cycle looks like. Next you will then map this to your people managment cycle that you will establish influenced by the people in your care. While the people management cycle typically transcends the formal performance cycle, you will want to help them align so you can help your direct reports maximise their delivery and performance.
Business Performance Cycle
The business you work for will likely operate an annual cycle where the business as a whole appraises people performance and from this salaries are reviewed and bonuses are paid. Understanding the full cycle will help you plan and plot key milestone dates, if they are not already provided to you. What happens inbetween is the most crutial part because your goal is to make these intense evaluation periods non-events for you and your direct reports.
To help you grasp this concept, in the world of SaaS (Software as a Service) the sales cycle generates enormous anxiety and pressure around the sale renewal date. They pull out all the stops to ensure every customer renews as the impact of losing any customer is expensive and damaging to year-on-year revenue growth.
Rather than focus on the renewal date companies have finally learned that between renewals is the most important time, if they keep the customer happy the renewal becomes a no brainer as the customer is satisfied. Even more so with humans we need to ensure that we are keeping them happy and engaged all the time, not just at apraisal time. This takes thoughtful planning and execution, and you are more than capable of that.
You can see that good managers and customer success teams are the true superheros in a business! This dovetails nicely into the second cycle you need to implement.
People Management Cycle
The cycle or framework you will implement at its core is going to be the same for all of your direct reports and it will align in timescale with the business performance cycle. Remember these are humans not robots and each unique so be sure tune to it based on the needs of your people.
There are four key stages in the cycle that you will manage. Its important to understand that are not equal in time or effort as they each play specific and important periods for your you and your direct reports. You will want to include your direct report in every part of the cycle, in fact this is a collaborative effort if you want the plan to be something you are both invested and engaged with.
1. Planning
This stage takes the form of a discussion centred around the question “What would you like to achieve based on your needs, the needs of the team, and the business?”. After prioritising these list items you will now together turn these into SMART goals. Be sure to also include personal development items too, and ensure 'in work' time is allocated for these activities.
Impact is based on what someone can achieve not on what they cannot. With this in mind be sure to factor in time off into the conversation when discussing goals as well as acknowledge any dependancies that are factors outside of their control. This helps to keep the planning process but also the execution human and reasonable.
Awesome managers will at this point emphesis its not just about what is done, its also about how they achieve their goals. You will want them to display qualities that will see them doing their work in a way that is inclusive, collaborative, and effective.
Inclusive problem solving means that everyone gets the opportunity to voice their opinions and share ideas. Pay particular attention to those who are shyer or quieter, as they may not feel as able to speak up. But they might have great ideas! Encourage them to speak and share their thoughts.
Collaborative problem solving involves multiple people and ideas, there are some techniques that can help you stay on track, engage efficiently, and communicate effectively during collaboration.
Effective workflows include prioritisation, breaking problems into smaller pieces, remaining focused and minimising distractions, quickly pivitoing when you face blockers, and establishing patterns of work that produce velocity at scale.
2. Executing
This is where all the hard work is, they will focus effort day-to-day on delivering outcomes. And your regular encouraging check-ins will be just what they need to remain focused, happy, and impactful.
Have a loose agenda for check-ins, this will then help keep important topics front of mind, remember these are not reporting sessions, they are connections and opportunities for feedback, discuss what they are enjoying about their work and where they could use your direct or indirect support with things that are challenging them. Personal development / training is another area you will want to discuss to ensure its happening and not taking a back seat to their day-to-day work.
Its often helpful to take succinct notes just to help keep track of your disucssions, any actions and of course wins and learnings so nothing is forgotten.
During this phase is where you can flex your Situational Management skills, adapting your engagement with your direct report based on their needs. This will prove critical for supporting your high-performers, those struggling, and everyone in-between. Let's touch more on this later.
To improve performance, it's critical to invest in development. You can accomplish this through proper training and development, complex assignments and other personal and professional development possibilities. Also, you can identify areas for improvement by active monitoring. These could be areas of underperformance that require attention or areas of excellent performance where the employee wishes to improve even further.
3. Reviewing
This is the fun part of because this phase focuses on not just what they have been able to achieve but the how they have done it. These conversations focus on the quality of their delivery, did it reach the anticipated outcome and make the expected impact. Were they able to deliver it in a timely manner and what were their learnings.
Off the back of this it would make a lot of sense to capture areas for improvement in the forms of training so they can go from strength to strength. Any completion of work goes into their evidence for the period to reflect their effort and recognise their impact. Be sure to document the discussion and the outcomes as this contributes towards their development plan and as mentioned everything anyone does factors into their appraisals and you want to represent them the best way possible.
4. Rewarding
While this often viewed as a more official phase, typically reflected by apraisal resulting in bonus or salary adjustments, all achievements big or small they should be celebrated and rewarded relatively. Its really important to remember that 'rewarding' should be sprinkled across all phases as that recognition is a powerful fuel.
We discussed that rewards are typically a part of the emplyment benefit package determined based on the (bi)yearly performance evaluation. If there are options available to you outside of these such as vouchers, small bonuses, awards, or company merchendise, be sure to give freely, be generous it will be noticed and appreciated.
Expanded responsibility and promotion are excellent tools for growth which need deliberate and careful thought to ensure we can help set the right expectations from the beginning on both these journeys.
“Growing people is the external signal of a great manager.”
Now we have covered off the structural element of management lets get into all of the good stuff that happens that brings this to life.