The dawn of the information age has ushered in an era of new approaches to performance reviews and job feedback. Thankfully, many companies are moving away from the entrenched system whereby managers deliver a one-way performance review to their charges annually; we even wrote about a better alternative here.
The decision to get rid of your annual performance review in favor of an ongoing feedback loop is just one piece of the last skill we’ll go over in our managerial essentials series: Professional Coaching.
Successful managers view employee feedback as a constant dialogue. It’s important to create opportunities to give and receive performance feedback with your employees whenever it’s needed, rather than selecting arbitrary check-ins, such as weekly or monthly. This is not to say that periodic meeting should be done away with; such staples provide consistent measures of forward progress.
However, progress toward task completion and individual employee growth are two very different metrics. Employee growth has to do with the development of new skills learned on the job, both via responsibilities and from those who surround them. Your team wants to learn from you. So, how can you facilitate this?
- Be transparent with your team. Allowing them to see the reasoning behind the tasks delegated them will help team members develop broader business senses.
- Allow a team member to develop an independent project from start to finish. By developing a hypothesis, creating a plan to follow, and gathering the necessary resources in order to execute and produce results, team members can learn new ways to advance your company or team goals.
- Delegate a team member a task out of his or her comfort zone. Ask him or her to learn a new skill in order to complete the assignment.
- Ask a team member to manage another employee, a small team, or an intern.
- Assign industry-specific reading materials to the team workload. Try doing this across your entire team to keep everyone on the same page and foster camaraderie.
After carrying through with one or some of these tasks, great managers will touch base with their team in order to reinforce what has been learned, address any questions, and continue the positive cycle of growth.
Most employees want to be engaged and challenged in order to grow, and good managers make this happen by offering continual insight and as well as regularly presenting their employees with new opportunities to learn.