Redefining Performance Reviews: A Strengths-Based Approach

Ah, it’s annual review time. Managers have gotten together and stack-ranked their teams, coming up with the employee’s performance rating. They now face the daunting task of writing a review to support that rating.

This is the time when the proverbial chickens come home to proverbially roost. Conflict-avoidant managers who haven’t been delivering the constructive feedback necessary for employee growth now face the challenge of explaining to their underperforming directs why, after a year of no constructive feedback, they must give them a below-the-bar rating.

Hopefully, you aren’t one of those managers and have no surprises lurking for your direct in the review you are about to write.

But that’s table-stakes.

The more interesting question is how do you use the performance review to motivate your employees, to get them to enter the new year excited about the growth opportunities rather than dreading them? And if you’re an employee, how do you get the most out of your performance discussion?

The standard way of writing/conducting performance reviews is to ask: “What went well?” “What could’ve gone better?”

This is an acceptable approach, and it’s certainly important to discuss the year’s triumphs and misses. But I’d like to propose asking a slightly different set of questions:

• Where did we leverage your strengths?
• Where did we engage your weaknesses?

Look, we’re all human. Everyone has weaknesses, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. There is a school of thought that advocates for focusing on your weaknesses. I think there’s a better way.

Strengths are a far more natural place to focus attention.

Simply put, people get better at the tasks they enjoy doing. By identifying the places where the organization has leveraged your direct’s strengths in the past year, you help drive the conversation toward work that will maximize their engagement, and thus grow their strengths.

Putting gaps to rest

“That’s all great and all,” I hear you say, “but surely you aren’t suggesting we should simply ignore gaping holes in performance?”

No, of course not. Gaps cannot go entirely unaddressed lest they undermine overall performance. They need to grow at least to the extent necessary not to get in the way of the person’s strengths. There are several ways to do this, but the most powerful will be through collaboration and delegation. We'll cover techniques for leveraging delegation effectively in a future article.

Just enough growth

Some gaps are those of skillset. Those can be overcome and eventually become strengths. Examples of these might be the knowledge of a particular technology, how to deal with ambiguity, or approaches to decision-making.

Others are more ingrained in personality, cultural or family upbringing, or inherent biological limitations. Those are unlikely to ever become strengths, unless gargantuan effort is expended that might be more efficiently spent elsewhere.

For example, my son has ADHD. He is unlikely to ever be able to easily focus on something he finds boring, though the ability to do so is achievable if he chooses to devote most of his energies to achieving it. An issue around focusing will likely come up in his on-the-job evaluation once he grows old enough to have a job.

Another good example, in the software engineering field, is nurturing the mindset of a software engineer, the discipline of methodically tracing code line by line looking for the bug, the critical thinking needed to deconstruct a system into maintainable, easily modifiable components.

Some people just aren’t built that way, and that’s all right.

The key as a people manager is to recognize when that might be happening and take immediate corrective action. That might mean letting the person in question go or shifting them to a role more suited to their innate strengths. Or simply helping them grow just enough to keep that gap from limiting them. They are unlikely to ever turn it into a strength, but they can grow it to the point where it’s no longer holding them back.

Know thyself

The prerequisite to having a constructive conversation of this kind is for each person involved to know what their own strengths and weaknesses are. If you’re a manager you probably have an opinion, but unless the employee aligns with that opinion, unless they’re self-reflective enough to think through it, an outsider’s opinion isn’t going to move the needle much. Sure, as a manager you can route them work that you think fits their strengths better, but at this point you’re taking the ownership for their career development out of their hands, and that’s not scalable for you, and disempowering for them.

So the best thing you can do as a manager is not to simply tell your direct what their strengths and weaknesses might be, but to encourage them to analyze their own performance, and come up with those strengths and weaknesses on their own. Which is where we come full circle back to the two key questions to ask in the performance review:

• Where did we leverage your strengths?
• Where did we engage your weaknesses?

Now, hopefully, it’s become more clear why those question are so important.

Optimize for passion

We at Empathic Insights Collective believe that the best, and most empathetic expenditure of your energy is to follow your innate passion. As a manager, the performance review is a perfect opportunity to work with your direct to identify this passion and discuss approaches for growing it. As with anything else in life, the more energy you spend on something, the better you will get at it. Passion translates into spent energy, which in turn translates into strengths. So by optimizing for passion, what you’re really doing is optimizing for strength.

Bringing it home

To come back to the initial point, asking the questions around how the past year has leveraged the employee’s strengths and engaged their weaknesses allows for more constructive conversations along the lines discussed above.

The key after that is to make room for an honest, empathic conversation about what their strengths and weaknesses are. The only way that will happen is if you, their manager, has made trust a priority in your relationship to date, if you’ve made it safe for the employee to open up to you without fear of repercussions.

This is yet another reason why empathy is so critical in your ongoing relationship, and why so many of our articles focus on empathy as a main component of successful leadership. Growing your workforce can only occur in a culture of trust and acceptance, and within the context of that culture, a performance review conversation revolving around leveraging strengths will help your employees grow into the best, most engaged, most productive version of themselves.