Successful teams are made up of individuals with unique ambitions, strengths, and personalities. The secret to being a great leader is the ability to identify and leverage these differences to create a complementary and motivated workforce.
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While it’s important to remember what was discussed in your meeting last week, it’s also essential that your notes help you to keep up to date with changes over time. Keep in mind that as your team members grow and develop, their coaching needs will also evolve.
One-on-One Conversations
Rather than relying on memory to retain important insights you learn about each individual, make notes of the key points you discussed.
- What is he or she concerned about?
- What are his or her current interests or challenges?
- Where does he or she want to go in the next year?
- How could you better support him or her in reaching his or her goals?
Review these notes before your next one-on-one, leading you to richer, more insightful conversations.
After Reviews
Performance reviews shouldn’t be a onetime event during which people receive feedback and move on. There should be time to reflect on and reassess how you and your team have grown and to build an action plan for what you will continue to do or improve.
Reviews can also be used to gain deeper insights into employee strengths. According to a study by Gallup, people who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged, 8% more productive, and 15% less likely to quit their jobs. In addition, knowing your team members’ strengths will enable you to leverage the unique skill sets in the most effective way.
After each review, set time aside to help each team member analyze and discover his or her strengths. If you don’t know where to start, here are a few questions to facilitate further reflection:
- Is this a skill he or she would be interested in developing further?
- If not, which skills would he or she like to invest time in improving?
- Is there anything in his or her report that surprised him or her?
- Be sure to also record ideas for potential stretch assignments to help him or her build on these strengths.
Observations
Aside from strictly career-focused exchanges, Google found that one of the top three things its best managers did was express an interest in their personal well-being.
This doesn’t mean you have to know the intimate details of your employees’ last checkup, but it is important to know that they prefer having the morning for high-concentration tasks and the afternoon for meetings or that they value public recognition of their achievements.
Show that you listen, pick up on certain details, and care about creating an environment for them to succeed; it is a sure way to get your team to go the extra mile for you.
- What time of day are they most productive?
- How do they prefer to receive feedback?
- Are they comfortable sharing feedback?
- Do they like receiving praise in public or private?
- How often do they want to check in with you?
- Do they like talking things through, or do they prefer to gather their thoughts first?
- What’s their learning style?
Giving Effective Constructive Feedback
Giving constructive feedback is hard. Keeping in mind that everyone prefers to receive and give feedback in different ways, follow a few simple rules to make sure your feedback is delivered effectively. When giving constructive feedback, you want to:
- Be thoughtful and understanding.
- Make sure it’s not a one-off situation but a recurring theme that needs attention.
- Never give it in public; pick the right time and place.
- Provide context, referencing specific situations and actions.
- Base it on facts, not assumptions.
- Include the receiver, leaving room for discussion.
- Make it actionable, ending with next steps.
While written feedback gives you time to formulate what you want to say, it can often be difficult to recall specific details when giving feedback in person.
 Steffen Maier is the co-founder of Impraise, the people enablement platform. Impraise’s belief is simple: Grow your people, grow your business. They help unleash people’s potential, doing more than just performance reviews, which means accelerating performance, fostering career development, and seizing all the moments that happen in between.To date, managers have successfully used Impraise to review each team member’s past feedback and goals before one-on-ones and reviews, resulting in more insightful performance conversations. With our latest update, we’ve added Private Notes, which allow managers and employees to go even deeper by recording notes on one-on-one conversations, post-review reflections, and important insights and observations about each individual. Only visible to you, Private Notes can act as a personal profile created by you for each member. For example, you can document:
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