A recent project I worked on reminded me of an important high-performance principle – good employees want to be doing the right work! And nothing kills employee engagement more than finding out at the end of the year that you were wasting your time driving hard on an expectation that was misunderstood, or that changed somewhere along the way with you left out of the loop!
I designed a performance management process for an organization that really got how important it is for leaders and employees to continuously work together to ensure expectations are clearly understood and clarified. Instead of just a one and done conversation at the start of the performance year, we landed on a much more fluid model. As important as feedback, all performance conversations needed to include a touch-base on expectations. In this client’s case, those conversations were frequent – taking place at least once a month.
I really like this approach especially considering how things change at lightening speed in the workplace. By imbedding this continuous expectation conversation right into the performance process, teams continue to stay in the know on evolving annual goals and targets. They can head off expectation misalignment that leads to costly and inefficient rework, and instead keep things on track through real-time course correction.
Here are some simple questions any leader or direct report can ask of each other to stay on track:
Leaders ask:
What, if anything, do you need further clarity on from me in terms of delivering what’s expected of you?
Employees ask:
Has anything changed or is there any new information I should know that may impact the expectations you are counting on me to deliver?