Seeking feedback on your compensation process

Organizations put a lot of efforts in choosing the people who can award compensation to their workforce. They may even decide to have a different set of people for different type of compensations awards (i.e. Salary allocation or Stock Grant) as per their business needs. But the question is after giving compensation allocation responsibility and various tools to make informed decisions to these people; do you seek their feedback on compensation allocation process in a planned manner?

It is critical to seek feedback from your compensation decision makers as it will:

• Help you to overcome any shortcomings in your existing compensation policy.
• Help you to understand good and not-so-good things about the tools provided for compensation planning.
• Help you to discover how determined your decision makers are to voice their opinion for betterment of your compensation policy.

Every compensation round has a theme or a predefined objective that needs to be fulfilled and it varies with the type of compensation you are dealing with. It’s best to collect feedback and keep it associated with specific compensation round. This association will not only help you to closely analyze context specific feedback but also to take the corrective actions. In case you need collective and only one set of feedback you can always combine compensation round specific feedback into one.

You should decide on feedback questionnaire if you are planning to collect specific feedback and can request people to rate things you want to be rated. However, it will be good to provide some free hand where feedback provider can share feedback not related to questionnaire.

Finally, you need to analyze the collected feedback; work on to resolve the highlighted problems (if possible) and follow-up with feedback providers (if required).  Publishing corrective actions or changes incorporated as a result of this exercise will convey that you value feedback and will motivate people to participate in future. You can expect some real value addition to your compensation strategy by this exercise as you will be working with the people important to your business and compensation process.

How about giving your Boss a Performance Review?

As an employee, it’s easy to think of a Performance Review as a one way street where the manager reviews your performance. In some ways, a Performance Review is just like social networking (such as Twitter/Facebook)- some make the most of it, while others think it’s a complete waste of time.

If you make the most of your Performance Reviews, then congratulations! I hope you walk away from them knowing:

• How you are doing at your job – what’s working and what’s not
• Suggestions/Action items for growth
• Hope for continued career growth – honest discussion so your manager can help align your strengths and career aspiration with the business needs

You can take it one step further. 

From time to time, you should give your manager the ultimate gift as well. As Meg noted in her Managing Your Boss blog, part of your job is to help your boss succeed. Just like your manager lets you know how you are performing, you should reciprocate and give your manager some feedback on how they are doing as your boss – all relationships (work or personal) thrive on a two-way communication.

So ask yourself: 

• What is it that your manager does that either helps or hinders you from performing your best? 
• Do you want your manager to continue or stop a particular behavior? 
• What do you want your manager to start doing to bring out your potential?

I am betting that I am not the only manager who appreciates honest feedback from my team. 

For example, I would definitely want you to tell me if I have broccoli stuck in my teeth  or that I was abrasive in my communication or worse, I am de-motivating you unknowingly. I would also like to know if I am doing enough for you and whether  I am providing the right level of support to help you grow? 

It’s one thing to do the best I can, it’s another to know that my efforts have the desired effect;  and if not, I’d be happy to make improvements and be a better leader and manager!

So go ahead – give your manager some feedback – it might even help your manager to help you in finding happiness at work.

Thoughts on coaching and feedback

  We talk a lot about how effective performance management requires regular coaching and feedback.  As luck would have it, I have been giving and receiving said feedback lately and so I’ve been thinking about what makes for good feedback.   

I think the most critical element of effective coaching is intention.  When you share feedback with an individual do you do it with honest intentions?  Do you want that feedback to be heard?  If so, you need to consider how it will be received.  Often times, the most important feedback is delivered in a way that it is of little or no use to the person who receives it.    This is the worst possible outcome for all involved.  The person receiving the feedback is hurt and now feels betrayed by the person giving the feedback and the person giving the feedback considers herself in a no win situation so avoids ever doing it again. 

To help you avoid these pitfalls, I thought I’d offer some suggestions  for your consideration.   The next time you need to give feedback I recommend you:

• Evaluate your intention – are you giving feedback to help the person grow?  If so, can you present it in a way that your intention is clear?  You are not attempting to tell someone that they have something in their teeth to make them feel badly, you are doing it avoid having them feel badly.  Building up a relationship of trust with the person and helping them understand your intention, will help them hear you.   If they can’t hear you there was little value in providing the feedback.

 

• Share your thinking – giving the person the broader context of your thinking can really help them understand what you are saying and put it to use.  If you just tell someone “don’t do this anymore” you often trigger their defense mechanism.  Natural skepticism can kick in such that they might disregard your feedback, justifying to themselves that, you might just be wrong.    Explaining why a certain behavior might be sabotoging their broader goals (and giving examples), will help them understand and digest the feedback in a way that moves them closer to addressing the issue.

 

• Balance the feedback — only pointing out flaws can give the recipient a “mother-in-law” bias against your views.  If you are always pointing out what is wrong with someone, they are inclined to think that there is no pleasing you anyway.  Again, not a reaction that will cause someone to be open to taking action on your suggestions

 

• Don’t forget to say the good stuff – do not take it as a given that the person receiving the feedback knows what you appreciate about them.   Even if they do, I know of no person who wouldn’t enjoy having it repeated.  Feedback is more helpful when it’s positive anyway.

Lastly, I would encourage you to do more feedback.  For your peers, for your management, for your employees.  Like anything else we get better with practice, so please do make coaching and feedback part of your personal style.  When good feedback happens, everyone benefits.

The ultimate gift to an employee

We all have talents and our job as managers is to bring out individual’s strengths and help them develop additional skills to be more successful at their jobs. This has a direct impact on employee engagement, retention, job satisfaction and of course the bottom line of the business. In order to do this, we need to create a safe and collaborative environment for team members to ask for help, give them resources to help themselves, as well as looking out for opportunities to challenge them to perform to the next level.

 

Easy said than done.

 

As managers we need to understand what motivates our team members to begin with (beyond money and stock), define and enforce core values with them as a team, and provide both constructive and positive feedback REGULARLY. It’s easy to give positive feedback (although we probably should do it more often) but giving constructive feedback is often the hard part of management – but it really is also the most critical aspect in helping someone with his or her professional growth.

 

On the giving front, we need to have the “right” intent. We give constructive feedback because we want someone to be more successful, not because we have an ill intent of busting him or her for doing something wrong. We need to be sensitive to the recipients and how they would react to the feedback. On the receiving end, it is important to have an open mindset and understand that constructive feedback really is something coming from someone who wants you to do better– no matter what career level you are at. I think the biggest impediment to improvement in most people is that they tend to tie their egos to problems and therefore are reluctant to identify and talk openly about improvement areas without becoming defensive. Mistakes are good – if we learn from them! It’d be wonderful if we are perfect, but to err is human. Just last week I made the mistake of spelling “Principal Developer” as Principle Developer” in a chat room. Someone kindly pointed out in a fun way and asked if the “Principle Developer” would develop principles? Instead of becoming defensive (which would have been a natural instinct), his correction actually helped me made a mental note to be more careful with my spelling. I am grateful that he didn’t want me to look silly in the future. Having the right (open) mindset in receiving constructive feedback is key to self-improvement. While some of us take time to self-reflect, we all have blind spots and we should always be thankful to those for taking the time to point out things we can improve upon so we can continue to grow! (BTW – Ken has an interesting post called Mistakes are just the icing on the cake, check it out if you haven’t read it yet!)

 

Fortunately my manager, peers and directs are very good at both giving and receiving constructive feedback. We have really helped each other grow over time. I truly believe that the ultimate gift to an individual is giving him/her honest and sincere constructive feedback to help with each other’s continued growth – the sky is the limit!

My first performance review

The very first performance review I received was when I worked as a consultant for a small software house in Sydney.Before the performance review, I actually really enjoyed my job. My boss appreciated all the extra efforts we put into our work to get our customers live. He cared and we responded by working extra hard.

Life is full of surprises though.

One day the owner of the company flew in from Perth (Western Australia) completely unannounced and fired our boss that same day. A couple of days later, the CEO sat me down and presented me with the performance review document that HR has put together. He told me that I met their expectations and the company appreciates my work. All was good – right?

Well – not exactly.

I walked away from the performance review feeling confused and disappointed- and it wasn’t just from learning that my boss got fired from a couple of days ago. What bothered me was the CEO’s body language during the performance review. He seemed uninterested and disengaged. He casually flipped the review document back and forth (so I wondered if he had read it before he came into the meeting.) He also seemed to have ants in his pants and checked his watch frequently. So while he read my performance document to me, I stared at the conference table for the most part – trying to hide my disappointment. Although the feedback was “nice”, he came across as “bored” and “insincere”. There were no specific examples of why he thought I did well nor was there any suggestions on how I could be more than just “meet expectations”. (If I was getting ready for retirement, I probably wouldn’t have cared. But I was young, energetic and really wanted to know what I can do to be a better consultant.) With my 20/20 hind sight, I should have asked. To this date, I still remember how shiny the conference table was and the question I kept on asking myself “is this the company I still want to work for?”

The good thing is that I learned how NOT to deliver a performance review. 🙂

Why are we smarter about puppies then humans?

While before I was talking about feedback in general, today I want to talk specifically about positive feedback.  I really enjoyed this posting that discusses the merits of praise, possibly enhanced by this one for those of you who prefer brevity.

Just coming back from The Conference Boards “Employee Engagement and Retention Conference” last week, I was struck by just how far we have to go in this area.  One point that summed it up for me was this set of questions/responses.

When asked “do you need encouragement to do your best at work?”

20% replied yes. 

When asked “When you get encouragement, does it motivate you to do your best?”

90% replied yes.

We all read this and think “of course”, we know this.  So I ask you, when was the last time you said “thanks”? 

Does your team make it a standard practice to recognize the contributions in an authentic and timely way?  Why do we understand so easily when training puppies that rewarding good behavior causes them to behave, but with people we focus on “constructive feedback” (and maybe once a year?!) and expect that to yield results.

I would encourage you to consider making a serious [focused] effort to say thank you more often.   Not only will it help someone be motivated to continue to do their best, it might also help you to always look on the bright side of life.