It’s important for leaders to be honest in all things. If team members cannot trust their leaders to be honest, they will no longer follow them. Given that a leader must be honest in all things, there are two specific areas that are so important that a leader must be brutally honest with their team members about – their performance and their potential.
Performance. Annual performance reviews were without a doubt one of the least favorite aspects of my job as a leader. Doing a good job on these reviews is hard and takes discernment. The reviews were very important, not only for that particular performance period, but in the career of an individual, especially if they were pursuing a leadership position, for whom excellent reviews were expected.
In the organization in which I worked, though the specifics would change from time to time, employees were evaluated as to whether they exceeded expectations, met expectations or did not meet expectations. The word expectations is key here. Leaders need to clearly set expectations with their team members at the beginning of each performance period, something that I could have been better at doing.
The expectations for an employee just joining the organization and one who had 30 years of experience, and was making a significantly higher salary, were of course quite different. If both achieved basically the same results, the higher award should go to the newer employee because the expectations for the more experienced and higher compensated employee were higher.
Though hard work, leaders need to effectively evaluate their team member’s performance given a variety of factors, such as achieving all of their goals that were agreed upon with their leader when expectations were set. It was difficult for team members to consistently exceed expectations. More often, good performers consistently met and occasionally exceeded expectations. Evaluating the difference between the two requires a leader to have good discernment. It takes leadership courage to be brutally honest with a team member who felt that they had consistently exceeded expectations, when you felt that they consistently met expectations and occasionally exceeded them.
Potential. In addition to performance, leaders need to be brutally honest about a team member’s potential. I worked with and mentored many strong performers who had a desire to obtain a leadership position. A few of these individuals actually did achieve that goal, but many did not. Strong individual performance can be an indicator that someone will be a great leader, but it is not a guarantee.
In our organization, both performance evaluation reviews and employee potential evaluations included a consensus building aspect. Individual leaders would discuss their particular team members as far as performance and potential and respond to feedback from their peers. There were many times I came out of those sessions with a different outcome than I had expected. The resulting discussions I had with individuals afterwards, in effect telling some that their dream of being in leadership was not going to happen, were some of the hardest I ever had. But they were conversations that required me to be brutally honest.
Evaluating a team member’s performance and potential were two of the hardest things I had to do as a leader. It is very important to be brutally honest with your team members when having these conversations. What advice would you give leaders from your experiences?
