September is the month when the kids go back to school and we start to think about Q4. Personal performance reviews for our staff and the joys of planning for next year.
Let’s face it, both of these can be a tense and unpleasant experience for all involved if not done well.
It’s surprising how many people dread it with the result that it’s rushed, not prepared for properly and the outcome for everyone leaves a lot to be desired.
Here’s how Invested Leaders can make this a whole lot easier and leave you with an outcome that benefits everyone.
Performance Reviews
I’ve hated performance reviews from the very moment I settled into the professional world, even when everything was going well. When things are difficult it’s even worse. No one enjoys being told they’re not achieving what’s expected of them and no one likes giving that message.
Invested Leaders makes this an easier and actually productive process by preparing managers beforehand and providing them with a meeting plan driven by our unique Invested Leadership methodology.
Instead of simply giving feedback and getting out of there as fast as you can, you'll coach your team member properly.
The perfect outcome here is a manager who’s stress levels are dramatically reduced because they know how to approach their feedback in a way that the member of staff feels understood and properly coached, and a staff member who knows exactly where they have gone wrong and feel supported in their task of resolving whatever issues they’ve experienced.
Invested Leaders actually turns these conversations into leadership development sessions for managers. As the meeting plan is generated Invested Leaders will show you a short leadership insights into what you’ve done well and what you should consider going forward.
The very last thing Invested Leaders does here is ask “Would you like help creating a Leadership Development Plan on any of these areas?”
The secret to turbocharging your leadership development is to simply say “yes” and Invested Leaders will start a leadership development plan with you and create your own Leadership Dashboard.
Q4 planning
It’s surprising how may people struggle with creating OKRs for their business or team, but OKRs are a simple yet powerful way to plan ahead for your business.
For those who don't know, OKR stands for Objective and Key Result. It’s as simple as that.
Your Objective is a clear definition of what you want to achieve. “Build a market leading candidate experience,” for example.
The Key Results are the specific time bound outcomes that tell you how you will achieve your Objective. “Increase candidate score from 7.2 to 8.5 by Q4,” might be an example.
This is where most people fall down.
I’ve seen arguments rage for days over what is a Key Result and what is an Objective.
Invested Leaders makes this easy.
By simply having a conversation about where you want or need to be in the next 12 months, Invested Leaders will build you a series of simple to understand OKRs explicitly designed for your company or team.
Not only that it will build a 90 day plan with you including check backs and team insights garnered from your 1:1s.
As soon as you’ve accepted the OKRs Invested Leaders has generated, it will create your own Execution Workspace to maintain your OKRs and ongoing performance against your plans.
This article by onrec gives a really good explanation of how OKRs bridge the disconnect between recruitment activity and business impact.