Every year, employees worldwide enter annual performance reviews with mixed feelings. Do employees enter these conversations with enthusiasm to learn new things? Rarely. Are managers eager to have these conversations and coach their employees on how they can improve in the coming year? No.
These meetings are typically experienced as difficult conversations. Opportunities for learning and relationship-building are often missed.
In an ideal world, employees would learn and improve from the feedback their manager provides in the annual review. But there are at least two obstacles that can stand in the way of that best-case scenario.
It can be hard to hear painful truths. Critical feedback can trigger defensive reactions: That’s wrong. Who are you to say? This is a disaster, and I’ll never be able to improve.
And, even if employees are receptive to the intended message, they may have trouble understanding the information and face difficulties implementing the feedback to improve their performance.
In an effort to get through, managers may try to soften their delivery. For example, they may use the much-maligned “feedback sandwich,” which bookends a critique between two compliments. But this tactic can obscure truthful and useful information, resulting in confusion, misunderstandings and worse.
A poorly conducted review can lead to defensiveness and confusion.
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We study organizational behavior and are especially interested in how people interact and communicate at work. Drawing from our research on humility and feedback, we suggest a new way for managers to approach performance reviews: Create what we call “humble encounters.”
By expressing humility, managers can transform performance reviews from monologues into dialogues, with greater learning and improvement as a result. Our studies indicate that when a team member expresses humility to a co-worker, it leads their partner to feel greater “psychological safety” – more comfortable sharing candid opinions and concerns without worrying about backlash or negative consequences. This, in turn, helps improve performance in the team.
Creating humble encounters
Humility has a few key ingredients: You must be willing to view yourself accurately, as you really are. But that’s not enough to create a humble encounter. You must also show that you are teachable by exhibiting openness to feedback, ideas and suggestions. Finally, it’s critical that you acknowledge and express appreciation for the contributions that others make.
So, how might a manager do all this in a performance review?
You can signal that you’re willing to view yourself accurately by sharing personal experiences of dealing with challenges: “I also struggled with this issue when I first entered the company.” By sharing your own challenges and how you worked through them, you signal that you’re aware of your own weaknesses and…
