Motivate Employees at Review Time by Asking “What Are Your Proudest Moments?”

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Employee performance reviews are notoriously painful, but they don’t have to be. Reviews can actually be useful, productive, meaningful conversations that do what they’re intended to do: improve employee performance. Some of the changes leaders need to make to have more effective reviews are pretty easy, like knowing which to talk about first: performance, goals or money. (It’s money). Another key tip is to start every review by asking “What are your proudest moments?”

Some of you may be wondering: how does asking for their proudest moments differ from a self-appraisal? When you ask for a self-appraisal you ask for the proudest moments, but you also ask for the biggest failures. And while it might not be a bad thing for your low performers to have to bring you an honest evaluation of their biggest failures, it’s actually quite harmful to your top performers.

Psychological dynamic different for high and low performers

There’s a different psychological dynamic that happens when high and low performers experience failure. Low performers might not know about the failure, they might not care, or they may have even intended for the failure to happen. High performers, on the other hand, have a high degree of critical self-awareness. This is wonderful, because most of the time these valuable employees already know they messed up—even before you tell them. And they get right to work on fixing the problem and making self-corrections so they never mess up like that again. However, most high performers are also prone to beating themselves up pretty hard when they mess up. And that can quickly turn the focus of the review back onto stuff they’ve already corrected and moved past. Plus you might get swayed listening to a high performer beat himself up and give lower marks than are deserved.

Proudest moments also ensures you don’t miss the greatest thing your employees did that year

Keeping things focused and balanced for high performers is only one reason to ask about proudest moments. Starting reviews with this simple question also helps leaders avoid the biggest employee de-motivator: missing the greatest things your people did that year. What you learn by asking this question gives you great information to work from during the review. Let’s face it, it’s nearly impossible to remember what every one of your employees did 12 months ago, so have your people make the list and tell you their proudest moments. It makes a big difference to them if the two great things they did get remembered and talked about a bit.

Another benefit is that by asking about proudest moments, you get clued in to the kind of meeting you’re in for. If an employee tells you, “I am just so proud of myself because I made it on time for work 70% of the time this past year which is a huge improvement over the 50% I managed the year before,” it tells you what kind of conversation you’re in for.

So before your next performance review period starts, simply ask your people to make a list of their proudest moments. If your organization conducts 12-month reviews, ask employees for their proudest moments from the past year. Or if you do six-month reviews, have them look back on the past six months and answer the question in writing. And just like self-appraisals, always do your own evaluation of the employee before you read their proudest moments. This allows you to avoid neurological biases that can skew your evaluation and make the review less objective.

Learn more about how to make employee reviews less painful including why talking about money should be done in a separate conversation by attending our webinar Taking the Pain Out of Performance Reviews.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.