Here’s why.

You’ve spent a lot of time teaching your managers to give effective feedback. And while your managers may in fact be giving ongoing, regular feedback to their employees, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet.

You need to assess the quality of feedback coming in and ensure feedback is being used to drive performance. You also need to ensure feedback is focused on the values and competencies that your organization says are important.

To do all of this you should keep track of the feedback given to your employees. This process doesn’t have to be difficult or complex. In fact, it can be quite simple.

1. Identify the feedback types important to your organization

You should have already identified (and communicated to all employees!) the types of feedback needed to support desired behaviors and actions important to your organization’s success.

Everyone in your organization should understand how these feedback types support your organization’s core competencies and values. Other kinds of feedback can managers give to support employees in their development and career progression can include: journal notes, manager notes, awards, coaching tips, observations, and recognition.

Make sure your people managers understand how to give critical or constructive feedback that will drive the behavior change they seek. Ben Eubanks of UpstartHR shared a great video about this recently.

2. Set up channels to deliver and store feedback

While you can use an automated system that makes it easy to share and centralize feedback (shameless Halogen plug right here), you can also simply task all employees to set up a folder in your company’s email program to do this.

Then ensure your managers…

• Book one hour each week in their calendars to make notes on employee performance over the past week. Managers should reference their notes to give employees feedback verbally or in written form.
• Hold frequent formal and informal meetings with their employees to discuss performance, check in on goals and development plans, provide coaching, etc.
• Set up task reminders for themselves to give employees feedback.
• Communicate to employees that they should expect ongoing performance feedback. (Conversely, employees should feel empowered to ask for feedback if they feel they’re not getting enough.)
• Keep a journal where to make notes on any successes, incidents and challenges as they occur. These notes can guide feedback managers deliver and be a great reference point when it comes time to write performance appraisals.

3. Ensure feedback drives performance

Since nothing discussed during a performance review should come as a surprise to either the employee or the manager, feedback collected throughout the year should be used to support conversations about performance milestones, areas for improvement, development and training.

It can also be used to record an employee’s progress in closing a skills gap or strengthening a key competency.

Consider using 360 degree assessments to actually evaluate your managers’ ability to give effective feedback. See if their employees feel their feedback is constructive and supports their performance.

You can also look at the comments they provide on performance evaluations forms. Is it specific and detailed enough to convey whether or not performance expectations were met?

Does it tie back to core competencies and values of your organization? If not, consider what training options you need to provide to elevate your managers coaching skills.

For feedback to drive performance it needs to be transparent and meaningful. You can help your managers by providing them with the training and tools they need to do this effectively.

To help, we’ve created sample employee performance comments for a selection of competencies. Download these sample comments to help describe and guide performance feedback.

In this post, Jane explores the five key roles managers can play to build and sustain high performance cultures, and to serve as strategic levers to boost and sustain employee engagement.

Enabling managers to have the confidence and capability to be great engagers is the only way to truly build and sustain a high performance culture.

To discuss this concept further, let’s look at ‘Sara’, an employee who has been with her company for five years.

Sara works hard, has recently gained a promotion and is popular with her peers and management alike. She enjoys her job and rarely has time off sick. But she isn’t highly engaged. She is a ‘Saver’.

‘Savers’ vs ‘Investors’

Look around your organisation and you will spot many more ‘Savers’. They are usually hard working, diligent employees who are committed to the company. Thanks to corporate communication programmes and initiatives, they often have a clear understanding of the business and know what is expected of them.

While regular communication with employees about the business is important, I don’t believe this is where long-term, meaningful engagement actually happens.

Employees like Sara are the bedrock of many companies but whilst every organisation needs ‘Savers’, they alone are not enough to create the performance levels that a business needs to excel and deliver exceptional results.

If companies are serious about increasing engagement for performance, HR needs to up its stakes and create a strong community of ‘Investors’.

‘Investors’ are employees who are willing to invest more of themselves in an organisation. Just like ‘Savers’, they are clear about the aims of the organisation and are committed to its success. But, crucially, they also feel a sense of genuine attachment to their employer because of a deep sense of value from the relationship.

Waitrose (the UK supermarket chain) represents this concept well. The people who work in its stores are partners in the business. However, ‘Investors’ don’t have to have share certificates in the organisation.

‘Investors’ are the employees who see a deep connection between their own personal values and purpose and those of the business. In day-to-day terms, they are the employees who are more willing to be an advocate for the brand and will demonstrate this, for example, by offering excellent customer service.

So, how can HR help create a culture of ‘Investors?’

HR often owns the employee communication remit and that activity goes a long way to creating ‘Savers’. However, true engagement and the creation of ‘Investors’ requires managers and leaders to be masters at engaging employees. They need HR to give them the processes and infrastructure but also the development, confidence, coaching and counsel to do this well.

For example, a strong performance management system that doesn’t get tangled up in process and complexity is crucial. It’s also important to ensure that any performance measurement really does have the performance of people at its heart.

The message will be loud and clear: we measure people performance because the performance of our employees is the most significant measure of our business success.

To create ‘Investors’, HR has a responsibility to ensure the right level of development for every line manager — not just senior leaders. It is line managers who are the game changers on a daily basis when it comes to driving engagement, but they need proper support and development to do so.

This is where I have identified the five roles of manager as culture-builder. When managers are strong in each of these roles, they will unlock tremendous potential in their people. High performance will follow for their teams, the business and the entire organisation.

Senior leaders, too, need to be super-charged across all the roles — because it is great role models that unlock the potential of their direct reports.

Five Key Roles to Create More Investors in Your Organisation

Here’s a quick overview of the five roles to build a more engaged workforce and the skills needed to be a great engager:

Image sourced via The Culture Builders.

The Prophet is all about passion, vision and inspiration. Prophets paint a visual picture of the future in a highly emotive way that others can get hold of and want to be part of.

The Prophet in action:

When Fujio Nishida, President at Sony Electronics in Europe, arrived in the region, the company was suffering in the market. He immediately started to focus on his people and created a rallying call for action and transformation. Nishida galvanized his people by outlining his vision for revitalization, branded ‘Fu-katsu’ (meaning ‘revitalisation’ in Japanese).

Once the journey began and progress was evident, he kept determinedly future-focused and introduced the idea of ‘Hiyaku’ (meaning ‘soaring growth’ in Japanes). Fujio Nishida stands out as an exemplary Prophet by embracing visionary, aspirational and emotive language that kept everyone focused on the future.

Tips for HR

Remind your managers they too are Prophets: what does the vision for their specific team look like? Encourage your people managers to set a vision they are confident about using with their team and remind them keep it current

The Storyteller uses an emotional and logical mix to bring the story to life about how we will achieve the vision and live our purpose.

Storyteller in action: Carlos Britto, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, is a passionate speaker who goes far beyond rational, dry messages to bring the company’s values to life. An impactful Storyteller, Britto uses powerful narrative, enriched with metaphors that colour his stories with simple but personal experiences and reflections.

For example, he discusses ownership in business with an analogy of “You drive a rental car differently because at the end of the day, you hand the car back to the company and you don’t have to live with the consequences of your driving….”

Tips for HR

Consider how you tell the story of your organisation’s People Strategy or how you can change the way you work with the business and how you could strengthen it to lead by example.

The Strategist has a plan to engage every person in his team or under his influence. He knows who his talent is and he has a retention and development plan for each of them.

The Strategist in action: Gabby Redfern, Senior Vice President, Media Operations at Discovery International, was highly intentional when it came to engaging her team around a new business challenge. She set specific, clear goals and helped everyone see their progress towards them and she made a phenomenal effort to know everyone in the organisation, working across time zones and locations to reach out to all of them, and built a clear picture of the talent across her teams.

Strategists are fully up to speed with their talent, and will explore opportunities to develop and support them, as well as ensuring they are kept at the forefront of future talent planning.

Because they understand the specific engagement levers for their people, they use this insight to support the appraisal process and to support the retention strategy for them. They keep a good record of performance and performance levers so that they can help ensure fast track career paths.

Tips for HR

The Strategist role is one of the lowest preferences for most managers so HR plays a critical role in helping them see the value of planning and making engagement work. It starts with managers building stronger relationships with their team and exploring what makes each individual’s heart beat.

With this insight, managers can then equip team members with the incentives and motivation that most engages them at a personal level and ultimately secure a clear engagement plan for every single person, regardless of their role or title.

The Coach is a manager who understands what makes the individual’s heart beat. She works with that knowledge and helps her employees grow and deliver more value.

Coach in action:

Leaders can help everyone to flourish by creating a culture of development. Stuart Fletcher, former International President at Diageo and now CEO at BUPA, is passionate about getting the best from people and saw this as a critical part of his role at Diageo.

He committed at least 10% of his time each year to directly engaging with management and staff throughout the business. He met them through formal ‘town-hall’ sessions held in each country but also invested in one-to-one meetings, coaching sessions and mentoring conversations with individual managers across the world.

His dedication to developing others and, crucially, role-modelling this behaviour for other leaders and managers is one key reason Stuart believes Diageo experienced phenomenal growth across its international business.

Tips for HR

HR can have a huge impact by coaching managers to have better coaching-style conversations with their people. Managers need to understand the importance of providing employees formal and informal feedback on an ongoing basis.

Managers should work continuously — and take training as needed — to improve how they communicate, set goals, give feedback, develop employees, recognize and reward performance, and build trust.

The Pilot is the measured, calm component of being a manager steering his people in the direction they need to go to reach their goals. His goal is to be the respected role model, the ‘parental’ adult with one hand on the tiller.

Pilot in action:

In 2009 HBOS merged with Lloyds, bringing together two different cultures and with it a huge level of employee anxiety and mistrust in a difficult financial market. Leaders and managers had a critical role to play in ensuring people were treated fairly and employees remained engaged.

Gordon Lyle, former HR Director of HBOS, encouraged leaders and managers to be as visible and accountable as they could and to keep talking to employees, even if it meant having to admit there were things they didn’t know. It was a huge lesson in empathy, trust and openness that resulted in a much smoother transition than could have otherwise been the case.

Tips for HR

Remind managers and leaders that employees will always look to them for clues on what is really happening and why. Their tone of voice is an important example of how people will ‘hear’ the message and decipher what it ‘really’ means.

HR, change the way you work with the business

To build a culture of ‘Investors, it is clear that HR has an impact by role modelling the five roles, as well as encouraging and supporting managers to do the same.

It is this deliberate and conscious application of the roles that enables managers to help more ‘Saver’s’ feel a deeper and more personal connection with what they do. And ultimately build a culture of performance, rather than one of survival or status-quo.

Jane recently presented on topic in a recent Changeboard.com webinar titled, ‘Engagement for performance: How HR can unlock value of the middle manager’. Sponsored by Halogen Software UK, you can access the webinar on-demand.

About Jane Sparrow

Jane Sparrow (@janiesparr)is a consultant and author specialising in transformational change, engagement and sustainable performance.

Her new book, The Culture Builders: Leadership Strategies for Employee Performance, is published by Gower and available at Amazon.co.uk.

Hints, tips and inspiration is available on her website www.TheCultureBuilders.com.

You can also join the Culture Builders’ LinkedIn Group.

Mentoring is a mutually beneficial activity. The mentor gains satisfaction in becoming a trusted advisor and role model, while the mentee receives guidance and encouragement from someone who has “been there” and “done that.”

We think Jack and Liz demonstrate a near-perfect (and definitely quirky) example of the mentor-mentee relationship.

Here are some lessons about being a good mentor that you can learn from Jack and Liz.

Learn, grow and forge ties

So there you have it. While every mentor-mentee relationship is unique the opportunities to learn, grow and forge ties is what makes the mentorship model so successful. And why it can be of mutual benefit for both parties.

Now have your say. What do you think it takes to be a successful mentor?

If you liked this infographic please consider sharing it with your networks. You may also like Are you committed to your employees’ success? Teaching vs. coaching your employees.

Who want to be taken care of, told what to do, have their problems solved. Who whine and complain about how things aren’t fair. Who won’t take responsibility for their actions.

It’s not fun. But worse yet, it’s bad for business.

Instead of a bunch of 5-year-olds, what you really want are empowered employees.

A definition of employee empowerment

First, we should talk about what an empowered employee looks like. Empowered employees are autonomous. They take responsibility for their work, performance and development. They participate in decision making, and often make their own decisions — within a defined scope of course.

They feel accountable for their performance and success, as well as for the performance and success of the organization.

Employee empowerment does not absolve managers of their responsibility to lead or manage employees. Rather, it creates a more collegial work environment, where everyone is accountable and has something to contribute.

The benefits of employee empowerment

Among the benefits of employee empowerment (PDF), a paper by think tank CentreForum cites: better financial results, and improved employee motivation and engagement. Other benefits include better accountability, higher customer satisfaction, better productivity, increased organizational responsiveness/nimbleness and reduced turnover.

And employee empowerment is a key way to get better results through a high performing, aligned and engaged workforce.

Some managers wrongly view employee empowerment as something that “disempowers” them. Rather, it’s about driving greater employee autonomy, accountability and engagement.

So how do you empower employees?

An empowered workforce requires excellent communication, good manager-employee working relationships, and an ongoing conversation about both employee and organizational performance.

From a talent management perspective, here are 5 things you can do to encourage employee empowerment:

1.   Foster self-evaluations

When you invite an employee to complete a regular self-evaluation of their performance, you invite them to take responsibility for their work and success. They should identify their accomplishments, challenges, areas for development, strengths and weaknesses.

When they share their self-assessment with their manager, they also become active and accountable participants in the performance review process. It allows them to influence their performance ratings and all the talent planning decisions that are made based upon those ratings.

2.   Promote 360 degree feedback

Requesting feedback from others is another way for an employee to take responsibility for their performance and development. It helps them see their performance through the eyes of others.

Sometimes, requesting that feedback is hard because it makes them hear things they don’t necessarily want to hear. But it helps increase their accountability to themselves and to others.

3.   Have employee draft their own goals

Having employees draft their own goals helps to increase their accountability for those goals. It also empowers them, because it gives them a say in their work and priorities. Employees should always consider organizational goals when setting their individual goals, and directly link their goals to the organizational goals they will support.

That helps them see how they’re contributing to and accountable for the organization’s success, making them feel a more empowered part of the organization. You’ll certainly want to have them review their goals with the manager, and come to agreement on these. But the responsibility for setting goals that help the organization achieve its goals should rest with the employee.

4.   Have employee draft their own development plans and identify appropriate learning activities

You also want to make employee more accountable and empowered for their own development and career progression. After all, it’s their career. So task your employees with drafting their own development plans, based on their learning needs. And have them identify learning activities that suit their personal learning style.

As an organization, you need to make resources and budget available for this activity. And managers should certainly help employees identify their learning needs, and review their development plans to ensure the organization’s needs are being met.

But the responsibility for drafting and completing development plans should rest with the employee

5.   Ask employees to give their managers feedback

Finally, you can empower your staff by providing them with a process for providing feedback to their managers. In an empowered workforce, the manager/employee relationship is seen as symbiotic, with both parties contributing to each others success.

So, as feedback expert Jamie Resker suggests, managers should regularly ask employees: “What’s one thing that am I doing to support you that I should keep doing?” and “What’s one way I could support you more?”

This dialogue helps solidify the employee/manager relationship, helps them work together more effectively, and empowers the employee to get the support they need to deliver high performance.

Having an engaged workforce is critical to organizational success

If you want to build a world-class workforce and establish talent as a lasting competitive advantage, empower your employees. You’ll drive up their performance, alignment and engagement.

For more tips, visit our Center excellence on employee engagement.

What advice do you have on how to empower employees? I’d love to hear it; please share your feedback below.

She quotes Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, as saying “coaches are specifically and explicitly on the student’s side” working with them to help them develop and reach their potential.

Teachers on the other hand are seen to use assessments to “label people rather than to help them master concepts that will be relevant in succeeding in a very competitive world.”

While these are generalizations, the overall message to managers is to behave more like coaches than teachers, especially when it comes to conducting employee performance reviews.

The article made me think of all the research in educational settings that has shown that a teacher’s expectations affect their relationships with their students and influence student results.

Those same concepts can be carried over the work setting. When as managers, we label our employees, and carry certain expectations about their performance and potential, we may, though usually unconsciously, treat them differently, and influence their performance.

So stop and ask yourself:

Would your employees describe you as “being on their side” and “committed to their success”? Do you need to change your behaviors or even your fundamental approach to management so you can better support your employees’ performance and success?

Ideas for effective employee performance coaching

Here are some ways you can demonstrate a commitment to your employees’ success and “be on their side”:

• Build a solid working relationship with each of your employees that is founded in mutual trust and caring.
• Maintain an ongoing, two-way dialogue about performance where you share expectations, provide coaching, answer questions, support employee performance, and solicit feedback on your own performance.
• Give your employees regular, ongoing feedback and coaching on their performance, focusing on desired behaviors and outcomes, and opportunities for development, not on “failures”.
• Keep the focus of your formal performance reviews on shared expectations about work and performance, continued development and career progression, and contributions to organizational goals/success, not on ratings and rankings.
• Make sure the goals you assign your employees are achievable.
• Don’t penalize employees for things that were beyond their control.
• Provide employees with ongoing development opportunities, both formal and informal.
• Engage in supporting your employees’ career development and progression.
• Recognize and reward accomplishments, progress and success.
• Treat mistakes or less than desired results as learning opportunities rather than failures.
• Encourage the sharing of different opinions and perspectives, and value the differences.
• Help each employee to discover and bring their passion to their work.
• Work to see the potential in every one of your employees and help them to be their best.

What about employees?

Earlier this week Trish McFarlane asked, Are you coachable? and that got me thinking that employees need to take some ownership in building the coaching relationship as well. It brings to mind that parable of how you can bring a horse to water…

As Trish says, employees should not be afraid to seek out feedback and to understand how others perceive their performance. That kind of insight is gold if you, the employee, want to take charge of your development and advance your career.

Do you have any ideas for ways a manager can “be on their employees’ side” and be committed to their success? What are your thoughts on the employee’s role in the coaching relationship?

If you’re interested in sharpening your skills as a manager, check out Performance management training for managers. You’ll learn best practices for managing your employees’ performance, development and career progression.