157: Year in Review: Reviews, Goals and Performance

Charlotte Ward: 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode 157 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I continue to look back at 2020. If you're listening to this real time, it's Christmas Week. 2020. It's that time of year where leaders and individual contributors email inboxes often fill up with requests to complete those annual reviews. And indeed, I received the first of those requests from my organisation today. And it got me thinking here in the middle of this annual review of the first year of the podcast. At these moments of looking back over the last year. How so much has happened and and how so much has passed by unnoticed from small achievements to relatively big milestones. Related to the podcast itself and my professional life and my home life and my whole life. I'm struck by how difficult it's going to be to write my own review for my day job. I started making notes a while back, but it's always difficult to do so retrospectively. And I really must, really must get better at keeping notes real time. If you've been following my journey on this podcast or or before that since the early days of customer support leaders, then you may also be aware that I wrote an article a week on LinkedIn for two years almost. When I got to my 100th article, I was feeling much the same. I was feeling like I had been on this kind of journey over nearly two years. And I just had forgotten, in all the busyness, to itemize, to pay attention to exactly what I was doing, to pay attention to my working life, to pay attention to my personal development and my learnings. I just never quantified any of it. And my 100th article made an attempt to do that. People at that time when I was consulting quite often asked what I'd been up to, and sometimes hear of a client or a job or a project. But everything else was a bit nebulous. To people who weren't familiar with what I was doing, I was working from home, consulting in this space that people didn't really understand, and also embarking on something of a series of personal development programs over the course of two or three years. It was understandable that they didn't understand. A lot of what I embarked upon and still embark upon has a less than definite purpose, other than maybe the embryo of an idea that I've wanted to prototype or test. And so from the outside it can seem, I'm sure, directionless or destination free, but it's definitely not meandering in my mind. Every effort, every experiment, every adventure, they've all had or served some purpose. Granted, I've been able to state the more defined ones with an air of greater certainty. But sometimes, and and actually quite often considering, the value has been as much in the exercises as in the outcomes. That journey has always been one of growth, if if not always obvious goals. And from this perspective, when I wrote that hundredth article, I decided that one hundred weeks was a perfect time to try and make one of those lists. I came up with one hundred things I'd been up to in one hundred weeks. I went to eleven conferences. I joined thirty-five communities, smaller meetups and other networking opportunities. I pursued eighteen different education and professional development or certification opportunities. I created twelve new initiatives, volunteering opportunities, and a small side hustle. I took part in twenty-three industry voice development and mentoring activities and I had this huge back catalogue of articles on LinkedIn. When I wrote that list, and it's a lot more itemized in the article, it reminded me of a few things. It reminded me that we need to get better at valuing our achievements. It reminded me that one-off activities might not seem to have obvious benefit in the moment, but they absolutely do when you build them into a bigger story. And finally and most relevantly at this time of year, it reminded me it's probably easier to list and recognise on the fly and in the moment rather than in 52-week or 100-week chunks. As we look forward to review season, and I hope yours is a good one and goes well. There's always a slightly darker side, which I explored early on in the podcast as I talked with other leaders about managing performance issues.

Ash Rhodes: 5:49

Someday I will write a book about like the tyranny of metrics and so on. I think that slavish adherence to KPIs in the long term hurt employees. I think that there is a more empathetic way to manage employees that help the company, help the employees, and help the customers. If you are not focused entirely on just hitting numbers, the employees are happy and the customers are super happy. And it just works better.

Lauren Eimers: 6:26

I built an intentional dashboard for the team in Zenbest so they can see team-wide their trending statistics. They know in our OKRs what we're working towards every quarter as far as you know, CSAT or efficiency, um, things of that nature. So they have the goals, they have this dashboard that they can see. Um, I'm always happy to pull individual reports for them too, so they can see specific things for themselves.

Hilary Dudek: 6:54

We really just try to identify the metrics and the or the or the KPIs with the team members. It's just not meeting the expectations that we've set out for them. And it's been consistent. This isn't something where it's the first time they've never not met that metric. And trying to come up with a way to let them kind of create their own path forward. If you want to continue working here, what is it you think you need to do to improve? And how can I help you with that? So then we sit down together and we make some goals. What I really value out of this particular process is setting hard dates. By February 28th, you will have done X, Y, and Z and you will have met this performance or this KPI four out of the five weeks or something like that.

Simone Secci: 7:45

You have to set the right expectation from the beginning, right? But like if you have somebody that is going to be disingenuous, that doesn't matter. At the end of the day, that's not gonna necessarily save you from an uncomfortable situation. If somebody measures your your trust, you have to really make them understand they can have a deal with it and you know trying to correct them, but still make uh I think you have to make the situation uh official. So I I work directly with HM and things like that were happening. I will give people more trust and more freedom than than a lot of uh the companies would. And so they were completely free to manage their time, starting from the very beginning. This is for entry-level positions because I want people to immediately understand what responsibility means, you know. And and if you if if you instead create uh an environment where uh everything is very rigid, you're not really giving people a chance to uh be responsible for themselves and the and the issue.

Charlotte Ward: 8:43

Yeah, you're not giving them that trust from the the get-go.

Josh Magsam: 8:47

It's a two-way street. Uh I find that this is certainly true of myself, but other managers and leaders that I've talked to, I think tend to fall into a similar line of thought, particularly early on in their career. And that is, gosh, I'm coaching someone's performance. Um, and if they fail, I I have failed too. But I I can look back at cases and understand where you know, someone on the other side, the person I was managing, the same effort wasn't being put into it by both parties. And I've seen situations where managers didn't really put enough effort into coaching performance issues. But to be honest, that's rare. I think a lot of the managers I work with are very passionate about helping their people, and and again, I think even more so early on.

Charlotte Ward: 9:36

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one five six for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.