I’ve had the pleasure of working with Toya and her organization, viBe Theater Experience, for over a year now. I’ve loved watching Toya in action, as she’s taken her organization to the next level. The tremendous increases in her budget, staff & programming over the past year have been so exciting to see, as has watching her continue to carefully cultivate an internal culture that centers wellness and trust. That’s what I wanted to talk with Toya about - the nuts and bolts of driving for programmatic and organizational excellence while also truly centering the humanity and wellness of her team. So often we talk about performance evaluation as - at best, an annual ritual that we go through but don’t really use, or worse, a necessary evil that creates stress and feels like a burden to everyone involved. Toya and I talk about how reimagining what it actually means to evaluate performance - how we define excellence, who decides which metrics to measure and how, what we reward and how we think about incentives - How that can actually transform the whole experience of an evaluation into a vehicle for fueling growth and deepening team members’ understandings of one another.