This episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast is about both performance reviews and employee feedback. There is tension around performance reviews, did I achieve my goals? They have a lot of stress around them. People don't like to do them for that reason, both sides. We will talk about both performance reviews and feedback as the yin and yang of engagement with employees. If you think about feedback as a more continuous process and a performance review is a more periodic kind of engagement, annual or biannual or whatever your pace is, they kind of work together. At one level you'd say the feedback over time should aggregate into the performance review. And in fact, one of the rules around performance reviews is there should not be any surprises around performance reviews. Some organizations are eliminating the annual performance review. They're basically saying, if we're doing a good job of continually giving feedback, we don't really need to do a performance review. Some dispute that because there's a bit of a formality that's got value in a performance review. Two Extreme Cases Gen Zs want continuous feedback on how they're doing. If you told them every day -red, yellow, green, or on a scale of one to 10, they would like that. They are the generation that grew up with- how many likes did I get on my post? And how many friends do I have? How big is my network? And they're constantly measuring themselves for acceptance and how are they performing and where they fit in. You can not give Gen Z too much feedback. The opposite of that is when we get feedback from people that do not have good self-awareness and they do not appraise themselves accurately. When there was a complete mismatch in their view of their performance and the boss's view of their performance. This is when there is a ton of stress, so the boss is questioning, what am I doing wrong that I've not communicated to this person where they stand? And, part of the answer is it's them. Standard Performance Review Model An annual performance review is still important. Let’s reframe performance reviews as a coaching opportunity. An opportunity to talk about the good, the bad, and what we're going do to make them better. That's your standard good, above average, performing employee review. How did they perform against their objectives? As a leader, you must set clear objectives - specific, measurable, action-oriented, time-based, achievable, all that has to be true about the objectives. They are very observable, third-party observable. You know if you did them, your employees know, if they did them. So when we sit down and say, did you achieve the specific objectives that we had for you this year? That should be a relatively easy conversation if you did a good job of making them measurable. So we go through the achievements, 1, 2, 3. You got an A on this, a, B on this, and a C minus on this one. The second thing that a lot of people miss when they're doing a review is how you got the job done. So they're only focused on the achievement of the item and they miss how you did the job.  How does your boss perceive you in this organization and how you got the job done? Are you effective in working with others to get the job done? Did you work and play well with others? When somebody does the job in a way that doesn't match your culture, they shouldn't be in your organization over time. How did you get the job done? What did you do well, and what did you do poorly on there? And then based on that, where do we need some development? And given where you want to go, so this is where the career conversation comes in. Do you want to be a vice president? Here are the three things that you don't have that you need to be a really good vice president. So let's figure out how to get you those things. We need to teach you some financial skills that you don't have, or you need to understand the product development process. Finally, what else can I do to help make you successful? And that's a bit of