Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
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Dear Bev,
I work for a large financial technology firm with around 400 employees. It is a great culture and I enjoy my colleagues and our leadership very much. I’m challenged, however, by our performance-review process. I’m in a client-facing role and charged with managing many client relationships. Because it is a tech product, we have issues that need to be addressed on a regular basis. I believe I handle them well, but I get no feedback whatsoever.
This is my third year. Previously, when performance review time came around, my boss asked me to go online and answer a few questions about my performance over the year. He answered the same questions from his viewpoint. I felt like he essentially copied what I had written. There are 14 people on my team. I get it. Performance reviews are hard to write and sometimes hard to deliver. It takes a lot of time. Like many successful firms, we run fast and hard and no one has a lot of time to sit around and talk.
But once a year?
There should be respect for the employees to care enough to engage in an actual dialogue. How do I bring this up without appearing to be a naysayer? Like I said, I am not unhappy in my role, my boss or the company. I just want to know how well I am doing and what I need to modify.
S.J.
Dear S.J.,
I was stunned reading your note about the irony. Companies want to have motivated, engaged and committed people. Yet I often hear from the employees about the desire to have a performance review and get feedback. Instead, the managers grouse about having to do them!
To think you might be perceived as a naysayer because you are asking for feedback and want an opportunity to improve your performance would be funny were it not so frustrating. It’s very common for me to hear someone is frustrated because they aren’t hearing enough from their boss to help them improve.
The obstacle I see you facing is bigger than one might think. In a company with 400 people, there is likely someone in human resources working with management to determine the process to put in place. You would have to gain the ear of this person or people to have them change the system. The approach for these processes is rarely put in place without a lot of discussion, input and consideration. That doesn’t mean the right decision gets made; it means it is hard to undo it with, what might be, one person’s viewpoint.
But you have an easier option, and that is letting your boss know you want more specific feedback. Explain to your boss that you respect the process the company is engaging in, and you are complying with it. But you believe it is helpful for you to understand how you are doing. You could ask very specific questions to help your boss focus his feedback around your client engagement approach, follow-up with clients, internal collaboration and so on.
A final note – and this is directed to companies doing something similar to S.J.’s. Don’t bother putting a performance review process in place if it is mostly to check the box once a year and say you have done it. Employees need and deserve specific, ongoing feedback. Think about the best sports teams – the players making millions of dollars a year get input on a regular basis about tweaks they can make, new ideas to approach the game and better ways to collaborate. If successful sports figures can benefit from specific feedback, why wouldn’t your employees do so also?
Dear Bev,
My company is implementing a new process around personal time off (PTO). Historically, we had to earn additional weeks (everyone started with two weeks upon joining the company). As you stayed longer, you earned more weeks, maxing out at six in total. The new approach is unlimited time off. People can take vacation or personal time whenever they need it. Our CEO told us this is to stay competitive. He claimed we are losing a lot of good, young talent to tech companies who often have this policy. He also claimed that research shows even when unlimited PTO is given, it often isn’t taken.
This new policy is bothersome to those of us who have been here a long time and have earned the six weeks total. I have never taken my six weeks, and most of my colleagues haven’t either. But I call this a “generational oversight.” We are trying to put a policy in place to attract younger people who want as much time off as they can get. But those of us who are older and have been working here for a long time are expected to ignore what happened before and move on.
A.B.
Dear A.B.,
I was teaching my graduate class on managerial skills this evening. We were talking about some of the top things managers need to do well to engage and motivate team members. Providing context was one of the top five. Your CEO probably took a misstep in that he provided context about what was happening in the marketplace from the recruiting side, but he didn’t look internally and consider the context for this message among those who have been around and would interpret it as something taken away, not given to them.
This is common when leaders and senior managers make a decision they have discussed quite a bit. Likely there were differences of opinion, perhaps debates and arguments and a great deal of attention paid to what the new policy would do for (and to) the firm. What they likely overlooked was, under the existing policy, how hard it had been for people to earn their way to where they are now and the impact the new policy would have on them.
In fairness, it might have been an unintentional oversight because your CEO might have believed this was good for everyone! If you are comfortable and have a boss above you who would be open to listen, point out how the message landed with those who have been working there for a long time to “earn” what they have. Explain that you don’t believe any malintent was at work, but the way the message landed was hurtful. Sometimes people don’t know how what they are saying and doing is being received and it is helpful for them to hear another viewpoint.
This depends on the receptivity of your management. You know the culture and the players better than I do, so use your judgment here.
Take the time given to you. Americans in general don’t enjoy time off nearly enough and you could start a movement to help us all get better at this!
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. Beverly is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here. 
