After you have identified for an employee both a range of goals and the mindset necessary to achieve them, the next logical step is to map out, in a pragmatic fashion and with employee input, different possible paths to success. The idea here is to describe actions, resources, and plans of action in terms as specific as possible...you want to provide your employee with a "nuts and bolts" repertoire of approaches that he or she can draw upon in the coming cycle.
- Beverly Ballaro, Dealing with Difficult People
Last week, we discussed the process of laying out goals for your employees during their performance reviews. Often, we would then leave the implementation of these goals entirely to our employee and move on to the constructive criticism we have to give as part of the review. Instead, Beverly Ballaro suggests we take this opportunity to do some joint brainstorming - to plan some of the action steps your employee can take to achieve his/her goals. This process is beneficial in many ways. For example, you can:
- Discover any questions/confusion the employee has about the new goals and address it immediately.
- Help your employee feel that the new goals are achieveable and manageable. We all feel like our tasks are much more approachable once we've broken them down into smaller, actionable chunks.
- Model the thought process you'd like your employees to go through when they plan. Each of your employees will need more or less help with this process of breaking down tasks, and walking through it together is an excellent way to customize and personalize your assistance.
- Give immediate feedback about the steps your employee may take, preventing potential missteps.
- Discuss necessary resources the employee may need and potentially give immediate approval for these allocations.
Once you have completed this discussion, an excellent post-review activity for your employee would be to turn your action plans into an actionable task list, project calendar, or other report that will allow him/her to track progress.