Page 105 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Getting Great People on Board 95

Of course, if you are leading a startup or a nonprofit, or taking over an
organization, you may need to construct a broader cadence yourself. Just
make sure that it fits your needs and encourages constructive feedback,
and don’t just delegate the creation of this system to human resources. For
example, Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign, insists that each manager have
a performance discussion with their people twice each year, talking about
what they are trying to achieve and what they are doing for the customer,
the company, and the team. To compel his managers to actually do these
well, he asks them to create a brief, one-page summary of the discussion
and send it directly to him. He then reads all of them and randomly sends
notes back to managers with comments about the reviews, sometimes
asking them to do the review again if it didn’t seem to have been truly
productive.
Strategy consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has another
approach. In addition to immediate feedback on projects, BCG has a for-
mal yearly process of written reviews for each of the 1,000-plus partners
in the firm. These reviews are discussed in face-to-face meetings of the top
twenty-seven senior leaders during partner performance week and are
used to make decisions about bonuses, promotions, future assignments,
and key development goals, which are then discussed with partners one on
one. According to BCG’s president and CEO Richard Lesser, this process
gives the top leaders an understanding of talent across the organization
and reinforces a “one firm” culture with consistent messaging. It also helps
those leaders calibrate their own contributions with the many impressive
performances outside their own areas, keeping them grounded and fo-
cused on supporting the next generation.
As your department or unit gets larger or you get more responsibility
and the pace of work increases, you also should make sure that your perfor-
mance management system doesn’t become overly bureaucratic and begin
to lose its value of driving systematic feedback and improvement. For ex-
ample, Raghu Krishnamoorthy, senior vice president and chief human
resource officer at GE, notes in HBR’s “The Secret Ingredient in GE’s
Talent-Review System” that GE’s leaders (up to and including the CEO)
routinely spend 30 percent of their time on people issues, including having