Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to build several incredible teams. After bringing new team members on board, I focus on understanding what makes them tick, their personal and career aspirations, strengths, and areas for development. I also ask for feedback on my performance, so that I can continue to grow as a leader. But all these years, I’ve never had the ability to track or measure feedback across team members. It’s been ad hoc at best, shared during 1:1 meetings, on email, over a drink, or at a tradeshow booth.
For the first time in 20 years, I now have the ability to formally assess how my new hires are doing 30, 60 and 90 days into the job. I can easily make sure the great people we’ve hired have gotten off to an equally great start. I can make certain they’re fitting well into the team and that it’s a good culture match. I can check to see if the people who were indicated as great hires through the reference checking process are, indeed, great hires. I can build this feedback into my coaching strategies to increase the performance of my team — now as a CRO, that gets me excited!
I do all this right in Harver Reference by simply sending out a request for 360 feedback across team members. Their feedback is captured and delivered in a report that gives me a clear, balanced view of a team member’s performance. This collective intelligence approach gathers powerful data with which I can give constructive feedback to improve my team’s skills and performance. I can also analyze that data against a team member’s reference report to see if there are any disparities or alignments of strengths and weakness, or other areas for development.
We’ve also democratized the HR process by empowering individuals to launch their own performance checkup at any time and request feedback to help them deliver better results and accelerate their own success. This will be welcomed news to many, especially millennials, given 74% of them report feeling “in the dark” about their performance. Since half of your workforce in 2020 will be millennials, don’t you think it’s time to give them more control and ownership of their career and development?
I’ve even done this myself. I launched my post-hire review, inviting my direct reports and colleagues to give input on my performance to date. Feedback was almost instantaneous and now I’ve got a great report that tells me how I’m doing – what’s working, what’s not, and how I can adjust to ensure I’m leading the team in the most effective way possible.
Now, development conversations at all levels happen throughout the year; not during your typical painful annual performance review. This is a major shift away from the traditional 1:1 check-in with a supervisor, to a continuous performance model, where both my team members and I benefit from the collective intelligence of many of our colleagues, at all levels. That’s the power of collective intelligence – and for the first time in my career, I have the insights needed to strategically build and develop an incredible team.
