My performance management framework
Beyond reviews and ratings... how I go about creating a culture around performance.
Spoiler alert: performance management doesn’t mean performance reviews, feedback forms, and productivity metrics. What it does mean is growing humans and delivering exceptional work that influences the lives of those who use it.
I’ve seen over and over how good leadership has accelerated my team members gain responsibility, get visibility and helped get the job done way ahead of time. Therefore it’s a leader’s duty to apply all the collective skill and will to help learn, have fun and ship value every day.
My framework is composed of the following tools:
Universally-understood standards for excellence
Clarity of expectations
Collaborative goal-setting
Relentless coaching, constructive feedback
Let’s dive into it!
Universally-understood standards for excellence
How should the team members carry themselves?
Standards of excellence mean your team knows not just what to do, but what ‘above the line’ looks like on a normal Tuesday. No team will perform at a given level unless the bar is set. When thinking about setting standards for excellence, think about an athlete focusing on core training aspects that will bring them to a medal.
My go-to combination of standards of excellence: ownership, communication, effort and impact.
But this list alone simply doesn’t cut it — concrete examples of excellent work are a must and conversely, of subpar work as well. They need to be relatable as well, otherwise the path to excellence will not be understood.
Consider the following example that I use to explain to my team how to meet the standards.
A platform engineer discovers that one of the product services is struggling to keep up with the incoming requests and is failing to pass the system health checks.
Ownership
✅ Above the line: discovering latency issues, ensuring all impacted individuals are informed or involved in the process.
⚠️ Below the line: raising latency issues but doing nothing above that. Assuming “everyone knows what’s happening” and stopping there.
Communication
✅ Above the line: directly answers “how bad is it” so that the consequences are understood.
⚠️ Below the line: provides information but no answers; teams and individuals are not aware what are the consequences.
Effort
✅ Above the line: system-thinking approach allowing to understand why the issue appeared.
⚠️ Below the line: focusing on the what the fix is and not the why it occurred.
Impact
✅ Above the line: tracks the short and long term effect of the resolution. Recommends further improvements.
⚠️ Below the line: resolves the issue, but misses out on providing a recommendation to improve the system.
Creating clarity of expectations
How do the team members know, they are on the right track?
It’s no secret that working towards unclear outcomes is a waste of time.
This means being articulate in expressing expectations — not being able to do so leads to poor performance and consequentially, poor morale.
When done right, it fosters psychological safety, since everyone is capable of self-managing themselves without getting sidetracked. Everyone in the team then has an intuition of the following collaboration aspects:
Knowing the team goals;
What are the operating principles;
How to communicate efficiently;
How much freedom there is to make errors;
When to take time to reflect and learn.
This is very well described in the study Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams, the summary of the paper is that clear behavioral norms predict team performance and job satisfaction, with norm clarity being the stronger factor.
Bottom line — I reduce ambiguity to the max as a tool to boost performance and morale.
Collaborative goal-setting
Having people accomplish goals their way.
The most successful organizations take pride in bosses who allow their employees to do their job. For us, as bosses, this means reminding ourselves to step out of our directs’ way and let them find their own path to meeting the objective.
In my teams, I clearly lay out the foundation for our success by setting the larger vision. For example:
Make our service the #1 solution for prototyping across the company.
With that intention out there, I invite everyone to apply their creativity in searching the quickest and most sustainable path to meeting that objective. The culture letting others decide the route to the destination (individual goal setting) and the vessel (selection of tools for the job) is the main force multiplier for combined performance and motivation.
Not micromanaging doesn’t mean no expectations - in fact, the greatest results come when expectations are set and autonomy is guaranteed by the leader.
My secret for 10x performance: setting goals by finding opportunities for intersecting individuals interests with team goals - the greater the overlap, the better. It’s not easy to do that, and let’s face it - we’re hired to tackle company goals - but my belief is that it’s on me to have the people buy into the idea of pursuing growth based on current needs. It’s not through any kind of manipulation, but rather by spending time in a 1:1 and dissection of pros and cons of development areas, and how they best convert onto added value to the project.
Relentless coaching, constructive feedback
Grow, adjust, learn, repeat
I put coaching and feedback last in my performance framework, but it’s my favorite part. Nothing beats the satisfaction of applying coaching and feedback to an aligned goal and seeing the person grow.
In coaching, I emphasize helping the individual find their own path to the destination; feedback acts as an aid to help them stay on that path.
Coaching and feedback also give a powerful opportunity to truly get to know the human sitting on the other side. The great thing about it is that most of it comes down to listening actively — and occasionally asking questions or sharing your perception of their behavior and the impact it has on the world around them.