As a manager, a lot of your role—almost all of it, ultimately—is about managing your direct reports' performance. That's why you're there: to enable your people to do their best work, to be a force-multiplier that makes your team greater than the sum of its parts, and to help your people self-actualize and grow in their careers (which, if done right, also means they'll stay working at the company for longer).

Good performance management is proactive, structured, transparent, and employee-driven. Let's look at each of these in more depth:

Proactive

A common mistake new managers make is to leave performance management to when there's a problem. By that point, it's far harder to get things on track than if there had just been proactive effort to manage performance (including catching poor performance early).

Structured

Use a routine schedule

Put a recurring one-on-one event on the calendar that is strictly used for talking about how work is happening, not the work itself, and performance evaluation. Even if the employee tries to use it for other purposes, insist on keeping it on track and dedicated for only this purpose.

The frequency and types of meetings you have will vary depending on your company and team's culture, but I usually like to have two kinds of one-on-one meetings on the books with direct reports:

• A 30-minute weekly check-in where we talk about general stuff for that week. The goal in this meeting is to ensure that they're in a flow state with clear priorities and goals, and to check-in more generally about how they're doing.
• A monthly, bimonthly, or perhaps quarterly 1-hour formal performance review where we go through a more structured process (usually something like start/stop/continue). These meetings always require a pre-written agenda written by the employee at least a few hours in advance, mostly to get the employee engaged in their own development (see the "Employee-driven" heading below) and thinking about what's most important to discuss, so they're not just running into it from another meeting without thinking. If this agenda isn't written at start time, I'll generally reschedule the meeting.

It may not always feel like there's stuff to discuss. Try anyway. If you get a pilot license, they say that there's always something to be doing when flying; you should never have nothing to do. The same holds true here: if you're doing your job as a manager right, you should always have stuff to discuss. It can help to create a "growth conversation guide" including a bank of questions to fall back on if either party feels like they're not sure what else to discuss.

Use an artifact

Performance reviews, like a lot of design, should be artifact-based. What does that mean? It means we should commit our thoughts to a document or drawing or another tangible thing, not just keep them in ephemeral conversation or in our own heads. Having a formalized place to collect performance assessment has myriad benefits:

• Encourage the right mindset: Sitting down with a document each time you discuss performance can help cue the right mindset for such conversations, especially when they're mixed in with a bunch of other types of chats, like social hangouts or discussions about the work itself.
• Prevent miscommunications: Without a formal artifact, it's extremely easy for tone of voice to be miscommunicated or misconstrued. Conflict-avoidant people tend to downplay negative concerns or overestimate the other person's sensitivity to criticism and therefore assume that things have been communicated when, in fact, they weren't. Formal artifacts also support multi-modal communication (written, oral discussion, etc.) which can really help the spectrum of neurodiverse minds fully process everything. Different people learn differently.
• Prevent recency bias: It enables both sides to go back and review the totality of feedback, not just what's most recent, reducing the problem of recency bias.
• Formalize memory: The very act of actually writing things down can help you remember things better, even if you never look at it again.
• Support termination, if ever needed: In the event that you need to fire the employee, it acts as a valuable paper trail showing that the decision was ultimately necessary and that you took a lot of effort to avoid it.

Personally, I like to keep things simple with a Notion or Google Doc, shared strictly between myself and the other person (don't make it so anyone with the link can view—make sure you have to securely sign in to view). Then, because it's privately shared, you can share the link in the calendar event for easy access, without concerns others will be able to see it.

Remember that these discussions are as much for you to manage them and yourself better as it is for them. Encourage reports to bring up ways for you to better support them. Remember that you model how you'd like them to receive feedback by how you encourage and receive feedback about yourself.

Transparent

It should always be very clear how to perform well in a role, what above-band high performance (and therefore, promotion potential) looks like, and how well the employee is doing against that expectation.

A formalized performance discussion document, as described above, is an important way to deliver on that, but that should just be the start. Consider creating things like:

• A performance discussion guide: Also as described above, a document with suggested conversation-starter questions can help ensure that everything is being discussed. Some tools like Lattice give you suggested questions to discuss when creating the agenda for the meeting.
• Career ladders: A rubric that clearly shows expectations at various stages. Staff.design/resources is a great resource to see examples of this, and you can see more examples in my Library.
• Promotion policies: Guides that describe how the company/team does promotion so it's clear when and how these can happen.
• How negative performance is managed, such as policies around performance improvement plans. These can be helpful to folks even if they're performing well, to reassure them of what it would look like were that not the case.

Employee-driven

People thrive when they're empowered and expected to drive their own development. Just as we ask employees to "think like an owner" of the company and its resources, so too should employees be encouraged to think of their own careers from the standpoint of ownership (because obviously, they do own it!).

A lot of employees, particularly more junior ones (in fact, this point is a fantastic measure of seniority, I've found), won't take this initiative unless encouraged to do so. They may perceive it as asking too much or being too pushy. Remind yourself what it was like in your first job, how reserved you probably were, and never underestimate people's tendency to hide when they're struggling for fear of being perceived as low-performing.

Tell employees that performance meetings are theirs to control and drive. That means that they set the agenda, so ask them to come to meetings with one formalized. If they want to discuss something, they always can in performance meetings—it's a safe space. Reinforcing that can help provide a backstop against cases where things may otherwise fall through the cracks in people's busy schedules. Performance review discussions are the last line of defense there, so ensure that employees know that they can discuss anything that's important to them.

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Did I miss anything? Let me know—I'd love to hear from you.