Past:
You knew what your group wanted to work on - find out how they have been doing so far, with a quick scaling activity.
Ask everyone to scale between 10 and 1 where they are now between realisation of their hopes and their fears. You can do this on paper, or - better - walking the scale in the room, to generate more energy.
 
Present:
Something comes up in the moment, but you (and probably most of the group) don’t want to devote much time to it for now. Write it on a ‘car park’ chart, visible to all, expressly there to list topics that we can’t or won’t deal with further in this session, but which will be allocated a time and a process for later.
 
Future:
Invite participants each to write a letter to themselves. Then post them out a couple of weeks or a month later as a great reminder of the learning, visions or actions from your session.
 

At last! it’s what they call your ‘HBR Moment’. That’s when your big idea gets recognised in an article in the Harvard Business Review. In this case it’s the cover story.

The big idea is that Performance Review Conversations need reforming, because for the most part they are counter-productive and based on faulty, traditional thinking. 

Co-author is Marcus Buckingham, who we exchanged ideas with a few years ago at a conference in Florida. Since then, we’ve always included him in our presentations, with his ‘Strengths' work as a significant feature in our landscape of positive change. It’s less likely he’s been mentioning us, but you never know. We chatted to Martin Seligman, too, and maintain friendly relations with Positive Psychology.

Meanwhile, we’ve been quietly developing and implementing better performance review processes with clients from care homes to dock facilities managers. As the HBR article says, it’s a hot topic, which we’re currently discussing with a leading heritage organisation and a charity for the homeless.

You can, as Bruce Springsteen noted, 'spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come'. Well let’s not waste any more time on performance reviews that confuse or demotivate. Give us a call to seize this HBR Moment and transform your organisation’s most important conversations!

Read the article here