Empathy is the experience of understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and condition from their point of view, rather than from your own. The best way to do this is to imagine yourself in their place in order to understand what they are feeling or experiencing. Empathy in performance reviews can be a powerful tool for any coach, manager or leader.
Why Empathy is Important in Performance Reviews
The workplace is a human place. Peoples job performance can be impacted by many factors. Outside influences of poor performance include: children, family, relationships and finances. You don’t always know what’s going on in their lives that are impacting their performance.
By using the stick method, improve or leave, to improve performance you could be missing out on the real issues. By not addressing the real issues of poor performance you are setting them up to fail. This is why few people successfully complete performance improvement plans. Pushing them to improve with an ultimatum of losing their job won’t inspire improved performance.
Using empathy when coaching your team fosters inspiration. By taking a personal and vested interest in their overall wellbeing strengthens your relationship. It creates a personal bond that will inspire greater performance because people work hard for people who care about them as a person.
How to Bring Empathy into Performance Reviews
1) Bringing empathy into performance reviews need to happen sooner. Waiting several weeks or months before addressing performance issues would be too late. This is especially true if there is a desperate need for performance. The reason being, there comes a point where poor performance may impact the organization’s ability to retain clients or meet shareholder expectations. Upsetting those apple carts can lead to bigger issues.
2) There need to be regular one-to-one’s that include performance reviews and goal attainment. Having regular meetings and discussions allow you to quickly spot negative trends. Because the first discussion should be around skill, coaching, encouragement and training need to be provided.
3) By the second or third meeting and coaching isn’t positively impacting performance bring empathy into the discussion. To do this ask questions like “what’s going on with you” or “how are you doing”? You can explain that coaching isn’t working and ask how else can you support them to improve. The idea is to get them to open up about what might be distracting them or consuming their attention.
4) After they’ve opened up and talked about what is going on in their life you have to get them to talk through how they will address it. It is important to get timelines and a commitment to resolve the issue. At the very least there should be a commitment to find a way to minimize the distraction while at work. Follow-up on their progress in your subsequent one-to-one’s.
Practicing empathy regularly when coaching your team is a good habit to have. When done regularly it can help strengthen your relationship and avoid potential performance issues, or at least correct them before it’s too late. Utilizing empathy as part of your coaching process doesn’t mean performance issues won’t happen or that you won’t have to part ways. But it does improve the likelihood that both you and your team will have a higher chance of success. Demonstrating empathy in the workplace is also a sign of strong emotional intelligence.
