Another performance review

By Marc Innegraeve

​Most of the people working in businesses think they’ve done a good job when they meet their KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). Well, think again!
 
KPI’s might seem an objective way to evaluate your work, performance reviews often show something different. It’s really your boss who decides about your promotion, your salary raise and other advantages that come with good performance. Your bosses might claim and even believe they are demonstrating rational and objective behaviour when evaluating your work, they are probably not. The challenge is that they apply company rules and KPI’s to evaluate you, but their belief about your performance is driven by their personal preferences or meta-programs.  But there’s hope .. two simple questions can give you the information you need to convince your boss beyond company KPI’s!
 
Q1: How will you know that I’m good at my job?
You might get a lot of corporate buzzwords in the answer, but that’s not what you are listening for. Your focus of attention needs to be the representation system that your boss is using when giving you his or her best MBA-slang. It will give you the channel to use to convince your boss. Some possible answers to listen for:
 
“I know a good job when I see it.” This boss needs to see you perform. If you are in a virtual team and your boss is residing in another continent … good luck!
 
“Customers will tell me if you’re good.” This boss needs to hear about your performance. You will need to get people to talk about you to your boss. And we all know that’s a lot more likely to happen when you do a bad job than when you’re performing well.
 
“I’ll experience it when working together.” This boss needs to feel and experience your quality of work. You will have to make your boss part of the action.
 
“I will see it in your sales figures.” This is a different way of seeing than the earlier one, and it’s good news! This boss has to read things to be convinced and might even belief in you just based upon your KPI’s.
 
Q2: How often do you need to see/hear/experience/read that to be convinced?
In this question, fill in whatever the answer of your boss was on the first question. It will give you the frequence or duration you will have to feed the convincer channel to convince your boss. Again listen for particular types of answers:
 
“3 times” This boss will need a number of times your feed before you can convince him or her.
 
“4 weeks” This boss will need to be fed information about your performance over a certain period of time.
 
“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt” This boss is easy to convince, because he or see will give you the benefit of the doubt. Your problem is that this can work both ways. One mess-up from you can be very expensive.
 
“For life” This boss is hard work. Time and again you will have to feed your boss convincing information about your performance.
 
So go ask your boss those two questions and listen. It may make all the difference in your carreer. And if you are a boss, ask yourself … how important are KPI’s to you?

(This article, written by Marc Innegraeve, originally appeared in the NLP-Newsletter of the Society of NLP.)

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