In an ideal world, the feedback you receive would come with a performance improvement plan that’s actionable. In reality, it is often up to you to translate constructive criticism into actions and improve your performance.
Performance improvement plan from feedback
Without feedback, we can’t improve. Everyone has their own blind spots, and it is almost impossible to discover them on our own. However, getting feedback can be a drag when it’s not positive.
In fact, it’s not only you who is not enjoying the situation. Managers hate giving critical feedback too. As illustrated in this study, the feedback managers were providing naturally without too much thought was often not actionable and, at times, led to defensive reactions and hard feelings. An example of this would be a statement such as “you should be more professional” or “you are a poor communicator”.
Actionable feedback is crucial for learning and performance improvement. It all starts with a practical action plan.
Without an action plan, feedback often remains just talk. Let me share a story to illustrate this point.
A few years ago, I received feedback after I finished an internship, and I was lucky because it was actionable. It wasn’t a personal attack, and I understood the skill I should work on is communicating with a non-technical audience. This was not the first time I heard that at that point, and I wasn’t alone.
Many times, I’ve found myself in conversations like, “I should improve how I talk to non-experts” only to hear, “Yeah, me too” and see no further action. However, when the feedback targeted technical skills, I have seen people (including myself) to create a performance improvement plan immediately.
Understanding and acting on feedback is not a rocket science. It’s about taking specific, actionable steps, even when it comes to soft skills.
In the next section we will look at the process you could follow to create your own performance improvement plan.
Create your performance improvement plan
We can break down the process into the following steps
- Dissect the Skill
- Brainstorm Activities
- Plan Training
- Execution
Let’s stick to communication as an example, but you can do the same with any skill.
Dissect the skill
As with any problem, the first step in solving it is to think about how you can dissect it into smaller pieces. For example, imagine you receive feedback similar to mine about communicating with non-expert audiences. What would you ask yourself?
One of my first questions was whether I needed to improve my communication in general. As mentioned above, it’s better to receive specific feedback like “improve communication with non-experts” versus the general “improve your communication.” On the other hand, this could be because the person giving the feedback is being nice. Hence, when I started to think about how to improve, it was helpful to go one level up and start dissecting “communication” instead of just “communication with non-experts.”
If nothing else, it can help you come up with more activities you could do. Are there specific types of communication I want to improve or more specific contexts?
It can be helpful to create a mind map with all the initial categories like this one:
Brainstorm activities for your performance improvement plan
Next, expand on your initial ideas and associations—brainstorm all possible activities associated with the skill you need to develop. It might be helpful to think of a role model who already has the skill you would like to improve. Where did you see them exercise the skill?
Keeping communication in mind, you could ask yourself, where do people speak publicly? Brands and organizations look for content all the time; maybe you could give a talk at a local event or a meet-up. What about written communication? Consider writing a white paper or a blog for general audiences. Write down everything that comes to mind.
You can keep perfecting the categories and clusters as you think more about it, but a perfect structure is not the most critical part. We still need to create the performance improvement plan out of this.
Here is what I ended up with (you can see some overlaps, and that’s fine):
Plan your performance improvements
Once you feel like you can’t think of any more ideas or find additional activities online, start choosing what to do and when. In other words, begin working on your plan.
What activities can you implement into your life right now? Be honest with yourself and choose smaller steps you can follow through on rather than larger steps you might abandon.
First, consider all the activities and be realistic about how many you can start doing initially. For me, I began with the easy ones. What’s easy will depend on your personal preferences, but you can consider factors such as where you live, and what you have access to.
Set up a calendar reminder to review your progress regularly, such as every two weeks or once a month. Regular reviews will help you assess whether you need to put in more effort and give you a chance to celebrate your progress.
Think about how you can measure your progress. This doesn’t necessarily mean assigning a number to it; it can be qualitative. For example, if you tend to procrastinate on difficult tasks, your feelings can serve as an indicator.
I recommend placing your plan somewhere visible. Whether it’s in an online application or a physical notebook, ensure you can keep adding notes and capturing any data.
Performance improvement plan execution
What remains is to do it—go ahead and execute your performance improvement plan.
Once you feel like you are making progress and feel good about your plan, I encourage you to make a bold move and join a new community. Whether you are improving a technical or a soft skill, a community provides a level of accountability and keeps you on track.
For those interested in what I did with my communication skills, I ended up applying to the Hackernoon Blogging Fellowship, and I now continue developing my communication skills by writing for Striving at Work, the blog you are reading right now.
I hope you have your action plan ready and will improve in whatever you set your mind to. Good luck!
