Performance Review Strategies for Diverse Teams

This report is a wake-up call. 23,000 performance reviews exposed 👇 The Language Gap: ↳ Women hear "emotional" 2.5x more ↳ "Abrasive" 3x more ↳ "Bossy"? Almost always directed at women ↳ "Unlikeable" 4x more The Real Business Impact: ↳ Innovation stifles ↳ Psychological safety shatters ↳ Top performers leave quietly ↳ Potential is squandered But here's the twist: It's not about blame. It's about better business. 5 Data-Backed Solutions: 1. Zero-Tolerance Policy ↳ Ban subjective personality descriptions 2. AI-Powered Screening ↳ Flag biased language before it hits 3. Structured Templates ↳ Guide feedback with objective metrics 4. Leadership Training ↳ Focus on behavior, not personality 5. Regular Audits ↳ What gets measured gets fixed The data is clear: Better feedback = Stronger teams = Higher performance Ready to upgrade your leadership? Start here. Tag a leader who needs to see this 🎯 Do you agree? Let me know ⬇️ — ♻️ Repost if you believe in better leadership! ➕ Follow me (Leonardo Freixas) for more. Source: Textio Performance Review Language Study (2024)

Performance review season is coming, which means it's time for your annual unconscious bias check-in! Friends, performance reviews can be a career advancement minefield, especially for employees from historically excluded communities. Unfortunately, most companies got stuck at "diversity hiring" and forgot the whole "inclusion" and "equity" part of the equation. Sure, they hired diverse talent, but then completely dropped the ball on creating environments where everyone could actually thrive, grow, and get promoted fairly. This isn't a simple fix, but here are some practical steps you can take right now: 🟣 First, admit you have a problem. Your company isn't magically immune to bias and inequity just because you did a training a few years ago. 🟣 Rethink your entire review process. Consider 360 reviews or focusing solely on an employee's individual growth rather than arbitrary comparisons. 🟣 Speaking of which... stop comparing employees to each other! 🟣 If you have any decision-making power, do this immediately: Look at who's been promoted in the last 2 years and who hasn't. Notice any patterns? (Spoiler alert: you will.) Make a plan and advocate for those overlooked employees. 🟣 When giving constructive feedback, focus on growth areas and (this is key!) how *you* will support them. Their development is literally your job as a leader! 🟣 Be intentional about salary increases. Pay equity doesn't magically happen, it requires people in power to make it happen. That's you! Remember: If your *all* your talent isn't thriving, the problem isn't them. It's your systems! 👋🏻 I make workplaces *work* for everyone. DM me to start working on your processes and systems!

We all want to reward employees fairly, yet decades of research--and for many people, their lived experience--show that bias persists. In other words, for the same performance, people earn less or more due to managerial error. New research from researchers at our Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab shows that many interventions are only targeting half the problem. Bias shows up both in how managers describe (view) performance as well as how they reward (value) behaviors. Viewing biases often show up in how performance is described differently based on who is performing it. Men’s approach may be called “too soft,” thus “subtly faulting them for falling short of assertive masculine ideals.” Valuing biases can show up as the same behavior being rewarded when men perform it but not when women do. Examples from the research show that men benefitted when their project specifics were described, whereas women were not. So the same description and behaviors showed up in reviews, but they were only rewarded on men’s. What can be done to curb biases? ✅ Standardize specific guidelines for how managers should view employee behaviors and assign corresponding rewards when giving employees feedback and making decisions about their careers. ✅ Help managers catch bias in both viewing and valuing. ✅ Monitor these impacts from entry level to executive leadership. It turns out that as the criteria shift, so can the way these biases work. A key lesson from our research shows that the work takes discipline, consistency and accountability. These steps may seem like a lot of “extra” work, but at the end of the day, managers also benefit when they weed out biases and fairly promote the most talented employees. Article by Alison Wynn, Emily Carian, Sofia Kennedy and JoAnne Wehner, PhD published in Harvard Business Review. #diversityequityinclusion #performanceevaluation #managerialskills