Explained in an interview on Cultural Brilliance Radio! 15Five: Unlocking the Potential of Your Workforce with Shane Metcalf.
Who is Shane Metcalf?
Shane Metcalf is a seasoned executive coach and is currently Chief Culture Officer at 15Five, which is an industry-leading performance management software company. Shane is obsessed with building healthy organizations and creating the opportunity for people to have meaningful work and meaningful relationships.
Claudette: Welcome Shane! So tell us about 15Five, what are you all doing over there?
Shane: So, we consider ourselves a continuous performance management software, and what that does is that if we look at what’s the kind of cutting edge and how do we design healthy thriving cultures. We need to build cultures of continuous feedback, where you’re giving the right cadence of the right conversations, you’re asking the right questions, you’re setting the right goals and putting in place an organizational scaffolding so all of these things are actually happening. We build software to do that. As an organization, we exist to help create space for people to be their greatest selves. We think that a business can play a role in helping each one of its people inside of an organization thrive not just in their work lives, but in their personal lives as well.
Fundamentally, if you help someone be a better version of themselves and they associate that with your company, they’re going to be more loyal, they’re going to stay longer, they’re going to have a higher quality of work while they’re there, they’re going to contribute to the people around them and it’s going to generate a lot of good will, you’re going to make more money as a company, and you’re going to recruit people more easily.
Claudette: I’m sure many companies would be thrilled to have a best-self review versus a performance review, right?
Shane: We’re counting on it.
Claudette: But it’s versus the performance review, which we all have experienced, and often can be demoralizing, depending on how it’s done.
Best Self Vs Performance Review
Shane: Regarding performance reviews, there’s a lot of really interesting research that shows almost nobody likes it. Managers don’t like it, the HR teams don’t really like it because they’re not getting what they want out of it and often it’s really just an excuse to fire/promote people to distribute rewards. And so, there’s a lot of unintended consequences of performance reviews of getting people into more of a fixed mindset. Maybe there’s some really good feedback in there, but if there’s a number, if you’re just being reduced to a number, that’s all you’re really going to be paying attention to. As a result, you miss out on some of the juice, some of the goodness of what’s happening inside of that performance review, such as 360 feedback, upward feedback, and helping you see your blind spots.
We all have blind spots and need to figure out ways to get good at giving and receiving feedback. We use questions to prompt this level of self-reflection and feedback, and then move into an in-person conversation with your manager, so that you can really dig into more of what you want, as we’ve separated compensation from the process.
Claudette: Shane, we’re bringing our interesting conversation to a close, do you want to share with listeners how they can learn more about your work? What’s the best way?
Shane: Sure, so the best way is really to visit our website at 15Five.com. We just yesterday launched a new science page, where we go into all of the cutting-edge social science that’s been behind our product, so that’s a really fun one to geek out on – why does this stuff work, what’s the research show. Also, we’ve got a great blog, it’s 15Five.com/blog, and so we’re always producing a lot of really great content there, and in terms of how do you and how can we apply some of these things, how we can begin to shape our culture to be higher trust, to be more functional.
To listen to the podcast and full interview with Claudette Rowley and Shane Metcalf visit:
Cultural Brilliance Radio on Transformation Talk Radio!
