Bernadette BoasExecutive Leadership Coach, Trainer and Speaker, Ball of Fire Coaching · Become the Leader Everyone Wants to Follow and No One Can Overlook.

How To Ensure Productive Performance Reviews

26 Feb 2025 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:10

In this instructional video, Bernadette Boas emphasizes the need for managers to prepare performance reviews proactively, intentionally, and with detailed, specific feedback. She argues that employees deserve concrete examples, scenarios, and the chance to discuss and collaborate on their reviews. Effective preparation involves planning the time required, documenting performance details, and scheduling review sessions well in advance—especially since review periods typically occur at the start and mid‑year. Boas advises managers to block calendar time based on the number of direct reports, ensuring each employee receives dedicated attention. She also highlights the importance of being ready for unexpected, last‑minute critical feedback by having documentation and a structured process ready. Overall, the video provides a step‑by‑step framework for scheduling, preparing, and executing productive performance reviews.

Chapters

One critical takeaway I would love for you to understand and to support is to ensure that you are preparing each individual's performance review in a very proactive, very productive, very intentional way. Because again, they deserve the feedback. They deserve the details, the specifics, the examples, the scenarios. And they deserve the opportunity to discuss it and collaborate on it and to ask questions and to even answer any questions. And that really, for many, many of my clients, really requires planning. Planning for the time that it's going to take to actually craft a very productive performance review. Or even if it's going to be a sudden last-minute type of critical feedback session, the preparation, the planning, the scheduling, the just overall documenting of the, of the performance review, it's really important to really have that all laid out and planned out so you can do it effectively. So to break that down a little bit further. We all know that the performance review period is always coming at the beginning of the year and mid-year. Knowing that, you can right now, weeks, months ahead of time, you can lay it out on your calendar, block the time that it's going to be necessary based on the number of employees you have and make sure that you're, you know, proactively scheduling/planning for their performance review process. At the same time, when it comes to being thoughtful, the time you're going to devote to each of your employees, you can also very early on get those blocked out and those planned, whether it's on your calendar itself, or it's even with your employee.