Name: The New Rules of Performance: Why Performance Is Becoming a Business Execution System
Uploaded: 2026-08-19T18:30:06.664Z
Duration: 1 h 29 min 50 s
Description: The New Rules of Performance: Why Performance Is Becoming a Business Execution System

Transcript for "The New Rules of Performance: Why Performance Is Becoming a Business Execution System": Hello everyone and welcome to the new rules of performance, which is, our first episode in our four part series on the new rules of what it means to be a people leader in 2026. I'm really excited that we get to kick off the series today with all of you. As you can see, we've already got folks in the chat telling us, where you're located. I personally am dialing in from Houston, Texas, and looking forward to hearing from you guys where else you are. We've also got a little bit of a back to school theme going on. So if you and your household or around you are dealing with any back to school related things, drop us a GIF in the chat, to represent how that's going for you. I feel like mine would probably be like that, GIF of this is fine, the guy the guy drinking the coffee and the fire is going everywhere. It's our second week of the first week of middle school. So, lots of fun. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yep. These are are all relatable so far. So, alright. Well, let's get it started. So couple of quick housekeeping items if you wanna advance the slide, David. First off, you're already seeing, in the chat, great place to have the conversation with us, talk to each other. Yeah. Great moments in there. If you do have questions for our panelists, we will do our best to get a to sneak in a few answers either at the end or throughout, if we can respond. So submit your questions in that q and a panel. You'll see up in the top right, hopefully, that you can toggle between chat, docs, q and a. You'll also see polls up there a little later when we bring those throughout. The document center also has some, great resources for you, if you wanna learn a little bit more, about some other related topics. So, my name is Allie Pollens. I am the chief marketing officer at Betterworks, and I'm excited to talk to you guys a little bit, later about what Betterworks does. Before I do that, I wanna bring on stage, our panel, Kim and Victoria. I'm excited to kinda let you guys introduce yourselves starting with Kim, who's the founder and principal consultant at CodeTraveler HR. Tell us about you, Kim. We're so excited to have you. Oh my gosh. Allie, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Really, really pumped to talk about, all things performance today. So like Allie said, I am the founder and principal consultant at Code Traveler HR. That's a very fancy way to say I'm a solopreneur. I run my own business. I was in, VC funded tech for ten, fifteen years, and really found a love for performance management. So when I got the opportunity to go out on my own and focus on that, that's what I've been doing. I'm in Napa, California. If you ever find yourself out here, say hello. Awesome. Thanks, Kim. We're so excited to have you. Vicki, your turn. Tell us about you. Fractional. people leader at Victoria Yang Consulting. Tell us more. Hi, everyone. Excited to be here as well. I've been in HR for twenty plus years across all sorts of different industries, nonprofits, big techs, startups. And I am now based out of actually Panama, the country, not Panama City, Florida, and, also a fractional people leader. So, like Kim, I'm also a solopreneur. I now am, like, the solo kind of HR team of one for a lot of small start ups because I love helping them build out, their foundations and also help them get stuff done. So really interesting to have both been in house and now outside of it. Love it. Love that we get all those perspectives of, in house all the way to fractional. I'm sure we have folks in the chat representing both, so we'll get all those perspectives, represented. So, yeah. So let's kind of frame the conversation today. So I think we can all agree that the pressure on leaders in HR and across the business, I can attest right now is pretty relentless. We're being asked to grow faster, operate leaner, adopt AI, rethink roles, change priorities on a dime, sometimes in the same quarter. Right? And alongside that, managers are still expected to coach people against goals that might be outdated and employees are trying to understand how to drive better results when the job keeps changing, goalposts keep moving. Right? So at Betterworks, we've been thinking a lot about a bigger question, which is how do we build performance into the future of work, and what would it look like if that was part of how businesses actually execute in real time. So that's what we're gonna dig in today, with this awesome panel. I also have a buddy from Betterworks who's gonna join us at the end to sort of talk about how we're doing that, ourselves at Betterworks. But first, we wanna get a pulse on what this actually feels like in your organization. So perfect. Our just kicked off our first poll, where we're kinda asking you guys, where does your current performance approach struggle most? So I mentioned that keeping goals aligned, as priorities change can be difficult. Giving managers enough context to coach effectively, capturing timely specific feedback, evaluating performance consistently and fairly, giving leaders visibility into progress and risk. Or if you're very fortunate, we wanna learn from you. Your current approach is working well. No notes. So we'll give you guys a couple seconds more seconds to respond to that. I know that, most of the companies that I talk to are feeling a lot of these. So I'm excited to hear what this group is feeling. Okay. Great. So oh, it's all over the board. Okay. So it looks like the number one answer is evaluating performance consistently and fairly. I see about 28% there. Second would be keeping goals aligned as priorities change. But it doesn't it seems like across the board, these pains are being felt. So I think we're gonna dive into a bunch of them. And I see in the chat a few folks saying, you know, close to all of the above or there's no single one that we can, say is the most. Right? Because we're feeling all of these. So makes total sense to me. Thank you for sharing your perspective. We'll have a few more of these polls, throughout the conversation. But now I wanna turn it over to our panel, starting with Vicki. I wanna dive into our first question, which is, you know, looking across the organizations that you've worked with, the ones you're working with today, what has changed the most about work and business expectations? How is that challenging the traditional performance model? I'll throw it to you, Vicki, first on that. Yeah. I think it was that that first one that keep goals aligned as priorities change. That one really hit home for me because I think things are changing so rapidly. It kind of becomes hard for traditional performance models to keep up. A lot of them lack flexibility, often focus too much, I think, on process versus outcomes. So, you know, we've got goals that are changing, roles that are changing. How are you able to track kind of development long term is becoming more challenging. There's a lot of stuff that the manager also has to focus on. So I think all of that is adding and then is adding more pressure to the system. And then now companies themselves, the between the economy, you know, and, like, I think AI is a good example of, you know, what that has done. It's been quite disruptive and in some instances actually drastically changed the entire business. So they have had to shift what it is that they're doing. So if you if they're shifting that, then how are you measuring performance? What's the new impact when, okay, you do all this work on this one thing and suddenly you're going over here, and then now we have to you know, does that all that work that we just did that we're not gonna use count anymore? And so I think a lot of the challenge for managers and leaders is really creating clarity around what work needs to get done and why, and then how teams and people within them are going to do it. So, like, what are the new expectations when it's constantly, like, what are we doing today? Because today is suddenly different from yesterday. Yeah. I feel like the pace of work, is nothing I've ever seen before. Right? So if if we've gotta move faster, but we're also changing what we're trying to do any given moment, we just, did a poll or a survey, a few months ago. Check out our talent intelligence report. I'm not sure if it's in the docs, but if not, David can probably share it. One stat that we found is that executives are six times more likely than employees to believe that performance systems have kept their performance systems have kept pace with this type of work. Right? So, it's going so fast. The goals are changing so fast. The reality between the C suite and what the frontline managers are actually experiencing is huge. Kim, how's that showing up for you? Like, what about you? Where are you seeing, what's changed the most? Yeah. First off, I would like to talk to those executives. What? That's wild. Yep. I I mean, growing up professionally in tech start ups, you know, the only constant is change, but I really do think that we, need to recognize how changing priorities, shifting priorities, even a change of manager or leadership structures impacts individual performance. So. plus one to everything that Vicki said, and we're dealing with a different employment population. Look. Performance management, I'm a huge nerd about history. We can trace it back to some very sketchy beginnings, but it really became popularized in the nineteen fifties. Fifties. And if we look at the workforce of the nineteen fifties and the performance practices of the nineteen fifties, the only thing that has really changed is our tech and maybe three sixty reviews. So we have a lot of opportunity to drag our performance practices into the workforce for today and prepare for tomorrow because everything has changed. How we work changed. The people we work with changed. There's just so much. Yeah. And I mean, as a leader, I know that my team is feeling this acutely. And we, I think pride ourselves on, you know, being a performance management business, but when the priorities, are changing so rapidly, what do we think should actually happen to performance when the plan changes? So that brings me to our next question. Right? What should be different in the goals and performance con conversations in this environment when priorities are changing constantly? I'm gonna go back to you, Kim, on this one. Yeah. I would okay. Bit of a spicy opinion here, but I would love to see us stop focusing on goals. Like, what we see is our employees chase that goal. Their performance is tied to it. Their compensation is probably tied to it. And we miss out on a lot of opportunities outside of what that, like, singular focused goal might be. So I would really love to see more performance conversations, more business priorities centered around what problem do we need to solve? Like, how is your work solving the problems of the organization? And of course, like, I think we can have a sprinkle of goals in there, a sprinkle of metrics in there. But I really wanna one of the largest, pros that we have of today's workforce, especially in knowledge fields workers, is the creativity of humans and our ability to solve problems. So let's harness that. If we're always constantly changing our roadmap, our goals, what's next, let's stop setting the goals and focus on the challenges and the problems that we're trying to solve and let our highly qualified, highly knowledgeable team flex those creative muscles a little bit spicy, I think. Yeah. I love spicy. What about you, Vicki? Does that resonate for you? Yeah. I think I love how Kim talks about solving the problem because what I what I feel like is when we think about how fast things change, it's really about understanding who your team is and who you have on your team and what they're able to do. And so that when these things change, you're able to to kinda lean into their strengths, develop their strengths. Like, performance management is about how do you amplify those pieces. And, yes, develop the things that maybe they're not as strong in. But if you don't understand that about your team, then you when you're trying to go and solve this problem, you don't you might be putting people in the wrong places too. And then it just kind of, I think, falls apart. And so for me, when we're talking about this kind of change, it's like being flexible, not just like, okay. Well, we have this person in this role. But what about this other person over here? They could actually be better because we know what they're really good at. So if we understand their performance and how they operate, you can shift a little bit better to have greater impact on the business too. So then it's not just you're not I think we tie ourselves too much to, okay, this is our goal, or this is the only time we do performance management is twice a year because plenty enough, most companies still do that if twice a year. Right? Like and then that's where we get stuck and we stop thinking about, okay. Performance management is really about understanding my employee and what they're good at and what they're not good at, and then getting them into the right place to help the business and also making sure that we're supporting them in such a way that'll make them successful. Yeah. And I think one thing that we're thinking a lot about is how do we get into the real time moments of those things so that we're, like Kim Minnick said, focused on the problems that we're trying to solve and maybe goals isn't necessarily always the right word for thinking about that. It's what are the outcomes that we're trying to drive? What are the problems that we're trying to solve? And how do we keep, like, a constant pulse on what the right people in the right seat are doing, how their skills are aligning to those things, especially, I think with AI coming into the picture. How are you seeing a difference as it relates to AI in the needs for these things? Right? Like, I think we're seeing a lot of that as HR is being expected to lead some of this transformation. You know, are y'all feeling that? Oh. A. 100%. Yeah. The you know, AI is change management. Right? Like, it's a new tool. We are so experienced in implementing in new tools, driving adoption in this responsible way. And, like, most of the people leaders I know are at least they might not be DE and I professionals, but they're attuned to, you know, various forms of bias, whether conscious or unconscious. And I think all of that is wildly important when we're managing an implementation as gnarly as AI. 100%. So my next question is in this context where everything's changing fast, we've gotta update our how we're thinking about outcomes and problem solving versus just goal setting. How should we be defining great performance today? And is it just about the outcome, or does how they get there matter too? Like, I think, ultimately, we are big believers that a great performance program does drive great outcomes, but are there things along the way that matter too? I'll throw that to Vicki first. How about? Yeah. I think I definitely think it's both. I don't think you can decouple it because if you're let's say you're making a great impact, but you're a complete jerk doing it, then I don't know if I want you working on my team. And so, you know, at the end of the day, we're we're still trying to achieve something as a business, right, and move something forward, make something easier, maybe help customers gain something. So output and the impact that output makes is still important. But how they do it is also important. And I think we we liked things to fit in boxes. And so oftentimes I will see, okay, well, we've got these job levels, we've got these competencies, let's align everything to that, which isn't necessarily bad. But really what that's really about is how do we get to more specifics that we can give someone about why they do something really well or why they're not doing something well. And I think that is how we need to define actually great performance is are we being specific enough when we're talking to someone about being strategic, for example? One of my biggest pet peeves is when managers like, oh, they're not strategic enough. I can't stand it because my next question to them is like, what do you mean by that? What are they not doing that you wish they did? And let's dig in deeper because if you can't explain it, you're not giving them the right feedback. I think another great example is I had a colleague in the past who people would always give her feedback as a sales engineer that she was great to work with. Clients trusted her. And so it was this, like, soft, fuzzy skill. But then if you break it down, she has a strong skill in building trust because she's able to identify pain points. She draws the lines between their pain points and the product. Right? She talks as much as she listens. She probably listens actually more than she talks. And then build rapport with the customer to keep that going. That stuff never showed up in her performance reviews. It was always like, oh, people like working with you. And so I feel like if we can get to that piece, that is the way to define what great performance in that role looks like. So that way you're talking about it doesn't matter if it's about the impact that they make or how they do it, that you're still able to shape both of those pieces and create clarity for them so that they can do better at something. And they also know what they are doing good at because we're gonna lean much harder into our strengths, I think, than really the things that we're not as good at. Yeah. It also, right, helps to try tie back to those true outcome outcomes and problems that we're trying to solve. Right? Because if you say, oh, great. You were strategic. Well, in what? What exactly results did you drive as part of that? I completely agree. Let's take it from subjective to objective in that. What are you seeing, Kim Minnick, as it relates to that? Yeah. I mean, first, I wanna shout out Carissa Tilford in the chat. She had said, sometimes we confuse time spent versus actual performance, and this is a wildly common, I'm gonna say mistake, I see particularly new managers making. Like, oh, this person works so much that they must be a high performer. I need to rate them highly on our evaluation or whatever the case may be. And it's actually like, woah. Well, are they working so much because they are in a job that is too big for them? Are they not experienced enough to hit what we have defined as great performance, which now actually answer your question? It is on the company to define great performance. And that's not just, you know, the goals or the outcomes we're looking for, but to Vicki point earlier, the behaviors. I really love a values forward culture where we think about, you know, how do our values show up in early career stages versus late career stages? If one of your values is, I don't know, transparency, or growth mindset. I think this is a pretty popular value. If your value is growth mindset, how an early career stage person shows that learning from their mistakes, not being afraid to fail shows up very differently at your executive layer. So, you know, my value looks different at an executive whose growth mindset might be a wild failure, the transparency and the learning, proactively shifting strategies or roadmaps to align with that. Yeah. So I I think, you know, I'm now I'm rambling, but to repeat what Vicki said, it is nobody wants to work with a brilliant asshole. We wanna work with folks who listen more than they talk, who come up with great ideas, who display the values that we have defined as important. Yeah. And I a thousand percent agree. I think being values forward is so important. How do you though in a performance management context make that not subjective? Right? Because that feels like a delicate balance to say, oh, you know, you demonstrate a growth mindset. How do you make sure that that isn't inequally applied to different people? Tamara in the comments said, you know, women often get more vague version of that than men. What do you see that looking like from a DEIB's perspective? Like, how do we make sure that we're equitably applying that type of feedback? I love a leveling guide. I love a detailed leveling guide with, like, examples of, like, hey. This is what it should look like at this level. Vicki, what about you? I I was gonna say the devil's in the details. It's all about the specifics. And it doesn't matter, like, what background. It's really because that is where it it ends. So the fluffy stuff, the how, you can actually get to specifics. Right? Like, people like working with you is a fluffy thing. But if you can break that down into why, strategic is a fluffy word. But if you break that down into the pieces as to what are you actually doing to be strategic, to see around corners. Okay. Great. Okay. So you want them to see around corners. What does that mean in that role? Give them examples. One thing I love about values, especially values when done well, is we're able to talk about what it is and what it isn't and what it looks like in action. And so when you have that, again, defined, right, you've got the specifics for it, then you're able to measure against it. And then it's really about sharing more stories. One of the companies I used to work for that has one of the to this day, one of the strongest cultures I've ever been a part of, A lot of it was storytelling. We would talk about examples of all of the seven we have seven values of all seven values constantly so that people understood what it looked like in action. And it really was embedded so that when you went and made decisions, right, when someone's, like, off trying to do something, that that's echoing inside their head. So I think it's really about those specifics. And shout out to the engineering teams who taught me their practice of going five whys deep. So okay. Great. Yep. This person is and teams love. working with this person. Why? Why? Why and just go five wise deep, and that's really when you start getting to those nitty gritty details. And that's just a phenomenal practice to infuse into your feedback giving. Yeah. Brilliant. And I think this is all, for me, you know, the case for why twice a year review process just doesn't work anymore. Right? Because if you're trying to get to that level of specificity and you're doing it in January, looking back over the last six months, what are you going to be specific about? Whatever happened last week, right? Or, you know, whatever you're biased about that stuck with you over the course of the six months that you happen to remember. I don't know about y'all, but I have so many direct reports and so many different conversations day to day where that level of, like if I was forced to kinda go back and just remember the last six months, there's no way that could be truly objective. Right? So or truly specific at the detail we need it to be, which is why, you know, we're really thinking about performance management as something that needs to happen in real time so that every conversation is in some way extrapolated into specific feedback that gets documented, that gets, heard by the employee and works towards you know, if we're defining the goals and outcomes for the next quarter, it's based on the feedback that came in in the conversations we just most. recently had. Right? That's what real time, I think, is all about. So, so all of this puts a lot more responsibility on the quality of conversations that managers have to have and the information that has to go into that, which brings me to my next question for everybody. I'll start with Kim Minnick on this one, which is what do managers actually need to know to have a great performance conversation, And what should we be capturing along the way instead of trying to remember at review time, which we just said, like, sounds utterly impossible. Right? So what do you think, Kim Minnick? Oh my gosh. Our poor managers, we put so much on them. Right? You need to know the expectations of the role. You need to know the expectations laid out in the leveling guide. And I would argue you need to know the individual's career goals or growth goals to really help that performance conversation land. If you have decided on their career path and that is not where they want to go, you're going to be giving them the wrong feedback. We really put it on our managers to learn the values, learn the leveling guide, learn how to give great feedback, learn the expectations of the role, learn the current goals and strategy, and now take this human that you are tasked with growing and developing and weave in their career goals and their professional development goals into something that works for the company. It's it's tough. It's a big ask. But I think, you know, practice is perfect. I love doing a role play with managers. Like, hey. Let's let's play out this conversation. I love giving nudges for a documented one on one. Okay. I know. HR, like, loves documentation, but it's super helpful to have whether you're using it in a tool or whether you're a scrappy startup, putting them in a notion doc. But having, like, highlights of conversations, that's, like, the outline for your review that you're going to write. Super helpful. Just to remember, like, hey, what have we talked about over the last six months? Have I been giving the same feedback, and is it not landing? Or have I been giving feedback and they've consistently improved and developed? Like, I think, Allie, you said earlier, our memories are shot. No one remembers what happened three months ago, let alone six months ago. So having this practice of giving feedback, of checking in on development opportunities, and doing it in a documented way is wildly helpful. And, you know, do a little bit now for a lot of effort saved later, is incredible for our managers. Love it. Vicki, what do you think? I 100% to what Kim said, and I'd say break it into smaller pieces. We keep thinking about this thing being really big, but it doesn't have to be. It's like, I had a manager who told me, hey. When you were presenting, you hadn't you didn't smile and you looked like you didn't wanna be there. And it was I hadn't presented in a long time. It was great feedback. That's the only thing she had to tell me. And then and the the next time, I fixed it. Right? And it's just this tiny little thing. Like, she said it real quick. It wasn't a big deal. And then I would also leave everyone with, like one thing I used to do with my own team is every month, we I'd had them write down what they were proud of, what's something they learned from someone else, and something they wanted to share with someone someone else. And we saved it in a slide deck. Everyone had access to this deck. And so every month I everyone and they were filling it in on their own. So we all got to see that across the board, we shared it with each other. And then by the time the formal performance review came about, I had this deck that I could use. I had all this information in it already. So I think. building in some little structures like that can be super helpful. What a sneaky way to, like I love that. I guess as, like, span of control gets, broader for a lot of managers, like at least the customers that we're talking to, we're seeing people managing up to 50 direct reports. Like how realistic is it to do this type of thing? And like, where are you seeing people like find shortcuts to make this work in reality? Are you seeing that? It's so hard. Oh, I think AI has been a huge shortcut. Right? And, look, we can argue the pros and cons of it, but being able to have a note taker in your meeting, being able to have a robot who remembers the conversations over six months, I think that's been a pretty big unlock now that AI does not have context into the broader organization or the changes that have happened or the pivots that have gone on, but it does help keep conversations in order or at least remembered. Yeah. One thing that we have coming into Betterworks, as part of our summer release, which is launching in a couple of weeks is to your point about AI notetaker, the ability to take your Zoom transcripts, have them automatically go into a documented one on one, and take the summary of that so that that feeds into the performance profile. When you go to give feedback to somebody there's nuggets actually being pulled out of that. One of the things I'm like most excited about coming into Betterworks. So, what about you, Vicki? I'd say it was interesting because I've I've the AI stuff, I know a lot of people are using it. Just be careful because I actually had a client who did it, and when we pulled the stuff out, it repeated almost the exact same thing it said last time, which then we had to go back and just double check. Yeah. I was like, well, is it because that is the same issues that are still plaguing this person? Because it probably was, and it part of it was. So I think, definitely, you know, use the tools. The one thing I love telling people is don't let AI, you know, don't let it AI you. AI is still a tool, so you have to own the tool, and you have to own how it works. And then just make sure that you don't take the shortcut because our brains love being lazy of, like, oh, it's spelled out the summary. We're good to go. It seems right. Like, truly read through it and make sure that you're thinking, okay. Is this the actual thing that's happening? Because there was something where we're like, yes. That is still the same thing. This person's been working on. It hasn't gotten better. But, no, actually, that last thing was from three, four months ago. So the AI tool will pull in the bias because it doesn't understand the difference. And then, basically, you know, they removed that and actually made a note to say, hey. Really great job. You fixed this thing that you've been working on. So I think that's Yeah. yeah. Just make sure you're double. checking everything. Human in the loop, I think, has to be a key part of it, and I think HR has to be the constant reinforcer of you can't just let AI do the work. You have to be, you know, use it as your, co pilot. But just as you would manage another person, you have to check the you know, do the review process. Right? So, I think, am I going to a poll now, David? Is that right? Yes. Perfect. All right. So when work starts to drift off track, when do leaders at your organization typically become aware? We've talked a lot about like priorities changing, so much for the manager to do. Is it as it happens, during regular check ins, after a milestone is already missed, during a performance a formal performance review, or is it something you don't really have visibility into, when work is off track? I already see some folks choosing multiple choice here. So, totally understandable. I'll give you all a couple of seconds. Okay. Are we sharing results already? Okay. Okay. So most are saying after a milestone is missed or an outcome is affected. So we see about 50% coming in with that. That is, really the place to focus, it sounds like. So hopefully we can dig into, how to Hopefully this conversation is giving you some inspiration as to how to bring that forward. So, okay. Perfect. So, I think we are short on time a little bit, and we already, tackled this one a little bit. So, David, do you wanna skip to who actually owns performance? So what are the roles for c suite, HR, manager? I know this is a controversial topic. Let's let's head to Vicki to start this one off. I'm guessing we have spicy what's ahead. I know this is this is gonna sound a little like a like a easy response. Everyone needs to be involved. Exactly. I think it's, you know, it's not just about the individual and how they did it, but, of course, we gotta take any other factors. Right? Like, how much clarity did c suite actually give people around, you know, the objectives the company is trying to achieve? Managers are definitely responsible for translating those objectives. So to Kim's point, there's so much on them. Not only do they have to ensure all the work gets done, they've got to make sure they are clearly explaining what it is and how they're what they're trying to do, and then also be giving feedback to everyone and aligning kind of, like, trying to motivate them towards that goal. Right? So it's a it's a tough job. And then if you've got leadership changing things constantly, depending on how big the org is, that can just create more kind of disruption. And so I think that is why it becomes this kind of tough problem to solve. But, again, yeah, I would like, h c suite really responsible for kind of what the outcomes are are being trying to be achieved, and then managers are really looking at how do they create more clarity and can help the person understand their objectives around this and then giving them feedback on it. And then I see HR's role almost like an internal customer success manager. And so, you know, no one should be doing this alone. HR is not the one managing your employee, by the way. Not happening despite what some managers think. But we will offer support, advice. Like Kim said, we will practice with you all to, like, get understand how you're gonna have this conversation. We'll look at who the person is, help you see what their motivations are because your a manager is also really deep into this. And now you've got a thought partner who also understands the business, understands your people on your teams, and that is, like, where I think that magic can happen because a manager should not be doing this alone too. So, generally speaking, I'd say kinda like those are the three the way I see the three roles playing together in a healthy way. Yeah. And I love that Vicki in the chat points out that also the employee. We didn't mention them too. Yes. They need. to be part of the process. They need to be engaged in it. So, yeah, what do you have to add on that, Kim? Yeah. I mean, plus one to everything. I actually think one of as HR, one of our failings in performance management is really only thinking about the individual employee. But, really, it's in the context of the success of the business. So if the business is failing, you're probably not having a ton of high performers because they're those that math ain't mathing. So I really think, like, yes, managers, everyone owns performance. Individuals own their own career. They need to be loud about where they want to grow, what they're interested in, what they're excited about, and where they can add value. Managers own the performance of their team and of the folks that they are leading. The c suite owns the performance of the business and HR, we own the program. We have to translate it to all those different personas. We have to make sure that the individual's experience and what they're learning and what they're hearing about performance translates to the company's success performance. Like, we we're doing some heavy lifting too. Like, we're right there alongside of our managers. But, yes, everyone owns it just in a different way. And I think when it all comes together well, we see organizational success. Yeah. And I'd love to ask the chat to weigh into us, like, who is the biggest obstacle in those roles today in your org? Right? Like, is it who where does where is it breaking down? I think it has the potential to break down at every one of those roles. Right? But where are you feeling it the most? I'm curious. And I wanna ask Kim and Vicki. We just talked about the should. What you know, who should own it? What do you think? What are what's the reality? And is it different in a lot of the companies when you kinda come on, where are you seeing the reality of where it actually lives? And is it still a check the box exercise for, like, what percent of companies are you seeing that that it it doesn't look like this? Oh, man. I think it's interesting being fractional now because we have I brought four clients that I'm head of HR for. And so it's across the board. It's just in each situation is different. The moment this is what's fascinating about having people in this process. Like, this is why HR also has a job because it's like an interesting puzzle to solve because every set is going to be different. So it depends on who the leader of the who the CEO is, who the leader of the department is, who the manager is, with who the employee is, change any of those factors and the whole thing changes. And so I don't I don't think I necessarily see it typically breakdown at any one point. I would say largely, currently, it is just about those shifting priorities and the leadership team trying to figure out where they wanna go and making sure that gets translated through. That's, I think, the biggest challenge I've seen is that might be a common thread across most of the clients that I have and most of the problems. I see. Vicki is saying breaks down at the top, and I think if it breaks down at the top and then we're not bringing HR along if leadership isn't bringing HR along into it, that's the death knell. Right? What about you, Kim? Do you see a trend one way or there? I mean, yeah, I'll blame the CEO every time. Like, every time. Yeah. Because, again, like, we're talking not just about individual performance, but organizational and company performance. You, dear CEO, are leading that. So if it's breaking down anywhere along the chain, is it because your executive team isn't, participating in the program as we expect? Is it because their next layer is? Like, where is this breakdown happening? But at the end of the day, it ultimately leads to you and I, CEO. So what do we need to fix and where do we need to help support folks get back on track? And have we overcomplicated the program? Like, okay. Sometimes it might be me. I've made some pretty complex programs. So maybe, you know, there's some real talk that needs to happen at that executive layer so we can make sure, you know, it all resonates. It all makes sense. It's easy to navigate. It's helpful and useful. I guess, yeah, maybe Vicki Yang is right. It just there's so many different areas where it could break, but, ultimately, I think it's me and the CEO hand in hand on this one. Agreed. Alright. I'm being told we have to move it along. Okay. Do we have another poll? Is that poll in the last question? Okay. Perfect. What do leaders at your organization have the least visibility into today? So, and we're about to jump into some questions about that. So, is work aligned with current priorities? We talked a lot about those shifting. So it seems like we'd be primed to have a misalignment not only in the work, but also in how leaders see that. Which goals or teams are at risk? Who needs coaching or additional support? Which skills and capabilities exist across the work workforce? We talked a lot about, like, who's in the seat matters a lot. Who's ready for mobility or greater responsibility? And Allie says, yes. That those are the issues. Check all of the above. That's hilarious. Okay. So or six. We have the visibility we need. I'd love, to see what you guys are doing if that's all clear. Yeah, we'll give you a couple more seconds to respond to that one and then move on to our final question. Okay. Oh, interesting. Skills and capabilities across the workforce. That's a surprise, winner for us. Definitely something that we can talk about, with Betterworks as well as far as skills and understanding where your talent is is obviously critical. So 47% of you say that's the biggest problem. Great to know. Alright. So I guess I'll go to my final question here, which is for the panel. I'll start with Kim. Looking three years ahead, so hard to look in the crystal ball right now because AI is coming at us so fast. What is the world right now? Right? If you looked in that crystal ball though, what do you think organizations most need to understand about their people and performance in real time that they can't see today? And what so that we can make this actionable for the folks on the webinar today, what would be your recommended change to make now to be ready for that three years down the road, what the world looks like? Kim, you wanna go? Yeah. Oh, Vicki, I wish you were going first so I could piggyback off of you. You know, I think that, like I said earlier, the the demographic of our workers have changed. Who we have in the workplace have changed. So I think we really need to understand what's important to our employees and, like, not be shocked when it's things outside of work. Everyone that I have met wants to do a good job at work. We want to know where we're doing well. We want to know where we have the opportunity to improve, and we want to know what's in it for me. If I do this, since I'm dedicating a portion of my life to chasing the CEO's goals and dreams, what do I get out of it? So I think, like, really understanding individuals' goals and, again, weaving that into what the company needs will be wildly important. And I think that maybe not even a change. It's probably more of the investment that you can make today. Build that feedback muscle. Like, forget about reviews, forget about evaluations, like, design your leveling guide, be very clear about what the expectations are across the organization, and build feedback because you're never gonna have a great review program if you don't have a great feedback program. You're never gonna have, evaluations that make sense or are fair or are consistent without a great feedback program. So just go ahead. Start that now. Build that muscle. It takes time. Be gentle with our managers when they don't pick it up right away, but definitely invest the time, put in the reps. Do it. Love it. Alright, Vicki? Final thought? Yeah. Yeah. I think plus one that everything Kim Minnick said. And I would just say lead with curiosity. Whether you are a manager or an employee, constantly lead with curiosity. Like, the five whys, asking those questions, trying to understand what is happening. And it's not rocket science. It's not anything new. And so and I don't think there's this magic thing that's going to change because this is still the key issue is, like, we just keep moving so quickly. We're letting that that sense of urgency or that fire that we think there's no fire. There's actually no fire. And we just have to slow it down. And I think really just think about, like, why are we doing this? You know, why why? Because we can we're our brains like to shortcut, so we're constantly assuming things, but that may not be true. And when you have all these different generations in the workplace too and different types of people in the workplace with all sorts of stuff going on outside in life, like, understanding and leading with that curiosity of, like, you know, why is this happening? What do you think you can do about it? Like, teaching each other to coach can be is, like, the best thing I think anyone could ever learn. So if it's gonna be one thing, it's just gonna be that lead with curiosity. Just ask those questions. I love that. It's almost like we need a whole webinar series on these topics to unpack all of this further. And we do have that coming. But for at this point, I actually wanna bring, Bruce from Betterworks, one of our senior solutions engine actually, okay. First, connect with Kim, Victoria, and myself on LinkedIn. You can do that. Search for us or use that QR code right there. And then I think I'm bringing Bruce on stage from Betterworks to help us, like, make this actionable. So we just told you all these reasons why you need to, rethink performance, why you need to build a feedback culture, why you need to enable managers. And I wanna give you some a potential food for thought of tools to think about how to do that. So, let's, talk a little bit about Betterworks and and pass it to Bruce to help, bring that forward. Wow. I mean, I could spend as long as as Kim and Vicki have been talking about all of those issues, explaining why I was nodding my head along with everything they were saying and thinking about how. I talk. You were backstage. So yeah. I saw you taking notes. Couldn't. help. Yes. Absolutely resonating with everything there. I think there are so many things. A lot of the things that people have been talking about are driven by the way that the data, has to be gathered and has to be collated by managers, by employees, by everybody in the business. Because a lot of the decisions that are being made are being made, as you say, without reference to that. People are are just relying on their gut feel, and then they're not really bringing it through. So a lot of what we do within Betterworks is make sure those real time conversations that people are having are being brought in to drive the data into a system, and then help you to connect that data in the right ways. So what I'm gonna do is just share my screen, and, highlight to you a few things of the many that I think would be, useful to support, what's been discussed. So just make sure that that's visible. So I've jumped straight into Betterworks. I'm not gonna give you any preamble. I'm just gonna drive dive straight into some of these areas that I think are interesting. So at the beginning, we were talking very much about goals and how goal alignment was so important. So for somebody like Michelle, who I've logged in as here, she has visibility around her own goals, but she can see the connection of those goals. The little arrows here she can click on to understand why the finance department that she belongs to has been asked to carry out this goal. It's because the finance director has this really important initiative that she's focused on that they can help with. So she we can have a look at that. And we can see that that has been set because the finance director has a a strategic objective within the organization, a top company goal that everybody needs to be focused around. And to make it even easier for people, as well as looking at it in this way, we can visualize that in a more kind of hierarchical structure or a more linked structure. So wherever you are in the business, you start to understand why the work that you are focused on either matters or if you can't connect it in this way, from the business perspective, doesn't matter so much. The it's that outcomes focus that both Kim and Vicki mentioned earlier on saying, well, if I'm working on something and I can't understand how that moves the business forward and concentrates on the outcomes that they have, then it's not so important. But to do that, importantly, we also need to be able to very quickly and easily understand what the company thinks is important. So being able to just click as any employee or manager in the business and focus in what the company at this point in time sees as their strategic priorities. So when I'm thinking about my creative ways of solving them, I can link up to these. I but I'm always having North Star of what's important within the business. So that was my kind of first thought. And then when people started talking about feedback I mean, feedback, I I can spend ages talking about one of the biggest challenges, when you wanna give feedback to people, how long does it take? You know? If if a user is using a traditional tool, you gotta jump into the tool, you gotta find the right page, you gotta find the person, you gotta find the type of feedback you wanna give to them. I've given up before I even get to that point. So what we need to do is make sure people have an easier mechanism to be able to record feedback as well as saying it to people. Well, why not use tools that people are already used to? If you're used to using Teams or if you're used to using Slack or Outlook or Gmail as your normal communication mechanism, why not just jump into those tools? And whilst you're there chatting away to somebody, say, oh, I've got a great piece of feedback to get to somebody, or maybe I I wanna request feedback. You can do it there and then. Whilst we're in that tool, we just bring them up. If I was actually in a channel chatting to somebody, which I wouldn't do, during this call, I would be able to immediately prepopulate with that person's name in the tool here. I would then be able to just choose the template and start giving them feedback there and then based on the templates that have already been set up within Betterworks. So this is just an easy way to make sure that those feedback processes are frictionless, are in the flow of work as people are working away and carrying them out. So we've got all that data. We've got the feedback coming through, which is obviously that driver that, people, Kim and, Vicki were highlighting earlier on. That's gonna be pulled into Betterworks to conform part of the review processes. So when I carry out an end of year process and, I've got the feedback for my employees, let's just go into Damon here for an example, I'm gonna be able to give my my responses using information that that the employee has provided when he responds to the review, but also looking at the goals that Damon here has been focused on and making sure that we understand how they're going and then looking at the feedback. Now it's great that all this feedback is coming through. If you're a manager with 50 employees reporting into you, are you gonna really read every piece of feedback that's been entered over the last year for the review? Probably not. So let's use the power of AI. Get that to summarize everything for us, highlight to us strengths that have been identified, areas of improvement that have been identified. So really shortcutting through to make sure that relevant information surface easily here so that we can go and answer the questions. And when we're answering the questions, if we're not very good at wording the responses as, Paul Michelle has been here, again, we can use AI to drive the responses, make sure they're being shaped in the right way, and allow it to help us to understand where we have been biased so we can make sure that the responses we give to our female employees and our male employees are are equal and, unbiased in the way that they work. And it will give you options, and it will help you to understand how you can do that better. So driving all of that. The last thing I wanna touch on, in the session here is skills. Again, something I could talk for for hours on. But skills, something that are often organizations really fall behind in because what happens if somebody joins an organization, you understand from their job profile when they join what are the skills that they hold. And that allows you to have a baseline and say, yep. This is the skills that an employee holds. But if you go back and look as an employee five years later, you'll probably find that the skills that they list are exactly the same skills that they held when they joined. Now that, I hope, is not the case. I think and if that's the case, your organization is definitely failing that employee's development. But the reason is most people don't think that the things that they do within their job are actually skills that they gain. They forget that. So what Betterworks does is it uses the information that is gathered, the feedback, the goals that people complete, the reviews that the manager carries out with that employee, and it uses that data to then infer the skills and say, hey. This is just a really clear way that you're showing that you have analytical thinking or that you, showing assertiveness by the the information that's, gathered. We'll highlight where it's got that, source from. So feedback here has been the driver for it. We can see what that feedback is if we choose. And as an employer or as a manager, we can actually confirm this. We can go in and say, yep. You're right. This is a way of me, showing that I hold this skill. You can allow potentially them to select the level they feel they show for that. Or that they can say, well, actually, I don't hold that skill, but I I should develop this. So I'm gonna highlight to the organization this is a skill gap that you need to help me to fill. Or maybe in the middle, I I have this skill to a certain level, but, actually, this is important for my role. I want help with strengthening this. So rather than being static skills, this is constantly evolving and changing, which when you think about your downstream processes like succession planning or talent pooling, if you're doing that with skills that are not accurate, you're missing out key people in your business that you really should be thinking about as you go through those critical processes. So those are the the key things I just thought I would throw in, Allie, to start off with. But, obviously, there's a lot more in Betterworks than just those. So much. You can just see in the left hand panel, we barely, scratched the surface here. And some of the things that I mentioned earlier that tie into some of the AI, you know, note taker things that could be useful in these one on ones. Lots of cool stuff coming. We invite you to get a one on one demo of Betterworks if that's something that you're interested in or join us on these up upcoming webinars, which I think we have a slide on, coming up in just a second. Or do we have a poll first? Is that right? Poll first. Okay. Poll first. Would you like a demo of Betterworks? If so, please let us know in the poll. We'll kinda leave that up and let you respond there. We'd love to, show you more and go deeper there. And then the second thing is, the the webinar series continues. So we talked about a lot of different things today that we could double click on. So performance was the high umbrella. Underneath that, we have enabling managers. We've got some great speakers on that coming up on August 25. Coaching, how to help your managers be better coaches, September 15. And then how to tie that workforce execution bit where we've got business outcomes that we need to deliver on. We'll go deeper there, and we'll give you some Betterworks demos tied to each of those things, in each of them. But we'll start like we did today with, a great thought leadership panel, that will, you know, have similar conversations, but double clicked on each of these areas. So, I really wanna thank, Vicki and Kim and Bruce for an amazing conversation today. I hope that, the audience felt it was as valuable as I did as a as a leader. So definitely check out the chat, register, for those upcoming webinars. And, David, did I have anything else that I needed to, focus on? Okay. Perfect. Then we'll wrap it up there, and we hope you have a great afternoon or morning wherever you're at. And thanks for taking the time. We appreciate it.