No More Fantasies: Let’s Talk About Deliverables

I’m going to show you what job interviews have in common with employee performance reviews and sales plans, even if all these “assessment” practices are completely inadequate today.

I’m going to show you what job interviews have in common with employee performance reviews and sales plans, even if all these “assessment” practices are completely inadequate today.

If you start thinking differently about one, you’ll have more success with the others—whether you’re trying to land a job or get a promotion, projecting sales, or trying to judge a job applicant or an employee on your team.

Let’s Go Short

When did you ever have a job that didn’t change significantly six months or a year after you started it? Most managers I know laugh at that question.

While a few say their jobs haven’t changed at all (which is why most of them are looking for new ones), we all know that the quickly changing business landscape often demands dramatic shifts in our work.

It also triggers changes in what’s demanded of us. That’s why I coach job applicants at all levels to ask this question in interviews:

“Please outline for me what the deliverables are in this job. That is, if you hired me, what would you want me to change, fix, improve, accomplish, pull off, deliver in the first month on this job? In the first three and six months? Twelve? Eighteen? Please be specific.”

That question quickly turns a routine job interview—about what animal you’d be if you could be any animal, or about your greatest weakness and strength, or about how you handled a persnickety customer once upon a time—into a roll-up-your-sleeves working meeting about the work.

The discussion forces a hiring manager to see you for what you’re worth because now you’re showing what you can do. You’re outlining a business plan for the job, and that’s the best way to stand out as the most profitable candidate to an employer. (It’s also the best way to avoid a broken job. See “Don’t Suck Canal Water.”)

Shorter Sales Plans

After all, isn’t this what we ask sales managers to do each year, when they gin up annual sales plans and projections for the next … er, three to five years? I still laugh when I think about the plans I used to produce when I managed a sales operation. Nobody ever looked at them again because everyone knew they were worthless six months down the road. Forget about a year or two!

Meanwhile, the VP of sales I worked for wanted a weekly spreadsheet showing our immediate sales pipeline. He was smart, and he was a good manager because this almost-instantaneous data helped him help us develop and close more deals. He never admitted it to the president of the company, who based his own planning on those annual sales plans, but our company was successful because the sales VP kept a finger on the sales pulse every day. He was reviewing us all the time, and that fostered a very close relationship between us sales managers and the VP.

Shorter Review Cycles

You can’t possibly understand what a job is really all about unless you know what the expectations are for the short term. What does the employer want from you the first month? Three months? Six? A year?

Fail to ask these questions, and you’re signing up for a broken job. Perhaps worse, the employer will wind up hiring someone after a job interview that’s mostly fantasy. “Why are man-hole covers round? Where do you see yourself in five years?”

In early 2016, IBM decided to give the heave-ho to “stack ranking”—that employee-review fantasy of Jack Welch’s that was designed to pit workers against one another while Welch cut the rope above the 10% who hung on its lower end. (I never liked Jack Welch. He epitomized the smug manager who loves to inspire terror rather than a healthy work ethic.)

“IBM is ditching its contentious employee review system for one that employees asked for,” a story in Business Insider said, after asking its employees what would make them perform better. It’s no surprise that they said they “wanted feedback more often and the ability to change their goals as the year went on.”

Duh. The world changes as the year goes on.

And so do the deliverables employers expect, even if they don’t know it. To me, the most valuable artifact of this shift to short-cycle performance reviews is that it forces top management to actually think about how the world is rapidly changing—and it forces management to think about what those new deliverables are. It also forces managers to talk to their employees all the time.

Whether it’s sales, jobs, or performance reviews, think long term, but manage short term, too. And keep talking about what the deliverables are in three, six, 12, and 18 months. Because you can’t get to three or five years on a fantasy. (See “The Only Interview Question You Need To Ask.”)