Sarah Keizer on Myth-Busting
What’s really going on in the performance management revolution? Listen in as Sarah Keizer, VP of HR at TD Bank, dives into:
- How a values-centred approach plays a strong role performance management.
- The role ongoing feedback plays in performance development.
- Why appraisals and coaching conversations need to be separate.
- What HR learned when it introduced mobile technology.
- Why change requires a myth-busting approach.
Also mentioned in this podcast:
Full Transcript
Michael: I’m Michael Bungay Stanier, and you are listening to Performance Management Stories. This is where we find out what’s really going on in the performance management revolution. And we do that by talking to senior leaders who are doing the hard work in their organization. And the organization today is TD Bank. So this is Canadian content. TD Bank are big Canadian bank. Of course they’re a global bank as well. And we’re talking to Sarah Keizer, who’s the VP of HR, but that’s a small title that covers a broad range of responsibilities from organizational effectiveness to career development to performance management and so on. And Sarah comes with experience working at ING, the Dutch bank, and also Coca Cola. So Sarah, welcome.
Sarah Keizer: Well thank you, Michael. It’s great to be here with you.
Michael: Yeah, it’s really nice to be talking to you. I mean, TD’s been a client of Box of Crayons for years, so it feels like talking to an old friend somehow.
Sarah Keizer: Indeed.
Michael: Now, I know TD Bank because you are our bank. Literally we bank with you as well as work with you as client customer. But for the people who don’t know about TD Bank, can you just give us a bit of context. How big are you? Are you global? Roughly how many people work at TD Bank?
Sarah Keizer: Sure. So TD is a global bank. We are a predominantly retail bank and we’re one of the top ten banks in North America. We have about 83 thousand employees and if you’re in Canada, you know us well, particularly in the Ontario province. And if you live on the west coast of the US, you’ve probably seen our brand a lot more than you used to. We’re actually the number three bank in Manhattan right now. So if you’re on a corner in Times Square, you’ll see us.
Michael: That’s right. I’ve walked past that branch. So let’s talk about performance management and how that’s evolved and changed at TD over the years. As you look back over the last two or three years, what have you been playing with? What have you been tinkering with around your approach to performance management?
Sarah Keizer: Well, I think like most companies, we’ve been really excited by some of the changes that we’re seeing with the pioneers going rating-less. But one thing that we hold very dear is our employee experience, and also we’re a bank, and we’re a big bank. So that means that we’re very thoughtful and careful about what we do. So those two things combined means that we’ve been looking at each of the evolutionary elements that have come forward and trying a few of them on for size in a few areas. So over the last three years, the first thing we did was actually not started out of performance management. It was actually started at our senior executive team.
So this is the CEO and his direct reports where they took a look at our guiding principles and our leadership behaviors. And we actually really went back to the core to say, “Who are we? And what is our why as a bank? What do we believe in?” And so there was about six months of deep thinking to just revise our mission, vision, and values. And really what it boiled down to was a set of shared commitments that we all hold dear, and as our CEO says it, they are a call to action, and if we live those every day, you know walking the talk, the strategy follows, the commitment to our customer follows, and then the employee experience of course will follow. So that’s probably the most exciting change that we’ve had that really flows down into performance management. You might say that was an obvious one, good place to start. But I can tell you from some of my previous experience, that’s actually quite a difficult thing sometimes to get done. And it forced…
Michael: And we’ve just conducted research on this, and it’s not that common that the C suite get as involved as that. And that’s just at a kind of sponsorship level. To actually kind of go where laying foundations here is quite a rare thing indeed.
Sarah Keizer: Yeah. I think as we started to think about shifting all of our core talent programs, if you don’t have that in place, and if you haven’t had the type of deep conversations with your senior leadership team about who are we and how are we living what we say we do every … What we want to be every day, it’s very difficult to get momentum to invest in the people management coaching programs and make big changes, especially for large organization, it’s like turning the Titanic. You really need to have that well-grounded in your vision, your mission, and your values.
Michael: So having built that piece around a deep, wide-based, values-based approach to go, “We know what we’re here to do,” what’s the next step in terms of refining how you then encourage people to do it and measure people against how they’re doing?
Sarah Keizer: Yeah. Well, the very first thing we did, and this was within a week after the announcement of the new shared commitments and our TD framework, we actually just implemented immediately that those shared commitments were part of your performance expectations.
Michael: Yeah, that’s fast.
Sarah Keizer: And suddenly… Yeah, it was very fast. We had a little warning. So the HR team, we had about six weeks to warm up. But we just said, “This is a logical next step. And once the CEO announces that this is what we believe in, these are the commitments, of course how you behave is part of your performance expectations. It always has been. And this is what we expect of you. Now the next year, please take time, make meaning of these shared commitments with your manager, with your employees, and we’ll get better at articulating them, observing them, and coaching to them over the next few years.” But we really took the opportunity to leverage performance management as that culture communication tool that it’s so good at to send a positive message and get it on the radar screens.
Michael: Now, you mentioned people who are kind of the cutting edge of this, or maybe the most radical changes eliminate ratings. And you kind of implied in your comment that you hadn’t gone that far. But how does TD Bank think about ratings, because it’s kind of controversial piece at the moment? Some people are saying it’s demotivating and it doesn’t really work. So where do you guys stand on that?
Sarah Keizer: Yeah. Well this is interesting because we’ve been watching and listening to those pioneers closely. And we’ve also been working with and talking to the NeuroLeadership Group and Dr. Rock, as you know, who really did a great job of translating some of the neuroscience into practical, applicable tools for the corporate environment and businesses.
Michael: That’s right.
Sarah Keizer: And what we see is that for the employee experience, it’s not okay to remove ratings and then have those conversations happen in a black box environment where there’s no transparency. And what we’ve been watching is that there are some companies where the level of maturity of the managers to give feedback and for employees to receive the feedback, and the culture around feedback was not mature enough to kind of make that big jump. And so many of them are, I don’t know if they’ve rolled the decision back, but they are certainly rethinking it because there is a tendency to see a black box environment start to evolve. And it never evolves with the best managers and the best performers.
Of course not, because actually performance management isn’t about your best performers and your best managers. It’s actually about helping the middle do its best work, and it’s about making sure that some of the bad environments don’t breed and get stronger and you can take action when you need to. And so what we wouldn’t ever want to do is to create a black box environment. So I think that’s one thing that we’ve been watching very carefully. On ratings though, Michael, and you’ve asked what does TD think about ratings.
We know the current ratings system that we have isn’t working. And that is clear. But we do know, and this is kind of where the nuance is, and where you need to go to your data, your own data to sort out what’s working and what’s not, that employees feel that their manager is providing ongoing feedback that helps them improve their performance. And we know that through our regular employee engagement surveys.
Michael: Nice. It’s interesting isn’t it? Kind of that separation out of the measurement at the end of the year, kind of this is where you rank against your peers versus the how do you support your people to grow and get better at their jobs? And they feel like the collapse into the same conversation, but they’re quite different actual ways of thinking.
Sarah Keizer: That’s right. And I think that’s the powerful distinction that if we can teach people that when you coach for growth, and you coach for potential possibility, and with positive intent, you get a heck of a lot more. But the minute you’re labeling someone, and it’s a evaluative conversation, they shut down. It’s a completely different conversation. Not that evaluative conversations shouldn’t happen. They should at certain times. But mixing them is actually stunting growth in some ways, and that’s not what’s going to help the best of the corporations get what they need out of their employee base, not today. And so I think we just as companies haven’t learned how to do those two things separately and do them well yet. And so there’s a few companies that are trying a few things, and other of us that are watching and learning and evolving rather than taking a big leap into someone else’s best practice. So that’s in a nutshell I think where we are at TD today.
Michael: Yeah. That’s great. Let me ask, because it’s clear that you’ve got an attuned radar to this. Are there any companies that you look to as pioneers that you’re going, “I’m tracking these two, or three, or four companies because they’re up to interesting stuff?” I know I’m putting you on the spot here, so if you’re like, “Yes, but I can’t think of them,” I totally get that.
Sarah Keizer: No. So pretty much all of them. Of course we’re watching some of our peers, JP Morgan, Goldman, and the FIs because when this first (inaudible) of companies, Adobe, came out with this, we thought, “Oh, here we go.” Right? Like this is the new up and coming-
Michael: Right, Silicon Valley, crazy Silicon Valley on the west coast. Yeah.
Sarah Keizer: Right. Yeah. And as I said, we are a big company. We have multiple business lines, and we’re very thoughtful about what we do, so we are like, “Okay, let’s see where this goes.” But then when some of the Accenture and Deloitte, because they have audit arms, right? And they have a very different, it’s not just consulting, they have audit arms. And we’re like, “Oh, how’d they get that through the regulators? That’s interesting. That’s very interesting. And why did they do it for this population and not that population?” Because the other thing is a lot of people said, “Oh, we’ve done this everywhere and we’ve done it for all populations.”
And then when you dig deeper, and I encourage people to really dig beneath the CNN style headlines that are now all over the place on LinkedIn and HBR, the Harvard Business Review. They’re very eye-catching, but you actually have to talk to the practitioners. And just what we found out, that wasn’t exactly what happened. And it was a bit more nuanced, and they were trying a few things on in certain populations.
Michael: And that’s exactly the purpose of this podcast series, which is, “Let’s get behind that snappy headlines that seem to make everything change perfectly and easily for everybody and go what really happened here?” So let me ask you if you’re willing to share, you’ve talked about some of the things that have worked really well in terms of your evolution as a bank. Was there anything that you tried or that didn’t quite work as well as you hoped? Any kind of places where it was more of a struggle?
Sarah Keizer: Yeah. One of the things that we just were looking at, because we are also going to be changing our talent platform, so we are going to be evolving away from our current platform and onto one that has mobile capability and some new technology. And as a center of expertise, we are all excited to push hard and go fast, evolve away from a mid-year milestone. So we have a fiscal year that runs from November to November, and our mid-year is usually in May. And it’s such a busy time of year because of lots of other things happening. And we really thought, “Hey, with this great mobile technology, it’s easier. We can support continuous coaching conversations and gather the great examples of performance and coaching through this new tool.”
And surprisingly what we found is that our HR organization and some of our business leaders, not all, they’re not ready for it yet. So we need to meet them where they are in terms of understanding the road map of the new vision of performance management. And we were so excited with the success of our new shared commitments, we thought we could go fast right away with the next step. And we found that actually we couldn’t, that we just needed to slow down, help them catch up so they can embrace it and live it. We also needed to take advantage of some new people manager training that’s coming out. So we’re going to slow down right now, but with the stated ambition to go a lot faster for 2019. So while that sounds contradictory, that’s often what I find is that your biggest achievements don’t … It’s not a linear state from A to B. You do have to be very well-attuned to the leadership, to your audiences that you’re helping and supporting, and certain your own HR organization.
Michael: You know, even on the good days, change management is really hard. I mean, it’s one thing to identify the programs and the platforms and the shared commitments and the like. But finding ways to roll that out so that things changed within the organization, that’s always tricky. So what other insights or lessons have you learned around the change management process that might be useful for people hear?
Sarah Keizer: You can’t go out and talk about the why of this enough.
Michael: Right.
Sarah Keizer: You have to take a sort of a myth-busting approach. So it’s like the myth that if we don’t keep a traditional objective setting mid-year review, year-end type of approach, no one will ever get feedback every again. Like that’s just not true. We know it today. But there is sometimes that fear. Myth-busting that a bell curve is an appropriate representation of human performance. That’s not true. And there’s lots of different ways, and depending on the business you’re in, depending on the type of roles in the organization, even cultural context, it’s much more nuanced and a bell curve isn’t the right answer. And then there’s always the … This is a new one, and I think for us almost 50% of our employee population fall within the millennial, I can’t even say the word, because I’m not a millennial.
Michael: Well I think that’s true statistically-
Sarah Keizer: Within the millennial definition-
Michael: -true statistically across most organizations now that we’re kind of past the 50% mark around millennials making up employee base.
Sarah Keizer: Yeah. Well it’s true. And if you think of that definition, the oldest millennials are now turning 40.
Michael: What?
Sarah Keizer: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael: Oh my god, I’m suddenly feeling so old.
Sarah Keizer: Yeah. But I think this is one that we’ve been trying to understand a bit better is that recognition and appreciation not just come from a manager and a pay slip. So it’s much more complex, how people are perceiving their value today and how we’re triggering engagement is much more affected by peers, a broader social network inside and outside the company. And of course, your manager is still a significant influence. And pay is always going to be an important factor, but it’s much more complex, and I think there’s a lot of interesting work being done on that area that as TD we haven’t really delved into yet that can be harnessed. So I think those three myths, the myth of the bell curve, the myth of that recognition can only from a manager, top down, and that no one in your organization knows how to give and receive feedback and waits and holds all this stuff for this milestone moment-
Michael: For years.
Sarah Keizer: -yeah, yeah, is not correct.
Michael: That’s lovely. And I love just kind of that stand for, “I’m going to break down some of those myths, some of those … I’m going to be a bit iconoclastic around here because we’ve been operating under these just standard assumptions of this is true, and if they’re not true, that changes the way we go out and we reach and we connect and we roll some of this new stuff out.”
Sarah Keizer: Indeed, indeed.
Michael: So this has been a fascinating conversation and honestly I’m like, I want to jump in a cab, go downtown, and actually pull you out for lunch and we can keep talking about this because it’s really interesting. But in the interest of time, do you have any final comments, final reflections on performance management and engaging your organization and that for the folks listening in?
Sarah Keizer: Final comments. That’s a tough one. I guess the thing is never stop listening to the signs of where real growth for the employees, and growth from the business is coming from. Don’t be afraid to make some match, like a patchwork quilt, the right solution for your company at the time that you’re in that company making the change. There is no one size fits all. There is no silver bullet.
Michael: Exactly. You know one of the other people we’ve talked to as part of this series from Citi Bank was saying, kind of related to that, which is don’t wait till you’ve got the perfect solution until you launch it. Launch something that’s a beta test and then learn and iterate as part of that. And it’s a kind of connected insight there I think.
Sarah Keizer: Yep. Absolutely. Yep.
Michael: Sarah, this has been amazing. Thank you for your time. It’s really appreciated.
Sarah Keizer: It’s been a real pleasure, Michael.
