HR leaders at TIFF and Gowling WLG on why time, skill and trust remain big hurdles to effective performance management
For Marsha John-Greenwood, vice-president of people and culture at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), a key part of performance management is driving towards the idea that it’s not a process being “done” to employees but an opportunity for them to get information to help them perform.
“For me, that connectivity, regardless of organization or industry, has always been really important… this is about ‘How I can show up and utilize the system and I can be very clear about… what I need to achieve to be good or to be excellent?’”
That shift was a central theme of a recent virtual roundtable for Canadian HR Reporter featuring John-Greenwood alongside Deon Blyan, senior director of people and culture at Gowling WLG.
That idea of performance reviews being “done” to the employee is a long-standing tradition of annual cycles, says Blyan, citing the importance of striving instead to the ideal of continuous feedback “and feeling connected to the forward momentum.”
“That is the curse that can happen if that year-end review is so heavily weighted… because then it just becomes so big and ominous.”
Time and skill remain biggest hurdles
Overall, performance management can come with great challenges — but these “are not insurmountable,” says Blyan highlighting its importance to an organization’s culture
He says the two biggest challenges are time and skill — particularly in a professional services environment with legal professionals focused on clients and a shared services team operating in a more traditional way
Developing skill, he says, comes from making an “ambiguous” process feel more tangible — whether that means executing the cycle steps themselves or learning how to give feedback in a way “that is congruent with the organization's culture.”
John-Greenwood says that TIFF runs sessions for both employees and managers to build those skills.
“You always have to remind people,” she says, emphasizing the need to make it “part and parcel,” so it’s integrated into how people work.
Moving from annual to continuous feedback
Both organizations have been working to move away from single annual reviews toward more continuous check-ins.
At TIFF, John-Greenwood says the organization introduced quarterly reviews and a mid-year point roughly four years ago, building in dedicated time within regular one-on-ones for these conversations. Managers are given guidance and prompts to help structure the discussions, and the next planned addition is 360-degree feedback for managers themselves.
“It's not always about obviously checking in in terms of performance, but ‘How are things going? Are there things that we need to develop?’
“So, we've changed the conversation, we've given some guidance, we've given some notes as to maybe things you want to discuss in those quarterly, but in particular, mid-year reviews.”
Gowling WLG began a refresh of its own performance cycle at the start of last year, with a goal of making the process more collaborative and proactive so that year-end reviews don't come as a surprise, according to Blyan.
"Even if it is a positive review, it still should not be a surprise. Somebody should know that they're doing well so they can continue to do well and focus on the things that are helping them do that.”
He adds that building the skill to try and avoid generic feedback is central to that shift.
"The more specific you can be, the better it is for the individual receiving that, whether it’s constructive feedback or positive because then you know what the person's talking about and what you should continue to do or what could be adjusted."
What the ratings distribution reveals
Asked about metrics, Blyan says he pays close attention to the spread of self-ratings versus how leaders rate employees.
"I'm curious to know the percentage of people that rate themselves ‘outstanding’ versus ‘meets expectations,’ and then as a contrast, the percentage of leaders that agree with that or disagree," he says.
“When that distribution of ratings is too positive, maybe there's a misunderstanding of expectations within the organization as to how performance is measured and driven. So then maybe there's an opportunity to get into more detail around making that more empirical.”
Compensation, Blyan adds, complicates that picture. He describes pay as an emotionally "sticky" subject that many leaders have learned over the course of their careers to treat as a “taboo subject.” That makes it easy for unskilled managers to default to tying performance ratings directly to pay even when the two are meant to be decoupled.
In a strong economic year, he says, that tendency becomes even more pronounced.
"It can be easy as a leader to say, ‘Yeah, great job this year,’” says Blyan, noting the reverse is also true — in tougher years, organizations may need to manage compensation more cautiously in ways that aren't really tied to how someone performed.
“It’s a delicate balance and it requires ability and skill to communicate,” he says.
Goal-setting and objectives
John-Greenwood says she focuses further upstream, on the quality of goal-setting itself. TIFF ties individual objectives to organizational strategy and tracks how closely results align with what was set at the start of the cycle.
"If we start by focusing in on the quality of the goals — and that’s ongoing work, it’s never done but it encourages us to have this alignment… we have a sense then to say, ‘OK, well, we can actually validate if that's true,’" she says.
That scrutiny has surfaced gaps before. John-Greenwood recounts a recent case in which TIFF discovered that some managers' own objectives made no reference to their teams at all — the focus was entirely on their individual output. "It was all about the person," she says, prompting a direct conversation about the fact that a manager's job includes managing their team.
She notes that despite these efforts, ratings tend to be inflated and skew positive year over year — a "halo effect" common across organizations — and that introducing pay-for-performance elements at TIFF has not meaningfully shifted that trend.
“But my question really is around, ‘OK, now we've had this person performing for the past three years at the exceed level, how are we supporting them in job enrichment, career enrichment, how do we leverage that?” says John-Greenwood.
“So, using the information from right at the beginning of the process in terms of those objectives and how they're closely linked then to performance really helps us have a whole picture.”
‘Consistently met’ rather than ‘exceeded’
Both leaders also raised the question of how organizations support employees who consistently meet, rather than exceed, expectations. Blyan argues that group deserves more recognition than it typically receives.
"That should be a very good thing because you need that stability, you need people achieving the deliverables at that rate in order to keep the strategy and the priorities moving forward.”
John-Greenwood agrees on the importance of recognizing and celebrating people who are reaching a good standard.
“It’s always that smaller group who are recognized for what they’ve done, and then it can be disengaging a whole group of people who are actually very solid and doing a great job for us,” she says.
“That’s what we want to encourage and ensure that a majority of our programs capture.”
Linking performance to succession
Blyan also sees value in connecting performance management directly to succession planning, treating strong performance as a prerequisite — rather than the whole story — for conversations about potential.
"Performance becomes the precursor and almost like the entry fee to get into that conversation about potential," he says, describing a shift in thinking from what someone did and how they did it, to what their capacity is to stretch and what they aspire to.
“When you get into that, you start seeing a different distribution of groups.”
Blyan cautions, however, that organizations can't treat too large a share of employees as high-potential without undermining their own promotion pipeline.
Reducing bias requires skill-building
On reducing bias in performance ratings, John-Greenwood says TIFF shares data with senior leaders during calibration sessions and encourages managers to raise concerns directly with their teams when they see patterns emerge. Ahead of those sessions, she says TIFF also brings managers together in working groups to discuss what they're seeing and experiencing beforehand, using examples in a safe setting so managers can reflect before going into the higher-stakes conversation.
"It's almost like just getting their heads in the right place before they go into that," she says.
"All leaders who are assessing, in this case, performance, they're going to come in with their own lens. So, it's incumbent on the organization to reiterate what the organization values — behaviours, competence and expectations of a manager.”
Giving managers specific examples, rather than vague observations, helps make potential bias concrete rather than abstract, says John-Greenwood. "It's not this nebulous thing with just lots of numbers and people — we're now talking about the impact someone could have on someone else."
AI's emerging role
Both organizations are exploring how AI can support the performance process, though neither has fully built it into their programs yet.
John-Greenwood says TIFF plans to explore AI within performance management this year, particularly for scenario-based planning and to help identify outliers in the data more quickly.
At Gowling WLG, they’re exploring AI to help leaders recap the entire year and enhanced their tone and sentiment in feedback, according to Blyan.
“You can have it run through the internal AI and just sort of beef up the positive tone a little bit, which we felt was very important and helpful and also allow someone to type in shorthand some things, and it can kind of formulate a more full sort of sentence.
“I think there's still a need for certainly within that to develop skill again for the leaders to be able to vet that and ensure that it has the human side of what it’s intended to.”
AI is also appealing in being able to pull together a great starting point for a development plan for an individual, he says.
Blyan says he also sees potential for AI to help synthesize broader patterns in ratings data — including the kind of self- versus leader-rating gaps he described earlier.
"I think there's probably a great opportunity in the future to also use it in ways to synthesize and find themes... and create solutions based on the things that are bubbling up," he says.
