Amy Giggey-Burns came to people leadership through an unusual path: her father was a coroner, as she explains, “death was dinner table conversation growing up.” Because of that began her career working in hospice care. Today, Giggey-Burns is the CEO and Founder of Talent Team, a fractional HR practice embedded in some of Colorado's most ambitious startups and businesses. 

When we asked her what her experience in death work has meant to her business today, she told us about the invaluable perspective it has given her about the workplace:

"I think that we forget that our legacy does include people that we spend 2,080 hours with a year. And how do you want to be remembered? What's the impact you want to have? What words do you want to come to people's minds when they think of you and their experience with you?" 

She recognizes that the workplace is an important part of our lives, it is where most people spend a significant amount of time, it has a measurable impact on our quality of life, and it should be valued as such. Individuals should not only be concerned about their workplace achievements, but also their impact on the company culture. We should be teaching people how to invest in their work relationships, and how to carry themselves with intention throughout their work life. 

Ineffective performance management initiatives and unclear talent strategies often prevent workers and managers from creating meaningful experiences within the workplace. She's seen the same failure mode repeat itself across dozens of organizations: well-intentioned, effective people struggle to find clarity and success in systems that were never designed with enough structure to allow the team to succeed.

Through Talent to Team, Giggey-Burns helps businesses and startups find ways to intentionally design and grow people foundations and work cultures staffed with people who truly understand their roles and how they contribute to team success. She aims to create workplaces where workers can create meaningful, enriching relationships on the path to business success. 

The Performance Management Playbook

According to a ThriveSparrow survey, ninety-five percent of managers are dissatisfied with their current performance management systems. And we know that poor management costs businesses big time. To Giggey-Burns, this is the product of a lack of clarity that compounds on themselves and leads to the inability to grow your business or reach your milestones. 

When T2T comes on board, we want to know where the pain in the organization is. Typically we hear companies are experiencing performance issues with their workforce and their teams are frustrated with the lack of career progression. It is often due to a lack of people structure compounded by failing feedback systems between employees, managers, and leadership. Often, the first thing HR departments turn to is the annual performance review. We think this will show us concretely where the challenges are, but it rarely does. To her, this performance review is usually the last place where foundational problems surface. By then, something more fundamental such as trust between employee and employer is already broken and we lack the real information to properly diagnose the problems.

Giggey-Burns says that often the annual performance appraisal surfaces a lack of productive communication, can become combative, and even tank morale organization-wide. 

"What happens is feedback is uncomfortable, we delay it, and the chasm between expectations and performance grows. Those micro feedback conversations can help surface the true issue. Is the friction coming from the person, the process, or the tool? Is the employee clear on their role? Do they have what they need to do it well? With a lack of continuous data, it’s easy for the employee to blame their manager and vice versa. In this scenario, once performance reviews come around, the team member is completely surprised, defensive, and the relationship is ruined.” 

We know that high trust, high performance environments take work and commitment to investment in performance feedback. It’s worth investing in because it creates legacy building businesses. 

Fixing the Two-Degree Drift

So what do we do about the communication chasm and performance reviews? She uses an analogy to describe the futility of using only the performance review to fix communication: A plane is set to fly across the country and land in Los Angeles. If that plane is off-course by two degrees, it will land in Seattle. 

Namely, small communication errors can lead to overblown issues down the road. Attempting to bridge the gap after months of deferred feedback with a performance appraisal is like trying to reroute the plane when it is about to land in Seattle. Instead, if we focus on promoting continuous, actionable feedback conversations, it’s like fixing that two degree misdirection shortly after takeoff. It is not only easier and more manageable, but significantly more effective.

Giggey-Burns says that HR departments turn to the annual performance review because it feels like an easy, straightforward way to gather and share data that will presumably identify gaps  across the company and help team members understand how to go about resolving them. The idea is that metrics and quantifiable outputs might help employees accept feedback more proactively during performance reviews. 

While she believes that this data is incredibly important to helping HR and companies as a whole improve, it should not be the primary tool to resolve performance issues. This is because, as Giggey-Burns explains, “data is a lagging indicator”. It measures success and failure after the fact, and doesn’t have the capability to assess current work relationships on its own. By the time the data registers a performance issue, the trust that creates the space for actionable feedback has already eroded.

Giggey-Burns urges:

"Trust is your leading indicator. How do we measure the trust that we have with each other and that our employees have with us? This is the most important question to answer."

If HR leaders are able to move away from a data-first approach that relies solely on the annual performance review, they will give themselves the opportunity to focus on cultivating trust in the workplace. And trust is what surfaces the real issues. Trust is how you find out about mistakes while they’re small. Trust is how you fix the two-degree drift as it is happening by focusing their efforts on promoting day-to-day communication with clear success definitions and actionable improvement opportunities. 

By focusing on trust, the entire nature of performance management changes for the better. People give you real, actionable information that you can use. What is primarily a documentation exercise becomes a gold mine of information so the leadership team can adjust and invest appropriately.  

Tools like Zal.ai are most powerful when they're built around this insight: the goal is not to just capture performance data, but use it to identify bottlenecks, issues, and misaligned roles and responsibilities.From this lense, Giggey-Burns explains, “performance reviews are supportive and valuable instead of time consuming and punitive.”

Talent Strategy as Hypothesis

Most performance failures, Giggey-Burns argues, aren't really about the person. Alongside communication issues, they're also usually about a fundamental mismatch between what a role actually requires and what the organization has designed, communicated, or hired for.

"When you build a talent strategy you are clarifying: where are we now, where are we going, how fast do we need to get there, who do we think we need to hire to get us there, and what type of compensation do we need to build to attract and retain this talent? Then we measure, and iterate. I can’t tell you how easy it is to hire the right person at the wrong stage and waste a year and a half of your life trying to put a square peg in a round hole. When you have your hypothesis formulated and you are measuring appropriately, you and your team can finally start working together. Think of it like I [the employer] am playing Monopoly and you [the employee] are playing Battleship/. Neither of us understand the moves the other person is making and I keep putting you in jail for dive bombing my thimble.  Let’s get clear on the rules of the game. And together we can enjoy ourselves and progress much faster.” 

The employee must understand the requirements and expectations of their role to truly work towards success. 

Oftentimes, especially in the startup world, these roles can rapidly change and become hard to define. In times of turmoil, Giggey-Burns encourages companies to rethink the way they approach role definitions: 

“Especially in the startup world, when you have a clearly identified talent strategy, what you're building is a hypothesis. You must revisit that strategy at least every year to test that hypothesis, but especially when you are making big strategy changes”

In this case, your org chart is your hypothesis – you’re making an educated guess that these are the roles and responsibilities that your organization needs to hit your goals. However, a hypothesis may not be true, and that may not be the individual’s fault. The company needs may have changed, an employee who sat in multiple seats left and now we need to hire individually for each, a bet we placed in channel marketing isn’t working out and we need to shift to focus on product, etc.  Make these changes thoughtfully and methodically to formulate a new hypothesis. And then we measure again. 

This reframe changes an inflexible system into a highly analytical one. By taking stock of each role frequently, leadership can understand their company’s needs more intimately, and respond to it proactively. 

This is especially important in the startup space, because, as Giggey-Burns says, “Career ladders in startup land are more like Shoots & Ladders.” Organizational roles are fluid, companies can grow faster than people, and a talent strategy can need to be changed on a dime. 

A Path Forward

Amy Giggey Burns’s quest to create an authentic work environment, where individuals are able to create a meaningful, lasting legacy, is built on promoting clarity, trust, addressing problems at the source, and embracing flexibility. 

Her advice is less about the right tool or the right review format, and more about addressing the preconditions that continue to prevent success. It's a structural diagnosis - and a call to build performance frameworks that are honest enough to interrogate the system before blaming the person, and human enough to foster true community.