Performance Reviews Are Performative Nonsense
If a critical machine on your production line starts smoking, you don’t wait for the next scheduled maintenance time to fix it. You stop the line, you address the defect. You move forward. So why do we treat our most expensive and complex assets – our people – differently? Waiting for a 12-month review to unload mostly useless and overdue feedback is an administrative burden that isn’t management, it’s professional negligence.
The Value Is Lost In The Batch Process
Batch processing is the enemy when it comes to managing people. It allows managers to focus on the functional portion of their role, rather than their primary function of managing the people. It allows low performers to skate by without having to work on their gaps, and it delays praise to your star performers.
Annual reviews are also plagued by “recency bias” – when you sit down to complete the form in December, you remember the mistake the employee made three weeks ago. You don’t remember the account they saved back in February.
We waste hundreds of hours having managers debate whether someone is a 2.5 or a 3, poring over extensive forms. We try to force rankings to fit the budget for yearly increases. It’s just a math exercise that prevents you from doing what really works. We’re not suggesting that you separate performance from compensation, we’re saying it’s not a 1:1 equation.
We Give You Permission To Do It Differently
If you’re waiting for permission to toss those forms, we’re here to give it to you. Somewhere in business culture, we’ve accepted that this is something we have to do. We’re going to expose a secret here – you don’t have to. Adobe famously stopped doing it in 2012 and saved 80,000 hours of leadership time. There are a lot of HR professionals that might insist on it, and we’ll tell you why. When you don’t have a culture of regular feedback, coaching, and documentation, you don’t have anything to protect against liability for making tough decisions about termination or demotion or choosing to promote one person over another. Enter laborious forms and a month of putting everything else on the back burner to get them done.
Go Lean: The 15-minute Feedback Loop
Stop doing an annual post-mortem and start doing the 15-minute check-in.
Frequency over volume: meet weekly, or as close as possible
No surprises: people know the metrics you’re tracking, they have access to the relevant info you have and issues are addressed when they arise
Remove roadblocks: what do you do to help them?
Real empowerment: you want their input and recommendations, and if a process is broken, don’t be afraid to flip it on its head
Kill the dread of the annual performance review and replace it with a culture of continuous improvement. Your managers stop being functional experts who avoid people problems, and they start being real leaders whose primary focus is the success of their team.
We can help you redesign your entire approach to people management. Companies that are doing the real work don’t have time for box-ticking forms; we’re here to give you radical transparency and structure that shows results.
