<
https://medium.com/@ElizAyer/annual-performance-reviews-ruin-everything-7464e07dff3a>
"There is hardly an area of work, psychological safety, growth, collaboration
or equity that annual performance reviews don’t undermine. Think I’m
exaggerating? Have I got a (long) post for you….
I’ve been on both sides of performance reviews, receiver for most of my 20+
year career and giver for 4 of the last 6. I’ve also been intimately involved
in processes to improve the processes. From first exposure, my experience of
reviews was at odds with other messages I was hearing from orgs, so I carefully
observed the effects on people, read widely, and talked with other people to
make sense of it. The vibe from managers where they still happen is typically
“enh, they’re not ideal, but what can you do?” They are rarely taken as
seriously in their toxicity as they should be, and this repeatedly causes harm.
Hence laying out the case here to coalesce opinion to quarantine and ultimately
eradicate them completely.
By annual performance reviews, I’m talking about the activity where a manager
delivers an assessment of their report’s performance once a year, compares them
to other employees, and ties that to a financial consequence. If we unpack
this, we see there is a lot going on: manager, judgment, annual, comparison,
consequences.
With every second-order effect from this judgment bundle, you can make a
one-by-one excuse or offer mitigations. Especially when you’re in management,
you may want to believe that these are merely risks, and you, thoughtful,
caring manager that you are, can avoid them. I’m asking you to consider what’s
truly in your control, and recognize that even if you shore up your own house,
the hill is sliding downwards. Performance reviews introduce dynamics, intended
and unintended, that other processes and behaviors have to work against to
maintain healthy working environments.
My point is not just that the dynamics are happening, but that they matter. The
underlying forces should make a difference to how you treat the structures on
top of them. How you diagnose problems, what you choose to build, what
additional purposes to use the land for. Knowing what’s going on underneath the
performance review can help you make choices about how to approach them, and
especially what you should
not ask them to do."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
