Beware the Fire Hose of Feedback

By Garold L. Markle

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Alyssa Lukpat joined the decades old chorus, chanting that “the performance review is dying” while forecasting that a “fire hose of feedback” is now positioned to replace it. As someone who has invested more than a quarter century advocating for “the end of the performance review,” I wholeheartedly agree that the century old practice needs to go.?

The suggested alternative, however, would seem very unlikely to be a suitable replacement. Below are five reasons why.

1. Frequency Fallacy. By far the most commonly cited criticism of performance reviews is the notion that they need to be performed more than once a year. They argue that feedback, to be of ultimate value in promoting behavioral change, needs to be delivered constantly and continuously on a never-ending timeline.?

Those holding this opinion theorize that assessing behavior and net contributions is only a problem because it is done so infrequently. What I hear them trying to sell is this. If you don’t like being labeled and judged once a year, you’ll love it once a quarter, month, or week. Assigning grades is problematic from a dozen different angles. Rapid, positive behavior change is easier to promote without this burden.?

1. Fire Hose Fix. Most companies Lukpat cites as leading the way on a grand new adventure reason that corrective feedback should be delivered from as many sources and angles as possible. That includes not just from your boss, but also peers, direct reports, work groups, teams, customers, etc. In short, everything you do and everyone you interface with should take a turn critiquing you.

A 360 Degree Feedback approach has been deployed by a large number of companies for several decades now. Some regard it as effective. Others find it more burdensome than beneficial. It frequently starts strong with meaningful insights for those at the top of the organization (who are given an uncommon exposure to upward feedback).? Lukpat laments that managers often opt to spend their limited time on “bigger priorities such as increasing revenue and reducing costs.” That’s a logical outcome for a system that weighs a lot but only produces a little.

1. AI Piles On. Artificial Intelligence is poised to increase the number of evaluation points logarithmically. Prepare yourself to be graded and rated competitively vs. your other “teammates” for relative assessments of “helpfulness.” Who was the number one most helpful teammate in today’s staff meeting vs. who was the worst? Who has the most effective customer service problem resolution? Who ran the most productive videoconference? AI makes it possible to be under the microscope at all times. Everyone judging everything done everywhere. All in the name of performance improvement.?

1. Who’s the Boss? ?What happens when your peers grade you highly, your direct reports heap on the praise, you see your own brilliance, and even your AI thinks you’re special… but the person you report to ranks you dead last in your peer group? Before you go running off to HR demanding they reconcile the obvious anomaly, remember that only one of these judges can fire you.

1. ?More is Better Mindset. In his book, Simplicity, Bill Jensen made the elegant observation that “Information is not power. Simplicity is power!” Focus and prioritization that leads to a concrete personalized development plan is essential. Drinking from a fire hose is, at best inefficient. At worst it is dangerous.

When it comes to the future of performance evaluations, I am certainly not advocating for the status quo. And before you point a finger at me for coming across as more negative than helpful, please know that I have offered a solution, which I think is a very good one, in my book and extensive writings/videos.?

Without even a modicum of competition, performance reviews, as still practiced by most companies today, represent the world’s poorest performing personnel practice. And clinging to the judging/labeling/grading paradigm at its essence has done more to damage the reputation of HR than any other burdensome act of compliance.?

If we want to knock this century-old, entrenched ritual off its dysfunctional throne, we’re going to have to do better than what was projected to come from Lukpat’s fire hose in the WSJ article. We’re also going to have to outperform projections from last summer’s HR Magazine’s 75th anniversary cover story titled “Performance Evaluations Are Broken!” Amen to that, but trust me when I say the 100th anniversary cover story won’t be much different without a more substantive change in paradigm.