It's Time To Kill Performance Reviews. Here's Why!

One thing we learn in life is that some of our most important lessons come to us slowly.

We don't get every big "Aha!" all at once in a flash of insight. Sometimes the learning drips in slowly, instead.

That's what happened with me with respect to performance reviews. I created the annual performance review at several companies I worked for. I helped other HR people create their performance review systems, too.

I looked at dozens of formats and perspectives surrounding the performance review process. I reworked our company's process slightly every year to make it better - or at least that's what I was trying to do.

A little voice in the back of my brain nagged at me: "Despite your efforts to make them more compassionate and less uncomfortable for everyone, performance reviews are stupid from the get-go, Liz!

"How does one human being get to evaluate another one, when their personalities and perspectives may be radically different?

"Why would we sit down and talk about the whole past year, especially from the perspective 'How well did you do your job in the past 12 months?' What a time-waster and mojo-killer!"

I had doubts, but I still administered performance-review and performance-management systems and of course, I wrote scores of performance reviews myself.

I sat through dozens of performance-review meetings -- meetings where my boss reviewed my past year's performance, and meetings where I talked with my team members about their past year's results. Here's what I noticed.

When my boss and I were in synch, the performance review meeting was pointless, because it was well-covered ground already.

When my manager and I were out of synch, the performance-review conversation was pointless again, because I didn't value my manager's advice and had no intention of following it. 

Now I can see clearly that performance reviews are not only a massive waste of time and energy, but damaging to the the fabric of a healthy corporate culture as well.

What do teams run on? They run on their collective momentum and trust. At Human Workplace we call that power source Team Mojo. Performance reviews, no matter how they are executed, can only deplete your Team Mojo.

They come from a place of fear -- fear that you might have screwed something up during the year and will be called to task for it.

Managers are afraid of giving calm and supportive performance reviews in case they're accused of being too "soft" on their employees, as though the hard-soft continuum were relevant to leading and managing capable adults.

There is no benefit to looking back over the past year and asking a working person "How well did you perform?" much less in telling him or her "Here's how I think you performed!"

If we are going to get better at what we do individually and in groups, we have to talk about situations we're dealing with when they arise, not months later!

We have to talk about them from the vantage point "What can we learn?" versus the perspective "Have you been a good or bad little elf this year?"

It is an act of power, not of trust, to call an employee into a conference room and review the past 12 months with the question"How well did you perform your job this year?" hanging over the conversation.

People who are immersed in their work don't invest enormous amounts of energy to get a gold star or to kiss their manager's rear end.

They throw themselves into their work because their work speaks to them. That's why evaluating their work from the standpoint "Are you an Excellent, Good or just Average employee?" is demeaning and insulting.

Talk about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs! When we presume to break the sacred connection between people and their work -- work that speaks to them and connects them with their power source -- we are behaving stupidly.

If we were tuned into the human channel at work -- the channel that broadcasts fear and trust signals -- we would see why performance reviews are so damaging to individuals and to teams.

Sadly, in the business and professional worlds we have trained ourselves not to notice the waves of fear and trust swirling around us.

That is a shame, because we'd be much happier and healthier and our organizations would be more profitable if we saw the waves and talked about them. 

We have constructed our crusty, archaic performance review systems to give employees our feedback whether they want it or not, because we believe that our feedback is good for them -- whether they value it or not! 

Without a bond of trust, even your most thoughtful coaching won't have any impact, but the problem posed by performance reviews is worse than that.

By reinforcing the idea that managers by virtue of their positions naturally and inevitably know more about how the work should be done than their underlings do, formal performance review systems reinforce everything that is broken about work.

Employment lawyers told me for years that a formal performance review process was a critical element in a leadership program. They told me that if we wanted to terminate an employee, the written record in the performance review would protect us against any claims.

That turned out to be false. In the U.S. we have the Employment at Will doctrine in place. It protects employers against claims from terminated employees far better than anybody's performance-review notes will.

Employment at Will says that your employer can send you packing because they feel like it. They don't need a reason to dismiss you, as long as they don't discriminate.

Every single time I had a manager say "I need to fire Shirley" and I pulled up Shirley's last performance review to read it, that very same manager had noted during Shirley's annual review that Shirley's performance was average.

I'd ask the manager why Shirley's performance was average a mere three months ago but now Shirley must be fired, and s/he'd say "Shirley's performance was lousy back then too, but I was trying to motivate her."

We need a way to figure out how to pay our employees each year, but trying to peg their new year's pay to their last year's results in the job is idiotic and insulting. 

There are many factors that go into a person's job performance and many of them don't make themselves evident right away.

We are not machines whose output can be easily counted and sorted, especially in the moment. One person is a weaker bean-counter than another but holds the team together as the unofficial cheerleader and den leader.

Another person is a lousy note-taker and needs help with followup but is an incredible genius at problem-solving.

Real life and real work don't fit into our arbitrary categories or fit conveniently into one spot on the Poor-Fair-Average-Above Average-Excellent spectrum.

Our job as leaders is to inspire our teams and remove roadblocks from our team members' paths. We can get rid of a massive energetic roadblock by removing  performance review systems.

In a Human Workplace environment that values people beyond their daily output, your brilliant team members bring themselves completely to work, heart and soul. That's a good thing! You want them focused on the big win for the company and for themselves, not a list of goals posted on a chart on the wall.

Slowly employers are realizing that they've wasted precious time, money and energy in their faulty recruiting systems. When they ask us "What's the next piece of the Godzilla structure to dismantle, once we've humanized our recruiting process?" we say "Kill performance reviews!"

The time and energy savings available to employers who toss annual performance reviews in the dustbin where they belong are enormous, but in order to overcome our addiction to measuring our teammates' output, we have to trust ourselves to lead through trust rather than to manage through fear.

Here's how Brendan, an HR VP, got the message that his company's performance review system had to go? He told us this story:

"I was talking with Blair, a manager in our company who hates to write and deliver performance reviews. Blair asked me 'Why do I have to sit down and talk with Kathy about her progress once a year, or once a quarter?

"Kathy and I talk every day. If I didn't talk to Kathy way more often than the performance review process requires me to, I wouldn't be a good manager. If I'm not a good manager, no performance review process will make me one.'

"I listened to Blair and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Performance reviews are a waste of time!"

If you're on the fence about nuking your performance review process, ask your employees what they think. Anybody who wants feedback from his or her manager should surely be able to get it.

Some of your teammates might love a steady stream of coaching suggestions, and they are entitled to them. Other folks might pass on your kind offer to critique their work, and that's their privilege, too. If a major issue were to arise, you'd address it then and there.

You can trust your teammates to manage their work, can't you? I hope so - you hired them! You trust yourself to hire adults and treat them as adults, right?

Of course you do!

Our company is called Human Workplace. Our mission is to reinvent work for people.

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