Populist messages have a tendency, however, to fall apart upon further inspection. There is no doubt that people hate performance reviews -- managers and employees alike. There's no doubt that in most cases they cause and create behavior that nobody wants.

I think he misses the boat right off the bat with the purpose of the review. The purpose of the review is to make sure the manager is doing his job with the employee, knowing what's going on in the employee's work, having an interest, offering to help, seeing where the employee and the company's interests can be aligned. Some of these conversations are tough, and if you didn't require them, a lot of employees would never have the chance to say no, I don't want to be a tech lead, I'd rather get into teaching (or something similar). To view the review process as primarily raise and checklist based is to see how it's done instead of seeing what it's supposed to do. A common argument in populist writing is to say "since X is commonly done very poorly, X is therefore a bad idea altogether"

He gets even further into the cool-aid with this comment "I'm sick and tired of hearing about subordinates who fail and get fired, while bosses, whose job it was to ensure subordinate effectiveness, get promoted and receive raises in pay."

Sounds good -- as long as you think bosses should always be able to make/help subordinates be happy and productive. But while managers are definitely super people, they're not superman. Things happen in life. People get accepted at jobs they will never like. Companies take directions employees simply can't agree with. There are lots of reasons why somebody can get fired while management is not responsible. I'm not even sure that most times management is responsible, but I know that it's not all of the time. Generalizations are always false: including this one.

</Rant>

If performance reviews were that useful, why are they done only once a year? I feel like this should be a weekly conversation. Employee growth needs constant attention, but unfortunately it only happens for a handful of hours once a year.

My attitude is more pessimistic. I feel like these reviews are only useful for HR, so that they have a paper trail in place in the event that an employee needs to be terminated.

Edit: Just so my intentions are clear, I'm a cofounder of ididwork

My personal take, and what I try to do with my reports, is to give periodic feedback, good or bad. That way people have plenty of time to either bask in the glory or improve before the final review is upon them.

Your profile didn't have your email listed - if you could shoot me an email at gupta[at]ididwork.com I'd really appreciate it!

No doubt the idea of the performance review was meant to create a additional channels of communication. But human beings are human beings and things don't always work out the way they're intended (Communism being a supreme example).

If we are empirically honest, we should conclude that performance reviews don't work, whilst avoiding undue judgement of managers who are still compelled to do them.

To critique something, you first define why it exists. Maybe I missed it, but in my opinion this was treated extremely lightly in the article. Instead it was all about the execution -- a sure sign that the point isn't a real discussion of the thing, but the popular feeling about the thing.

It's a short leap to complete anti-managerialism once one sees malice (I am often guilty of this).

You're right: it's easy to drag out the guillotine without asking honest questions.

I'd say "since it's a bad idea, it is therefore commonly done very poorly" instead. It's not a demonstration, but a cue.

My boss was asked to burn the review. Someone else from above would write a new one. I guessed what was going on (later my boss confirmed my guesses), so I didn't waste a second. A week later I gave the two weeks notice to go to a place with 20% more pay. I wouldn't if not for the review system.

My point (same as in the article) is that performance is not the question, but market forces. It turns out they really lacked the power to give me a bad review. The same person that ordered the good review to be burnt and wrote a new one (very bad, I guess) was a few days later offering me 10% more pay, just because I was leaving.

A good boss in a candid organization will be delivering informal feedback throughout the year. The annual performance review has no surprises; it's a set time to formalize what is already known.

People shouldn't treat performance reviews as salary negotiations, but instead as evidence-gathering for a salary negotiation. A salary negotiation has two important variables and the performance review provides evidence for only one. The two variables are a) Value delivered to the company by the employee and b) Best alternative salary for the employee.

It's still quite disappointing to see him referring to managers as "bosses" and non-managers as "subordinates". The next logical step is to state that managers are not there to exert power, but to make it possible for non-managers to do work. Fewer power plays means a better working environment.

"Unlike the rest of Sony, CSL employs researchers on a one-year contract basis, with annual performance reviews. Salaries are high, but they are based on success, not on seniority."

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...

And then you have GE and IBM.

At GE in Jack Welch's days, they routinely fired the bottom 10%. Up or out.

At IBM, they rank all of their scientists from top to bottom.

At IBM, they rank all of their scientists from top to bottom.

One of my favorite examples by Edwards Deming is a factory that has three production lines, each manned by an employee, each producing the same product on the same equipment. Furthermore, assume that there are no defects in the equipment, the manufacturing processes are under statistical control (negligible products appearing 2 standard deviations from the mean in any measured variable, iirc), and that the employees are equally skilled at their jobs. The company has a policy to promote top performers and dismiss low performers.

Every year, at the annual review, the company policy demands that they promote one average worker, keep another average worker in production, and fire the other average worker, simply because even a statistically controlled process produces some variation. This is a random process in that all three candidates have been defined as equally qualified.

In a typical software organization, where there is hardly such a thing as a controlled process, performance reviews are pure fiction if they purport to say anything about the individual. It's simply amazing hubris to think that you can attribute any given success or failure to a quality of the individual employee when your processes are not under statistical control. It is therefore amazing naivete to think that promotions in an organization of any size are handed out based on merit. They are handed out based on, at best, a record of performance, which is subject to the vagaries of chance.

Note that I'm not advocating for any particular Utopic solution. I'm just acknowledging that local reviews of system components (employees, in this case) will never produce a globally optimum solution.

Welch's rank-and-yank has been documented as, almost without debate, a failure. GE still uses some form of it, but not the draconian 10%.

The first problem with it is that it's difficult to allocate the firings across divisions. If you do this unevenly, workers and managers in the divisions hardest hit get angry about the perceived injustice. If you do it evenly, you end up firing people in high-performing divisions who might be good employees by the company-wide standard.

The second issue is that a company's proportion of deadwood decreases with successive firings. The first iteration, most of the people let go are of negative value to their teams, and few people miss them. Second iteration, some mediocre performers are fired, but managers would rather not let them go because they're still of positive value to the team, and their firing means that those remaining have to do more work. Third iteration, it's impossible to find enough deserving people, and hell breaks loose: managers get pissed off about being forced to can good people, and line workers get angry when they see respected colleagues depart.

   Problem with Performance Reviews
   http://gmj.gallup.com/content/529/The-Four-Keys-to-Great-Management.aspx

   First Break all the Rules summary
   http://gmj.gallup.com/content/1144/First-Break-All-Rules-Book-Center.aspx

It would be interesting to know if performance reviews are as common in jurisdictions where employers can fire staff at will.

I do not understand why adult human beings, who get a few short years to do something creative and useful, want so bad to be treated so similarly to grade school children. Line up to pee in the cup and have your bodily fluid tested just like the cattle you fat fucks gorge yourselves on. Come into the principa...manager's office and get reduced to some meaningless numbers it a social ritual that directly links to mankinds worse tendencies to form hierarchies that exist to mantain power. Piss away the potentially creative years of your lives living the same day over and over again and get a few measly biosurvival tickets in return, until you drop dead. If you are going to go through life processing your relationships to power structure like a grade school kid, what's the point of being an adult?

I do not want to hire the kind of person who needs or wants to be validated like a second grader. I would prefer to hire the kind of person who demands the dignity and responsibility due to adult human beings, and would blow me off if I tried to sit down and hand out gold stars based on what's already happened. I would prefer to address real problems when they come up, as appropriate, and ignore nitpicks rather then saving nitpicks to be unleashed in a minefield of potential miscommunications and ignoring problems with employees until the review. There is no need to have this stupid ritual every six months.

I do like his "preview" idea. The idea of replacing review with long range planning seems exactly right. Companies exist to invent the future, attention should be focused on the future.