Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

Annual Performance Reviews Ruin Everything

3 min read

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Highlights

Performance reviews reinforce unfairness (View Highlight)

If the burden is on the employee to make a case, that runs up against certain groups’ cultural norms or prior socialization against self-promotion. Also, let’s be honest, it is really time-consuming. As such, it disadvantages those with less spare time, again often correlated with various marginalization factors. In other words, it implicitly embeds self-promotion as a reviewable skill and reinforces marginalization. If, instead, the labor is on the manager, this adds force to the biases that person is already expressing. (View Highlight)

  1. Performance reviews encourage a reductive approach to work (View Highlight)

In other words, performance reviews have to be reductive. The point is to provide comparability across people and roles, so it is literally required that they not take individualized account of strengths and contributions, especially where the contributions are outside the dominant framing of value for the organization. (View Highlight)

This is especially self-defeating where an org is trying to promote innovation or diversity (View Highlight)

  1. Performance reviews promote batching of feedback, anchored at an arbitrary point in time. (View Highlight)

For me personally, the connection of feedback to rewards makes me more likely treat the feedback as gameable. My automatic reaction is, “how can I move that opinion so that more $$$ comes out at the end? (View Highlight)

  1. Annual performance reviews reduce psychological safety and increase anxiety (View Highlight)

a performance review is a statement about a person’s worth to the organization. (View Highlight)

psychological safety that it is present only when a person can be unafraid of being judged. Performance reviews, which judge by definition, appear to be wholly incompatible with psychological safety. How can one not be afraid to fail, when not only is judgment required by the system, it also has financial consequences? (View Highlight)

  • Note: Not sure if I agree with this: it does not have negative financial consequences. Worst case scenario: you do not have positive consequences.

If you’ve never suffered harm in feedback, you may want to take that as an indicator to reflect on privilege rather than evidence that performance reviews are not harmful. (View Highlight)

At its core, a performance review is a stark reminder that a manager controls aspects of your fate. (View Highlight)

good managers usually frame their work as being most on structures, not directly on people. (View Highlight)

No performance review system takes appropriate account of how well the organization itself has done in creating the conditions for success (View Highlight)

Reviews often correctly diagnose challenges, but put responsibility inappropriately back on an individual, blaming them for their own marginalization or ineffectiveness. They take a person’s failure to be heard and give advice that they could have communicated better. They tell silenced people that they should speak up. They take people whose time has been time-sliced into ineffectiveness and recommend improving their time management. This advice is not necessarily wrong, but it transmits an expectation that if they work hard enough, the individual can change the outcome, without any requirement for change or support on the system side (View Highlight)

You can only make them less toxic, never actively health-promoting. (View Highlight)

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