Love/Hate Relationship with Performance Management

It’s Feb 2021 – That wonderful time of the year where everyone is finalizing performance reviews and trying to figure out what they did for the past year and managers are going through writing reviews and fitting a years (or a quarters) worth of feedback into a single paragraph or two. The worst part about performance review season is that everyone agrees that it shouldn’t be a surprise but I have never experienced a person who loved this process.

Feedback is personal. Criticism is sometimes hard to take and there is always a question as to how balanced and impartial the assessment was. If you have a great trusted relationship then it can be helpful, but when there is an uneven balance of power (like someone is a boss) it always seems to come across as either too soft or too critical.

Goals, OKRs and Objectives are great tools for aligning organizations but if I truly want to develop myself as an individual I need more than just a set of results to achieve, I need to know how I’m doing in the context of how I’ve done in the past. With mobility, remote work and turnover in many industries it can be really difficult to get a clear picture of where an employee or colleague is in their journey and how best to motivate them to improve.

I think that’s the real tragedy of performance management systems. We forgot that there are people, with feelings, on the other end of those reviews. If you boil everything down to an OKR or Goal then an employee’s or person’s worth gets tied to whether or not that goal was achieved. It can be demoralizing and in organizations that typically run lean and under resourced no-one can possibly achieve everything they want. Why do we have to feel make each other feel so bad?

Inspiration comes from a shared objective and collaboration. Sharing your thoughts, ideas, and building relationships. True performance management is understanding your people are more than what measurable goals they can achieve for your company but how they can create a combined experience that raises everyone’s bar.

Dr. Maria Montessori once said “You have reached success as a teacher when you can say – The children are now working as if I did not exist. ” – I think this is true of great managers as well – the teams they lead should be able to self direct and feel empowered to build each other up and achieve even more than they thought they could.