Still uncool, but finally useful

Photo by Terje Sollie.

There are several weird parts of our jobs. One part is realizing that bad managers are often woefully ill-equipped humans doing the best they can. Quite messily. But not usually maliciously. And in ways that are eminently fixable.

Another part is talking to execs and HR leaders and seeing macro-trends play out along a multi-year horizon. Like watching ping pong tables, beers in the fridge, and unlimited vacation go from cool harbingers of startup culture. To Not Cool. This type of trending isn't just for perks. It also shows up with management tools.

When we started, annual performance reviews were squarely in the Not Cool bucket. We heard from orgs who had done away with them entirely. Who were working to establish cultures of ongoing feedback. And trying to squash the thing where employees would wait a full year to find out how the hell they were doing at work.

We don't need performance reviews, went the thinking. Everyone hates them. Our managers hate writing them and delivering them. Our employees not only resent them but wind up less-engaged as a result of the process. And to top it off — this annual demoralizing of our workforce is massively time-consuming.

So, let's get rid of them. Save everyone some time. Save everyone some face. And just have people talk to each other about how things are going all the way along.

And it's possible the whole "having people talk to each other about how it's going thing" would have worked. But shortly after declaring the death of the annual perf review, many workforces sent everyone home. For good.

As the pendulum swings

Once everyone was home, a few things happened. Talent got expensive. It got very hard to tell who was working on what and when to expect it. And executive teams got nervous. Those nervous execs needed a way to make sure feedback was flowing through the org. And they needed anything at all that resembled accountability. This got particularly important as newsfeeds were littered with quiet quitting think-pieces. The tool the execs reached for was the same backstop that orgs had been using for a long time.

This is how regular performance reviews made the move out of the Not Cool bucket. And back into the, well...cool isn't the word for it. Perhaps the Uncool but Useful bucket? Orgs rolled reviews out with enthusiasm, and hoped they would act as a sort of accountability balm. But there was a reason everyone hated the old version.

Sometimes we joke that Raw Signal Group's whole job is to take the parts of work that are hateful but necessary and make them non-awful. So when we tried to reimagine a modern version of the performance review process for last week's Pulse session, we started where we always start.

What is this thing supposed to do? Forget how it's done today. If the thing it's trying to do is important, let's figure out how to make that thing actually happen. In an hour, with strangers, several people had the best performance reviews of their careers. This is how we did it.

Start at the beginning

You already know the first thing. The first thing any time you're trying to do some work on yourself, or asking your people to do some of their own, is reflection. Whether it's been six months or a year or a decade since you last had any kind of performance review conversation, it's always fair game to take stock.

Thinking back on the last year — what felt great? Highest highs, work you're proudest of, areas where you've felt growth and stretch and impact?

And then, when you're ready for it, what didn’t feel great? Where did you struggle the most, feel frustrated or disappointed, either in your own work or the org overall?

Some form of inventory like this is required prep for most perf review processes. And like, it's good. It's fine. It's an important first step for both you and your people to set aside the time to do this work. If you give yourself even 10 minutes of silence to work through those prompts in good faith, you'll find you start to see patterns. Reflection is good. You should do it.

But a lot of reviews stop there. Writing up a list of things in the rear-view mirror. And it's the most frustrating thing because the best case scenario is that you each do this work, write up these reflections, maybe even agree with each other and... now what?

Now it's time to break your performance review conversation wide open.

Move from inventory to implication

Take this list you've made of wins & fails, happies & sads, whatever. And what we want you to do next is to turn them into implications. Try to turn each observation into a sentence of the form:

If I'm right about ________, then that means [I/you] should _______.

If I'm right about being one of the top sales people on the team, then that means I should have my own team next year.

If I'm right about how well you mentor others, then that means I should put you in charge of onboarding.

If I'm right about feeling overwhelmed by the number of projects I'm on, then that means I should hand off these three to other people.

This is a hard exercise. And for your people, turning a general observation about past performance into a concrete implication for the future may be deeply uncomfortable. It exposes the things they were leaving unsaid, hoping you would say them instead. Their hopes for recognition or advancement or growth. Their fears about demotion or firing or failing. Their confusion about where they stand.

Making those things concrete, even just seeing yourself write them down, elicits a very physical response in some people. Like it's electric. Like turning inventories into implications gives them magic powers.

Turning inventories into implications gives them magic powers

Here's the thing. The biggest lie of performance reviews — the core reason they have frustrated and demoralized entire generations of the workforce — is the idea that they are about reading a report card. You read your eval to them. They read their self-eval to you.

If the review conversation is a recitation of a report card, of course it's a dead end. 98% of it will be re-treading failures you both already feel bad about, or successes you've both already celebrated. And the final 2% will typically be some well-intentioned version of, "let's try to do better next year," or else, in the best cases, "keep it up."

A great performance review is not an evaluation conversation, it's an alignment conversation. It shouldn't be a conversation about which things happened, it should be a conversation about which things matter. It's an opportunity for you and your person to get onto the same page about where you're seeing the work differently, because that is fucking informative in terms of how the next year is going to feel. And the implications you each wrote are what make that conversation possible.

A boss who will gamely nod along when you say, "I'm one of the top sales people" — because you are! — will suddenly stop short when you say, "I should have my own team." That's a signal you can do something with.

Your person who will quietly accept the recognition that they "are great at mentoring others" — because they are! — may make a terrified and trapped face when you say, "put you in charge of onboarding." That's a conversation that clearly needs to happen.

This is not about seeking conflict for its own sake. A great outcome for a performance review is that you find that you two are aligned, and do agree on next steps. But an equally good, maybe even more productive, one is that you uncover a deep misalignment about how you're each seeing the work and what matters most.

The only bad outcome is when you or your person leave unclear about what comes next, about what matters, about where you stand. Which, you know, has been most performance reviews, most of the time. They have not, historically, been great. But they can be.

- Melissa and Johnathan