phone+416-460-8474
mail[email protected]
  • Home
  • About
    • About Reengagement Realized
    • Biography
    • Testimonials
  • Services
    • One-On-One Transition & Transformation Coaching
    • Group & Organizational Coaching
    • Customized Facilitation and Training
  • Case Studies
    • Individual Cases
    • Organizational Cases
    • White Paper
  • Blog
    • Reengagement 180 Podcast
  • Contact

Reengagement 180 Podcast #9 – Why Performance Reviews are Wrong for Today

Reengagement 180 Podcast #8 – Reviewing Performance Reviews

Reengagement 180 Podcast #7 – Expecting to Win

Recent Posts

  • The Lesson of Grace and Learned Hopefulness
  • Eulogy—Trumpets Herald the Passing of Nobility
  • Promoting Yourself is an Invitation to Others
  • How to “Predict” the Future
  • How to Deal with a Workplace Bully – Part 2

Categories

  • Anticipating the Future (1)
  • Appreciative practices (11)
  • Career (11)
  • Coaching (16)
  • Complexity (3)
  • Culture (9)
  • Engagement (17)
  • Events (2)
  • Everything else (3)
  • Gratitude (3)
  • Hiring (7)
  • Human Resource(fulness) (21)
  • Intention (11)
  • Knowledge (2)
  • Leadership (21)
  • Management (2)
  • Motivation (4)
  • Opportunity (4)
  • Performance (18)
  • Podcast (20)
  • Quiet Quitting (1)
  • Success (1)
  • Tactility (4)
  • TikToks (13)
  • Transformation (8)
  • Valence Theory (3)
  • Workplace (2)

Archives

  • January 2023
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • April 2020
  • January 2018
  • August 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • July 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015

In our last podcast, we looked at a number of reasons why performance reviews are set up to fail, and more importantly, set up to fail the organizations that use them. This week, we dig deeper to ask: Why do them at all? What purpose do they serve? The answers may surprise you, and you’ll definitely want to share this with your manager.

Transcript

When a factory invests in a piece of industrial machinery, it wants to know that, over time, it continues to perform to specifications. Whenever it fails to meet its production expectations, we can call in a maintenance crew to bring it back up to spec, or replace it with a newer, more efficient and effective model. In the 20th-century, “scalable efficiency” model of organization, in which more efficiency and productivity are required as the company grows, performance reviews provide this quality control check on the investment in machine resources otherwise known as humans.

Nominally, the intention of performance reviews is to align worker’s activities with organizational objectives. The review seeks to accomplish this by creating an incentivized check-up system designed to ensure that people accomplish assigned tasks and goals that collectively sum up to the organization’s short and long-term objectives. Additionally, performance reviews supposedly identify individual opportunities for personal and professional development – in other words, so-called weaknesses – to be fixed in order to collectively strengthen the organization. After all, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.

More significantly, to achieve the organization’s long-term vision and mission, an organization requires more-or-less predictable, determinant outcomes. To be successful in this undertaking, the organization’s leaders need stability, and that necessitates systemic control over as many aspects of the organization’s operations as humanly possible. Performance reviews are a way of operationalizing such control via the associated incentives of rewards and punishments, including the always present threat of being rank-ordered into the outplacement office.

But here’s the thing: Today’s world is not stable. It is not predictable. It is certainly not controllable. In fact, any attempt to exert control over some aspect of your organization will only result in some other aspect going out of control in an unexpected way because contemporary organizations and the environment in which they exist are complex.

For organizations in a knowledge-based economy to achieve Scalable Capability, that is, the bigger you grow the more you know, it is mandatory that leaders create workplace environments that encourage individuals’ autonomy based on their key strengths. Employees will act on opportunities that are aligned with their personal aspirations and thereby deliver meaningful results to the organization with a passion and energy that no performance-review-driven incentive plan could possibly hope to achieve. And in this world where collaboration among knowledge networks is the key to success, a person’s direct manager is generally not the one who can make the best, up-close-and-personal assessment of the impact and consequences of their achievements.

So, given that check-off-the-goals performance reviews serve neither contemporary organizations nor their people (not to mention that nobody enjoys them or does them well), I will introduce you to an amazing alternative that not only works to acknowledge and bolster a person’s strengths, but naturally creates alignment among organizational knowledge networks, and the overall strategic intentions of the enterprise. That’s coming up on our very next podcast.