performance-management

Performance management

Most review systems are an expensive annual ritual that surprises nobody and improves nothing. The work happens in the ordinary week; the cycle should record it, not discover it.

Performance documentation carries legal weight, particularly around termination, discrimination and accommodation. Employment law varies by jurisdiction — involve qualified counsel before acting on sustained underperformance.

Expectations before assessment

Nobody can be fairly assessed against a standard they were not given. Expectations need to be specific to the level, written down, and shared before the period rather than produced during review as justification.

Separate two axes deliberately, because conflating them is the most common structural flaw:

• Outcomes — what was delivered, which is partly situational.
• Behaviors — how it was done, which is more within the person's control.

Someone who delivered through a collapsing market and someone who delivered by scorching the earth around them are different cases. A single blended rating hides both.

Feedback in the week, not the quarter

Feedback is useful proportional to its proximity to the event. Specific, immediate, and about the work: what happened, what the effect was, what to do differently.

The annual cycle should contain nothing new. A review that surprises someone is a reporting failure by their manager, and the surprise is the finding.

Calibration

Managers rate differently — some systematically generously, some harshly — and the differences are invisible until ratings sit side by side. Calibration exists to make comparison possible, not to fit a distribution.

Forced distributions are the failure mode here. On small teams they are statistically meaningless, and they reliably destroy exactly the collaboration the values section claims to reward.

Calibrate on evidence: what was delivered, at what level, against what expectation. A rating that cannot be defended with an example is a preference.