Performance reviews must die.
The traditional approach to performance reviews is dragging tech managers to complacency, negging the real definition of performance management, and making their teams simply… dysfunctional.
Biip! You get a calendar invite notification: “Performance conversation."
Your heart beats faster, and your mind enters a state of anxiety. You’re curious. You do a quick introspection. The math cannot go off. You did all right.
You enter the Zoom call, and Boom! You get signals that you're falling flat, and you have never heard about it before.
Suddenly, the conversation becomes weird. Your manager starts sweating while the chat evolves.
They ramble.
They avoid contact.
They don't believe in their own words.
And you just can't understand what happened.
Performance reviews vary from company to company, from quarterly to twice a year to annually. However, what never changes is the mixed feelings of excitement and anxiety across team members when the time comes.
And there is a reason for that: many companies use review cycles to drive promotion nominations, salary reviews, and performance calibration.
The problem is when the performance review becomes just… a process.
Well, this has happened with me several times, and I'm sure with many of you too. That feeling… oh, that feeling. The mix of “I just want to drop this call” with the itchy and latent willingness to lose control.
A cold shower to your best efforts.
But after reflecting on over a decade leading teams from forming, to storming, to performing, I have developed an opinionated perspective about performance reviews: performance reviews must die.
Before we dive in, here is what you will get from today's essay:
The history behind performance management
Why the traditional performance review process is broken.
What is the impact of bad performance management within your team and the broader organization.
How to beat the game and do a performance review the right way.
Let's dive in.
Managing performance is a buzz in the corporate world.
Some frame it as an employee benefit, and others as a business driver. None is wrong, though. Nor accurate or right as well. The value is somewhere in the middle.
A bit of history
It's important to notice that the definition of performance was not invented by one individual or revolutionary thinker. The definition of performance has been present in English for centuries, and it's rooted in the old French ("parfornir" - to carry out, complete) and Latin.
It was always revolved around the idea of carrying out an action, task or function. In simple terms, getting shit done.
But what did happen is an evolution and specific application of the existing word "performance" to the context of work and organizational goals.
Let me wear my history teacher hat. Brew your favorite drink. Take a seat. And prepare for the quickest history lesson of all time (bear with me… don't sleep.)
While the concept of evaluating performance is quite ancient, the terminology as we are used to nowadays, and its usage as a key metric in a formalized way were defined alongside some key events over decades.
Industrial Revolution (Late 18th - 19th Centuries): As work became more organized in factories, the focus was naturally on output and efficiency. Although the term "performance management" wasn't used precisely as we do, the underlying concept of measuring how well work was performed was inherent.
Scientific Management (Early 20th Century): A bad boy named Frederick Winslow Taylor (followed by other thinkers) focused on analyzing and standardizing work for maximum efficiency. His core idea was to optimize the performance of a task, even if his terminology was more “output-driven." However, the idea of measuring against a standard was a precursor to the modern performance metrics we are familiar with.
Human Relations Movement (1930s onwards): This movement brought more attention to the human element in work, but the expectation of task completion and contribution remained.
Post-WWII and the Rise of Formal Appraisals (1950s onwards): The concept of performance reviews/appraisals becomes more explicitly and widely used to describe what was being assessed. Peter Drucker emerges as a significant figure in this milestone by publishing the “Management by Objectives (MBO)” paper in the 1950s, centered on defining and measuring performance against agreed-upon objectives.
Shift to Performance Management (Late 20th Century): we mixed altogether: tasks, humans, and measuring performance through goals, giving birth to what we know nowadays as performance management. Companies started adopting the practice and adjusting it to their workflows for better results.
Yet, if you put 10 people in the same room and make all these papers, studies, and concepts available to them for 24 hours, I'm sure you will end up with 10 different definitions of performance.
I put myself in this group.
Defining performance in a workspace context
I like to see performance overall as a combination of different factors and areas to observe: Actions and behaviors, results and outcomes, effectiveness and efficiency, and contribution to goals.
Actions and behaviors: The observable things people do. How they show off, the tasks they execute, the way they go about work, the investment they make to solve a problem, and not feeding their ego.
Results and outcomes: These are the achievements, contributions, and outputs of an individual or organization towards a defined set of expectations or goals.
Effectiveness and efficiency: How well someone or a group carries out their responsibilities and achieves a desired result, often considering the resources used.
Contribution to goals: The ability to move the needle, deliver value, and contribute to the overall objectives of the organization.
Performance review, as we know
We screwed up decades of evolution with performance reviews.
Don't get me wrong. Performance review from the performance management standpoint is not bad. From the process standpoint is the most terrible tool someone ever implemented… ever!!
It is based on the principle that managers must connect with their reports to have a conversation dedicated to performance. Having structures to support the consistency of those conversations somehow feels right. No matter if it's yearly, semesterly, or quarterly. Companies are pushing for well-established periods dedicated to performance conversations.
Yet often this process fosters more than a stronger sense of consistency. It fosters a culture of competition, panic, last-minute evaluations, and bias. A complete disaster for psychological safety and trust.
Embracing the panic mode
The last few years were somehow fun to observe how review cycles became a synonym of panic for managers.
It makes me think of those shiny little red buttons with a big label of “Don't push” we used to see in cartoons to trigger some hilarious but tragic scene, and a ten-year-old kid around it.
If you don't know what I'm talking about… they will push it!
Suppose you are a teenager. Let's say you're not the best student in class. You do your thing… and that's it. Sometimes you miss the homework, and you only sit your butt on the chair when you have a test. Organization is not a superpower as well. Sometimes you get distracted, and let's say you miss some notes, eventually.
One day, you wake up, drink a perfectly brewed cup of coffee in a mug saying “made by mum… with luv," enter the classroom, chill for a moment with your friends, and just discover it's test day.
You didn't study. No diligence at all. What happens? You hit the panic button.
You take your notebook and spend the next hour studying as you never did before. Because you want a result — a good grade. Because if you don't get a good grade, you will lose the PS5 night with friends, and your mum will be mad. No smartphone! You want to make and keep her proud.
But so much has been taught so far. You feel it's impossible to learn everything in one hour. Your heart starts rushing… you can feel it trying to jump off your chest. What could sound like a simple sprint now feels like the Ironman race edition. And the road to success becomes longer and longer.
Eventually, you do the test. But you don't feel confident. You don't believe you will get a great grade. You ramble, you come up with answers that might fit what your teacher is looking for. You try to cheat by copying the answers from the smartest kids around you.
The thing is: sometimes you will get a mediocre grade that is enough to do what was meant to do, and you will feel okay with that, as the mission has been accomplished.
Sometimes, you will get a terrible grade. But you observe that the consequences are not as bad as you expected. You will start feeling okay-ish with it, and slowly, it will become part of your behavior. Because once a bad habit is not corrected, it pretends to be just a habit. And all of a sudden, studying less and less is acceptable and even becomes the norm, regardless of the result.
But let’s be honest, packing a semester of knowledge into one hour of study on test day is unrealistic.
Same for performance reviews as we got used to.
Performance reviews have completely lost their purpose — managing performance. That's because managing performance is not a semesterly, quarterly, or annual game. Managers got used to looking at their reports’ behaviors and outcomes only when it's time to press the panic button.
The problem is that pressing the panic button has become the norm in management. Performance for the sake of getting a process outcome, not as a people enabler.
I'm tired of seeing managers going crazy when they get a system notification adding n performance conversation entries to their workload queue. And it becomes even more interesting when we get close to the deadline to conclude these tasks.
360-degree feedback requests start piling up.
ChatGPT gets a usage spike.
Arguments are built.
They become so nimble and fast at compiling information from the last six months that it makes me feel bad. They become athletes! It's just impressive.
But in the end, what they have is biased pieces of information that are barely backed by observations. Not enough to provide decent feedback, but enough to feel a sense of accomplishment. Not enough to evaluate rationally, but enough to feed favoritism and bias.
And when the time comes to deliver the conversation… a disgrace. They ramble, and sweating, they avoid eye contact. They book one-hour calls that feel like one year in hell. They go through line by line, checking for any expectation that was vaguely discussed, and make that the rationale for promotions, salary reviews, or coaching plans.
If you ever worked or have seen a manager operate like that… now, you know the root cause.
How I feel is not the same as what you believe I am feeling
While managers feel relieved for closing the performance conversation task, their reports cry tears of blood.
The silence during the call. The nodding. The “yeah..” and “okay”. What you signaled as a “mission accomplished” moment is becoming the perfect ingredient to make your team dysfunctional.
Once I got a performance review document, 110% written by ChatGPT.
The problem is not because they used ChatGPT. I truly believe that if you use the tool in the right way, it can do wonders. But in this particular case, the meeting started exactly like that:
Hey, Rapha. I'm pretty bad at writing, and I was a bit rushed. So I created this document with ChatGPT early today. — they said.
The weird vibe was already seeded. I've answered with a fake smile, followed by a weird 10-second silence:
Okay…
They started reading through the document. They were a bit lost to find information and to understand the content flow. Almost like they have never taken the time to read that before our call. But why should they prepare, right? The panic mode fosters reactiveness, nothing else.
Forty minutes later, the conversation was derailing. I started getting nervous and anxious. I couldn't control my feet or hands anymore. I had no idea what they were talking about. And practicing my self-regulation was tougher and tougher every second.
I had to interrupt the memo reading and asked them:
I appreciate you for sharing this vision with me. However, I must be honest with you: I'm struggling to understand where this is coming from. Can you provide some situations where you observed or confirmed this behavior, please? This will help me a lot to reflect and understand what are my growth opportunities here.
I knew what was coming… and their answer confirmed it:
Aaaah… Hmmm… Eergh… I can't remember one specific situation now, you know. But that's what I've been noticing and hearing. Anyway, we are now pushing back on your salary review request because we have other folks with better performance at the moment.
My motivation dropped significantly since then. I've lost the spark to run the extra mile. And somehow, accepting the boundaries of my role description (whatever that meant), sounded attractive. I started asking myself: “Why the hell should I help others if my contribution might position them better than me and get a better salary?” Selfish view, I know, I know. Yet, the competitive mood was in the air.
My sense of collaboration transformed into a sense of the World Cup finals.
The story repeats with many professionals from many different industries.
Managers are constantly operating in panic mode. They are too busy with other priorities that will enable business growth or generate the next AI-powered product to disrupt their industry. The daily pressure to get things done obfuscates the core idea of performance management and transforms the process outcome from aspirational to trashy and clunky lists.
While every report will react differently to performance conversations, it's not uncommon for skip-leads to pile up calls from skip-reports in the post-review phase. The topics vary, but somehow they will always connect with some of the themes below:
Team success is driven by competition.
Setting expectations like drafting nightmares.
Generic evaluation that leads to generic growth.
Establishing goals that even your manager is skeptical about.
You are kicking your team's psychological safety in the butt. And by the moment the emotional balance becomes unbalanced, trust erodes. And when trust erodes, you start missing signals. Silently (or not), delivery takes more time, minor changes transition into major obstacles, and communication turns out to be as great as trying to use your cellphone in Grandma’s basement in the middle of nowhere.
But what happens when you have a team that does not deliver timely or does not honor commitments?
Your customers might get less value from what you ship. Unhappy customers lead to high churn rates and bad health scores. It compromises your renewal pipeline and funnels down your prospecting queue. Your recurrent revenue goes downhill. They don’t care about your internal dramas.
It’s a damn loss-loss in all senses.
So, how do you deliver performance reviews that matter?
Simple… don’t wait for a review process to discuss performance.
Once, I argued with an interviewer around this theme. He asked about the number of direct reports in my organizational structure and how my team was split. By that time, I was covering one additional team due to an open position, summing up 17 direct reports. The interviewer commented:
Well… your performance reviews must be terrible. It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation with that many people. You have to compile everything, look to your notes, think about topics you forgot to chat about in your one-on-one. It requires a huge preparation effort.
I knew where he was coming from… and I agreed with him, but not as you might imagine. Indeed, seventeen performance conversations require very good time management to make it on time.
But I was fighting back my pride to hold myself in check. I knew I had to go to the bottom of the topic, so I asked him to describe his vision about a good performance conversation and the ideal team size. He answered:
At most five direct reports. More than that, the quality of your review becomes questionable.
And he started doing the math:
If you consider the time preparing all the resources, engaging with other departments, and the conversation per se, we are talking about three to five hours preparing for each person.
At this point, I had a huge what the fuck monkey screaming in my ears. I said:
If I spend one to two hours preparing for these calls is way too much. Usually, I have a fifteen to thirty minutes conversation with my reports, and we move one. And so far, we have great retention, our NPS and eNPS are increasing YoY, our satisfactions survey have very candid feedback (positive and not so positve). We promote and we get headcount whenver we ask for. The value delivered is super high.
Very skeptical, he asked me:
I’m sorry, I can’t see how this approach is meaningful to your reports. Can you explain how you do this?
Here is how I broke it down:
Move from a transaction-based to a human-oriented relationship
That’s the most fundamental step to enable performance.
Waiting for a process deadline to chat about what’s going well and not-so-well is the best way to make the relationship with your reports transactional. You don’t need to care. You don’t need to be present. You just need to show up when the time comes.
On the other hand, a human-oriented setup fosters vulnerability and “intimacy.” When I worked at Tymeshift, I remember celebrating birthdays, joining family dinners, knowing my reports’ kids’ names… etc. The same on the other side. They knew who Raphael was. And I knew the person behind the role.
So, let your one-on-ones flow beyond the work-related stuff. Discuss their passions, struggles, weekends, and catch up on their loved ones.
This connection will enable you to get their unspoken needs and ambitions. The roadmap to translate signals when situations and behaviors start getting off track.
Become great at catching signals
Signals come from verbal and especially non-verbal cues.
One defensive answer. One deflective attitude. The avoidance of executing a task. The grumpiness or apathy during meetings.
While these are somehow easy to catch, you must master the art of deciphering complacent behaviors. The team is missing delivery deadlines, not engaging in product discussions, the cycle time is exponentially increasing sprint over sprint, and your NPS detractors are popping from the ground up.
Yet, in every one-on-one or team retrospective, you hear:
“Everything is good.”
“You know, it’s busy. But it’s okay.”
“It’s a busy week. Busy is good, right?”
Is it that good? Really? Are you sure?
Catch signals early, and explore them… even if the path to exploration becomes uncomfortable for both sides.
Set clear expectations… I mean, very clear!
Let’s recap Parkinson’s law in its most rustic definition:
Work expands to fill the available time.
You can apply this to performance. Not defining clear expectations to an individual will cause them to inconsistently distribute their efforts across multiple tasks, and the definition of success, regardless of their importance and urgency to the business, team, and individual, as an attempt to expand their impact to fill what they think their manager want and what they believe will make them successful.
In simple terms:
Understand how they perceive their roles and their responsibilities.
Discuss what the company expects from them**.
Voice out loud what YOU expected from them.
** Usually attached to a career progression framework or dissecting their job description.
Having these conversations is critical to remove any ambiguities and ensure a strong alignment.
Now, here is the catch: Because you know them on a human level (passions, ambitions, needs, etc), you can set or frame expectations that deeply connect and resonate with each individual. Some will prefer a more straightforward and bold approach. Others will require more context and follow-ups.
But regardless of their personal preferences for digesting information, you are now in a great position to play around when sharing context, providing the necessary resources to enable your report, and especially providing your vision on what success looks like.
And you start working from a place where clarity reigns, trust flourishes.
Micro-coach consistently
This has nothing to do with micromanaging.
Think about micro-coaching as the deepest level of care for your report. If something went well, you let them know promptly. If something is off track, you let them know promptly. If something needs immediate course-correction, you let them know promptly.
It’s about moving your leading mindset from finding time to creating time to lead your people.
When this happens, you start engaging in frequent, brief, and targeted conversations aligned with the individual traits, ambitions, and agreed-upon expectations. And because you are no longer waiting for a process timeframe, you naturally start recognizing the opportunities to make your reports shine and thrive, whether from showcasing skills they already master, or developing new ones from initiatives that support their growth areas.
Performance-wise, deeply caring about your reports will:
Create an environment of trust.
Frame feedback not as an ordinary tool but as a means to grow.
Improve the ability to adapt to unpredictable situations before it’s too late.
People start focusing more on the process rather than the outcome per se.
Enable their self-awareness and increase their willingness to push their skills to the next level.
Avoid blaming, and set them up to fail forward
Things will go unexpectedly, eventually.
Don’t pretend they won’t. Don’t ignore when they won’t. And sometimes the consequences might be pretty ugly.
But never point your finger. Because that’s the best way to destroy the performance journey.
Back in 2010, I joined a new challenge as a junior engineer. My previous experience has set the tone, and I was feeling confident as hell. My skills were getting sharpened… I felt it.
I started on fire… until I wasn’t anymore. I was so hungry to ship code to production that I rushed into a deployment that caused a major outage to our payment queues.
Transactions started piling up.
I could hear our monitoring systems screaming from a mile away.
I was pale. I couldn’t feel my face. So, I pushed the panic mode.
Then, I see a very calm person walking in my direction… it was our lead architect. A very respected person in the company. I’ve heard about him, but never actually interacted with him.
He picked up a chair and sat by my side, and said with the most friendly smile I’ve ever seen during a crisis moment:
Hi, man. I’m Carlos. Welcome to the team, and congrats for your first incident here. Your first time?
I answered with a trembling voice:
Yeah… what a shit…
He gave a loud laugh and replied:
First time… you will never forget about it. Let me help you with that.
We solved the problem in the next 30 minutes. I understood what I did wrong in the first 10 minutes. He guided me to solve the issue myself in the next 10 minutes. And while we expected the deployment pipeline to finish, we discussed how I could improve my craft.
I felt cared.
I felt empowered.
I felt damn energized and hunger to improve.
But what I never felt? Judged. Undervalued. Alone.
Carlos became my inspiration from that moment on. I still think a lot about the empathy, the desire to help, and the ability to frame failure as the fuel for success that he taught me that day.
Be like Carlos! Set your team to fail forward. Be supportive. Don’t let vanishing metrics obfuscate your judgment.
Final thoughts
Performance management requires 99% human interaction and 1% process.
Unfortunately, we are demonstrating a sad flip in this ratio. More and more, managers get used to pushing the panic button during performance reviews and wait for a Christmas miracle. On the other hand, their reports are caring less and less about their outcome and impact, waiting in a painful silence for promotion, recognition… or even tough feedback.
Yes, people wait to be poked. I wait desperately to scratch that itch of getting uncomfortable with hard-to-digest feedback. Because that’s where performance and growth live.
So, yeah… performance reviews must die.
—
Rapha
If you read up until here, thank you very much.
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