Check the Box? Or Change the Culture?
What performance review season — and your team — actually requires.
Well, everyone, we are at the close of another fiscal year — which means the most wonderful time of the corporate year is at hand:
Performance review season.
Ah, performance review season.
The yearly ritual of awkward one-on-ones, apprising performance that doesn't matter half the time, and judging people against standards that some (probably) old, white executive drummed up as best practice in 1985.
Do not get me wrong. I am all about helping my team members grow, learn, and reach their goals. But every time late May/early June rolls around, I find myself cringing just a little at the thought of having to size up everyone who reports to me.
DOODLING IN THE MARGINS
I actually think I wrote off these formal performance review processes pretty early in my career, after I was roundly criticized — a grown-ass woman with a graduate degree — for the practice of doodling on my copy of the agenda at staff meetings.
(The last time I had been reprimanded for such a thing was in like the fifth grade, so maybe my heart was still feeling a little tender???)
You know how I feel about "professionalism" and optics in the workplace. Nevertheless, one of the things that was not accounted for during that review? I retain information better when my hands are moving.
I was engaged. I was present.
I could have recited back everything said in that meeting.
The doodle wasn't a distraction — it was how I paid attention!
What that performance review moment actually measured was how closely my process matched someone else's expectations of what focus looks like. Not whether I was focused. Or contributing. Or thriving.
And that's the problem with annual reviews.
- We do them to check a box.
- We do them to ensure we hold people accountable once a year.
- We do them despite standards that don't matter.
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