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Why Performance Reviews Don’t Work
Like a lot of measures that are well-intentioned but ultimately dysfunctional, performance reviews started in government. Feedback as a tool to improve performance is much older. But in the United States, it was the Performance Rating Act of 1950 that enshrined an annual feedback ritual across departments of the federal government. At the time, the idea was noble. Government workers weren’t getting much of any feedback or recognition, so the law required agencies to provide that feedback at least once a year….which quickly became only once a year.
Organizations in all sectors soon followed suit, and the annual performance review became the norm just about everywhere. Since then, there’s been all manner of attempts to improve the review, from software tools to rating methodologies. But none have seemed to offer much of an increase. Organizational Psychologist and Stanford professor Bob Sutton offers perhaps the best verdict on performance reviews. He once told the New York Times, “If performance evaluations were a drug, they would not receive FDA approval. They have so many side effects, and so often they fail.”
In this article, we’ll examine the reasons they so often fail. And we’ll outline some practical steps you can take to offer feedback to your team that actually helps them grow and improve.
