Annual Reviews – On The Other Hand

Lest you should misunderstand my last post on Annual Reviews, this has been a good week for me in sharing annual reviews with my managers. It has been a week of celebration and challenge and self-awareness. When Annual Reviews are Ongoing Reviews, when they are living documents that are used for conversation and reference throughout the year they have great value – they set expectations, they provide the framework for planning and performance, and they create ongoing accountability.

Sadly, most annual reviews are “one and done” and are perfunctory – and hence not only are they a waste of time, they can be demoralizing and foster a culture of disconnection, laziness, and untruth. When we simply go through the process of filling out review forms, which are often mindless, what does that say about our investment in our people? When we are not honest with others in terms of their performance, what does that say about how much they really matter to us? And when we simply send the forms into HR and then file them away, never to be seen again, what does that say about the charade we’ve just participated in?

When I meet with my folks we both bring last year’s reviews, which have last year’s goals. While these often have financial-performance goals (how their assets have performed), their focus is on personal/professional growth goals – because if they don’t grow personally and professionally their assets and careers will suffer. In other words, we all need to learn and grow so that we can help our teams and residents living in our apartment communities – this will translate into growing financial performance for our clients. I try to give my folks incremental larger aquariums to swim in every year.

This past year saw some wonderful growth in my direct reports. Yes, there were challenges; some of the challenges were recognized by the individuals who needed to recognize them, and some weren’t – most were. Overall we had a lot to celebrate.

A challenge for me is to teach my folks how to be honest with their folks – people just don’t like to tell the truth when it comes to performance. I imagine this is because we live in a culture in which “spin” is the name of the game and we go along to get along and that people’s “feelings” are more important than telling them the truth. Of course it isn’t really their feelings we are concerned about, it is our own, we don’t want to feel bad about them feeling bad – I guess we’d rather them underperform and maybe lose their jobs than help them by telling them the truth. Well, people actually need to feel bad when they aren’t doing their jobs and they ought to feel bad if they aren’t growing – but hopefully they ought to feel good that someone cares enough about them to tell them the truth and to try to help them. I’ve had employees who have been with a company 20 years but only have 3 years of experience – because they’ve never been challenged to grow. They get frozen in time and then they get frozen out of a job. That is not caring about people.

So yes, in many situations performance reviews are a waste of time and do more harm than good in that they foster a perfunctory approach to people – this shouldn’t be, but it is. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. When we engage with people as a way of life, as a way of doing our jobs, reviews can be a living relational conversation.