Never been a big fan of the concept of the performance appraisal. It makes no logical sense to me. If a company rolls out a new product or so-called ‘strategy’ and that product/strategy is bombing a week or so later, the CEO is going to be calling meeting after meeting with his lieutenants. If they’re not all based in the same city, you can bet some flights are being booked ASAP.
So in short: we evaluate customer-facing strategies literally every few days, but we focus on the performance appraisal — what, once a year max?
I’ve written about this stuff a little bit before, although I used the term ‘performance review’ as opposed to ‘performance appraisal.’ Here’s a few examples:
- Let’s eliminate performance reviews
- When you kill performance reviews, you develop employees faster
- Blow up the performance review
The dirty little secret of anything related to the concept of a performance appraisal, of course, is that it’s all a giant cover-your-ass move: in the modern era, most companies use performance appraisal to either (a) get someone out the door or (b) keep someone at the same salary level for years. If someone is a really high-achieving, top-flight performer, the performance appraisal means almost nothing — and I think we all know that. That person will get…
