Performance management

Most review systems are an expensive annual ritual that surprises nobody and improves nothing. The work happens in the ordinary week; the cycle should record it, not discover it.

Performance documentation carries legal weight, particularly around termination, discrimination and accommodation. Employment law varies by jurisdiction — involve qualified counsel before acting on sustained underperformance.

Expectations before assessment

Nobody can be fairly assessed against a standard they were not given. Expectations need to be specific to the level, written down, and shared before the period rather than produced during review as justification.

Separate two axes deliberately, because conflating them is the most common structural flaw:

• Outcomes — what was delivered, which is partly situational.
• Behaviors — how it was done, which is more within the person's control.

Someone who delivered through a collapsing market and someone who delivered by scorching the earth around them are different cases. A single blended rating hides both.

Feedback in the week, not the quarter

Feedback is useful proportional to its proximity to the event. Specific, immediate, and about the work: what happened, what the effect was, what to do differently.

The annual cycle should contain nothing new. A review that surprises someone is a reporting failure by their manager, and the surprise is the finding.

Calibration

Managers rate differently — some systematically generously, some harshly — and the differences are invisible until ratings sit side by side. Calibration exists to make comparison possible, not to fit a distribution.

Forced distributions are the failure mode here. On small teams they are statistically meaningless, and they reliably destroy exactly the collaboration the values section claims to reward.

Calibrate on evidence: what was delivered, at what level, against what expectation. A rating that cannot be defended with an example is a preference.

Sustained underperformance

Address it early and directly. Late intervention is worse for everyone, most of all the person, who has been allowed to believe they were fine.

Establish which it is first, because the remedies do not overlap: unclear expectations, missing capability, a role mismatch, or something outside work. Treating a role mismatch as a capability problem produces a performance plan that fails for reasons nobody named.

Where a formal plan is warranted it needs specific outcomes, a real timeframe, defined support, and a stated consequence. A plan that is only a paper trail for a decision already taken is recognized as such and does damage well beyond the individual.

Tooling

Review and feedback: Lattice, Culture Amp, 15Five, Leapsome, Workday Talent, and similar.

Engagement measurement usually ships in the same platforms, which is convenient and creates a temptation worth resisting: engagement data and performance data should not be joined at the individual level, because people answer honestly only while that is true.

The tool cannot fix a process problem. If reviews are late, unspecific, or a surprise to the person receiving them, changing platforms will produce the same reviews on a nicer form.

Never

• Assess against expectations that were not set in advance.
• Deliver news in a review that should have been given weeks earlier.
• Force a distribution on a small team.
• Start a performance plan without deciding whether the problem is capability or fit.