"It’s time to put the performance review out of its misery," says consultant and professor Samuel Culbert. "This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities."
Culbert, a professor of management at UCLA, goes on to say that the performance review is "a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus."
In Culbert’s just-published book, Get Rid of the Performance Review!, he advocates instead the performance preview, which he says will actually accomplish what performance reviews never have:
- Ensuring hierarchical control
- Holding people accountable for their actions and their results
- Giving employees the feedback and evaluations they need to improve their skills
- Giving the company more of what it requires
Make It Go Both Ways
Culbert’s overriding problem with standard assessments is that they are written entirely from the boss’s point of view. The boss, or HR, or top management—or all of them in concert—have established performance standards for each job. And each person who holds a position in the organization is assessed at least once or twice a year on how well the boss thinks he or she has performed against the predetermined objectives in the job description.
This leads to a culture of fear, Culbert asserts. A boss-dominated relationship will seldom elicit a straightforward statement that reveals what the subordinate actually believes. That individual is going to do what any individual does when trying to make a good impression—focus more on saying what will earn points than stating what he or she honestly believes. In the performance review, pretense is every bit as important as fact, says Culbert.
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The performance review system does enormous damage on a personal level, Culbert believes, making work lives miserable, and leaving employees anxious and depressed. On the corporate level, the damage is just as bad: It wastes an enormous amount of time and energy, and it prevents companies from tapping the innovative, outside-the-box thinking that so many employees are capable of, if they weren’t so afraid, Culbert adds.
He illustrates his points with his vision of an early performance review of Steve Jobs of Apple:
Boss: You’re not making adequate progress on the circuit board that’s your number one performance objective.
Steve: I’ve got a great idea that can revolutionize this company, not to mention the world.
Boss: That’s not your job. You are weeks behind our established deadlines for the circuit board.
Imagine that review going on every day in thousands of companies with millions of employees. That’s a sad loss, Culbert says.
Another problem with performance reviews is that "you don’t tell someone to change something, and—presto, it’s corrected," Culbert says. "How can you give someone advice they can trust, when you don’t understand how they see situations and why? How can you give someone prescriptions for development when you don’t understand how they learn? You can’t."
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HR Takes a Hit
The old performance review system may not be good for employees or for the company, but guess who it is good for, says Culbert—HR!
The system gives HR a "keeper-of-dirty-little-secrets/KGB-like status, ensuring that all managers treat them [it] respect."
HR’s "lame excuse" for keeping negative reviews is "legal backup," Culbert says. However, the ones who sue are the ones with positive comments in their files. It’s common sense, he says.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, more of Culbert’s take on performance reviews, and an introduction to a program for the flip side of performance reviews—compensation compliance.