Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I want to start
today with a scenario that I think is going to
trigger a legitimate physiological response in
about 90 % of our listeners. You're starting
with a threat. I like it. Bold strategy. It's
a Tuesday afternoon. You're in the zone. You
know, you're in that flow state, just getting
work done. And then suddenly your phone buzzes.
A calendar invite pops up. It's from your boss.
And the subject line is just two words. Oh, I
know they are. Performance review. Yeah, that's
it. That is the corporate equivalent of seeing
a police car flip its lights on behind you. It
really is. Even if you haven't been speeding,
your heart rate just spikes, your palms get a
little sweaty. It's a visceral biological reaction.
It's the principal's office for adults, 100%.
And what is so fascinating to me is that this
isn't just a you problem or a me problem. No,
no. It is universal. And here's the kicker. The
managers. They hate it just as much as the employees
do. Oh, absolutely. Their research backs that
up entirely. It is this ritual that consumes
millions of hours and billions of dollars. Yet
it's widely regarded by the very people doing
it as uncomfortable, bureaucratic, and a lot
of the time totally useless. So that is the mystery
we are solving today. Why do we do this? If the
performance appraisal is so universally loathed,
why is it like the bedrock of modern employment?
Right. We aren't just going to talk about how
to survive your next review. We are going to
dismantle the entire machine. We're going to
look at the economic theories that justify it,
the absolute mess of cognitive biases that make
it so unfair, and all the legal landmines that
companies are just dancing around every single
time they fill out one of those forms. And we're
going to find out if we are actually measuring
performance or if we're just measuring how much
our boss likes our personality. Well, I think
the data suggests it might be a little more of
the latter than you'd probably like to admit.
I knew it. I knew it. Okay, before we get into
the... The depression of it all. Let's define
our terms. Yeah. Because companies love to dress
this up, don't they? Oh, they do. They call it
talent connect, career development discussion,
or my favorite, the quarterly sync. Yes. But
stripped of all the HR branding, what is a performance
appraisal fundamentally? At its core, a performance
appraisal, and it really doesn't matter what.
fancy name they give it, is a systematic periodic
process where an employee's job performance is
documented and evaluated. And it's evaluated
against a set of pre -established criteria. The
word documented there feels really heavy. It
is the most important word. A conversation is
just a chat. Right. An appraisal is a record.
It goes into a permanent file. It is the data
point that will determine your pay, your promotability.
And this is the crucial part. It creates the
paper trail that can be used to fire you. So
despite all the soft language about growth and
development, it's effectively a legal instrument.
In many, many ways, yes. But if we step back
and look at the mission, you know, the management
theory behind it, it's not supposed to be a weapon.
OK. What is it supposed to be? Well, the academic
literature, it generally agrees that the primary
objective is increasing organizational efficiency.
Which, I mean, that makes sense on paper. If
I'm the CEO of a car company, I need to make
sure the person on the assembly line is actually
building cars and not... you know, toaster ovens.
Exactly. It's all about alignment. You have these
big corporate goals at the top and you need to
cascade those down to the individual actions
of thousands and thousands of people. Right.
If you are working incredibly hard, but you're
working on the wrong things, you are technically
productive. But from the organization's point
of view, you're useless. The appraisal is that
course correction mechanism. So it's like the
GPS for the workforce. Right. The recalculating
voice. Ideally, yes. It's also meant to facilitate
collaboration, discuss pay, and clarify expectations.
But there is a deeper, more, I don't know, cynical
or perhaps just more realistic economic theory
that explains why this whole structure exists.
Okay. It's called the principal -agent framework.
I saw this in our notes. It sounds like something
out of a spy thriller. The principal and the
agent. It kind of does, but it's really the foundational
concept of labor economics. So in this scenario,
the employer is the principal. They're the one
with the capital. Got it. The boss. The boss.
The employee is the agent, the one hired to perform
a task. And the central problem in this relationship
is something called information asymmetry. Meaning,
I know what I'm doing all day, but my boss doesn't,
really. Correct. The principal hires the agent
to do a job. But the principal cannot stand over
the agent's shoulder 24 hours a day. It's way
too expensive and inefficient. Right. So the
principal has a blind spot. They don't know if
the agent is working at 100 percent capacity
or if they're scrolling through social media
or cutting corners. So the principal is basically
paranoid. They're paying for a service that they
can't fully verify in real time. In economics,
yes. This creates what's called moral hazard.
Because the principal can't see everything, the
agent has an incentive to do the absolute minimum
amount of work necessary to get paid. Ah, okay.
The performance review was invented as the solution
to this problem. It is the mechanism to manage
the direct effect and response, as they call
it. It's a monitoring device? Okay. It's a way
to audit the agent? It connects the agent's behavior
to the principal's goals. It bridges that information
gap. And when you understand that, you start
to realize why these reviews feel so adversarial.
Because they are. They are structurally designed
to be an investigation from the very beginning.
That is incredibly clinical. Yeah. But here's
a twist from the research that I just did not
expect at all. We usually hear about how these
systems are biased, and we are definitely going
to get to that. But there's an argument that
these rigid appraisals can actually increase
diversity. Yeah, this is a really important nuance.
It sounds completely counterintuitive, right?
You'd think a rigid system would hurt marginalized
groups. I would, yeah. But you have to consider
the alternative. And the alternative is what?
No system at all. Right. If you don't have a
formal documented appraisal system, how do promotions
happen? It's who you know. It's golf. It's drinks
after work. It's, you know, I like the cut of
his jeb. Exactly. Informal systems are absolute
breeding grounds for implicit bias. If there's
no form, no criteria, no documentation, managers
just promote the people they feel most comfortable
with. Which usually means people who look, talk,
and act just like them. That's how you get the
old boys club. So the argument is that even a
flawed form is better than total chaos, because
at least it forces the manager to justify their
decision on paper. Precisely. If it's done in
a culturally sensitive manner, a structured appraisal
can ensure fairness in hiring and promotion for
socially excluded backgrounds. It provides a
clear, objective ladder to climb instead of a
secret handshake. That makes sense. However,
not everyone agrees that individual performance
is even the right thing to be measuring in the
first place. I'm looking at the notes on labor
unions here. Ah, the stakeholder view. Yeah,
unions often have a deep philosophical disagreement
with the very concept of the individual review.
And their argument is what? They argue that in
a modern workplace, individual performance is
largely a myth. A myth. That's a pretty strong
word. Well, think about your own job. I mean,
think about it. How much of what you achieve
is solely 100 % because of your own effort? Not
much when you put it like that. If IT doesn't
fix my laptop, I can't work. Right. If marketing
doesn't bring in the leads, sales can't sell.
If the receptionist is rude to a client, the
deal falls through before you even walk in the
room. We are all entangled. My output depends
entirely on your input. Exactly. We're a collective.
Unions will often argue that trying to isolate
one person's contribution and then grade it on
a curve isn't just inaccurate, it actively destroys
the solidarity needed for the work to actually
get done. Because it encourages people to say,
that's not my job, instead of helping the team
out. It pits people against each other. That's
a fascinating tension. The company wants to measure
the agent, but the agent is actually just part
of a hive mind. And that leads us to the practical
question. If we're going to do this, if we're
going to try and measure the agent. How do we
even do it? How do we collect the data? Right,
the how. The sources break this down into three
basic methods. And as we go through these, I
really want you, the listener, to think about
which one your company uses. Let's start with
the one that seems the most fair on the surface.
Objective production. This is what I call the
widget count. It's very straightforward. You
measure sales figures, units produced, lines
of code written. The hard numbers. Exactly. It
deals with unambiguous criteria. You sold $100
,000 worth of paper or you didn't. Numbers don't
lie. Numbers don't lie, but they also don't tell
the whole truth. The source material points out
a massive flaw here, opportunity bias, or as
it's sometimes called, criterion contamination.
Okay, can you give me an example of that? Sure.
Let's say we are both selling the exact same
car. You are assigned a territory in a booming
city center with tons of foot traffic. Okay.
I am assigned a territory in a rural town where
the main factory just shut down and pretty much
everyone is unemployed. Right. I see where this
is going. You sell 20 cars. I sell two. Are you
10 times a better salesperson than me? No, not
at all. I just got lucky with the map. Exactly.
The variability in our performance was due almost
entirely to factors outside of our control. But
the objective production method punishes me,
and it rewards you. It creates this false sense
of meritocracy. Plus, it completely ignores quality.
If you measure a customer service rep purely
on the number of calls taken, they're just going
to start rushing people off the phone to hit
their number. You get what you measure. It's
a classic management problem. If you measure
speed, you get speed, but you might lose customer
loyalty in the process. So to try and fix that,
some companies use the second method, the personnel
method. This one sounds like the naughty list.
It essentially is. This is recording what they
call withdrawal behaviors. So absenteeism, being
late, having accidents. Yeah. It's basically
tracking the negatives. So you showed up on time
every day. Congratulations, you're a good employee.
Well, it sets a floor, but it doesn't really
set a ceiling. You know, it's very useful for
identifying problem employees, people who are
literally not showing up to do the job. But it
is completely useless for distinguishing between
an average worker and a superstar. You can be
punctual and still be totally incompetent. Exactly.
Which brings us to the third method, the one
that almost everyone in a knowledge economy is
subjected to. judgmental evaluation. This is
the subjective one. This is the subjective rating.
This is where your manager sits down, thinks
about your year and decides if you are a four
or five on leadership. And this, this is where
the wheels come off the whole thing. Yeah. The
section on cognitive biases here is frankly terrifying
because we like to think our bosses are these
rational, objective judges. We do. But the science
says they are bringing a lifetime of baggage
into that meeting with them. It's not just baggage.
It's like a funhouse mirror. Let's talk about
the big one first. The idiosyncratic rater effect.
This comes from some incredible research by Marcus
Buckingham and Ashley Goodall. I love this concept.
Break it down for us. Okay. So they argue that
when a manager rates you on something, the rating
reveals more about the rater than it does about
the person being rated. Wait, hold on. So if
my boss says I'm bad at strategic thinking, that's
actually about their idea of strategic thinking.
It's about their definition of the term. Yes.
And it's about their mood that day, their general
tendency to be a hard grader or an easy grader.
The data suggests that over half, sometimes as
much as 60 percent of the variance in a rating
has nothing to do with the employee's actual
performance. Over half. Over half. It's all about
the manager's unique rating tendencies, their
own personal biases. I'm being measured with
a ruler that changes length depending on who
is holding it. That is a perfect analogy. That's
exactly what's happening. If I'm a pessimist,
I might never give a five out of five because,
you know, nobody is perfect. If you're a people
pleaser, you might give everyone fives just to
avoid having a difficult conversation. We aren't
measuring the work. We are measuring the manager's
personality. And then you layer the halo effect
on top of that. Oh, the halo effect is a classic.
It's a cognitive shortcut. The human brain is,
you know, it's lazy. It doesn't want to evaluate
20 different traits separately. So if I have
a generally positive impression of you, maybe
you're tall, confident, you dress well, my brain
creates a halo. I just assume that because you
are good at one thing, like looking professional,
you must be good at everything. The financial
analysis, team management, coding, all of it.
All of it gets a little bump. It's the pretty
privilege of the corporate world in a way. And
the reverse is the horns effect, I assume. Exactly.
If you have a messy desk or you made one awkward
comment in a meeting six months ago, I might
subconsciously downgrade your entire year's output.
He has a messy desk, so his thinking must be
disorganized. It's a leap, but our brains make
it all the time. And there's the anchoring effect.
This is about first impressions. Or just the
first piece of data available. Let's say I look
at your file before our review and I see that
your previous boss rated you a three. Okay. My
brain is now anchored to that number. Even if
you performed like a five this year, it is psychologically
very, very difficult for me to deviate far from
that anchor. I will now look for evidence to
confirm the three, not to challenge it. So we
are fighting our boss's personality, their general
vibe check of us, and whatever number they happen
to see first. And we can't forget leniency and
centrality bias. These are huge. Leniency is
simply rating everyone high to avoid the awkward
conversation. No manager wants to have that fight.
And centrality is rating everyone average or
in the middle to play it safe. Everyone meets
expectations. Both of them make the data completely
useless for actually differentiating performance.
There was one more concept in this section that
I found really interesting. What? Organizational
citizenship behavior, or OCB. Ah, yes. The good
soldier syndrome. This is all the stuff that
isn't actually in your job description, right?
Correct. It's helping a colleague when their
printer jams. It's planning the office holiday
party. It's staying late to wait for a delivery
that isn't even for your department. The little
things. The little things. The research shows
that managers are heavily, heavily influenced
by these dimensions of altruism and civic virtue.
But isn't that a good thing? I mean, we want
people to be nice and helpful. It's good for
the culture, definitely. but it biases the performance
review against people who just want to do their
job and go home. Right. If you're an introvert
who hits every single sales target, but you don't
want to organize the potluck, your rating might
actually be lower than the extrovert who sells
less but always brings donuts on Friday. So we
are rewarding personality and compliance, not
just pure output. We're rewarding the good citizen,
which is not always the same as the good worker.
Okay, so we know that data is just a complete
mess. But let's look at the tools themselves,
the actual forms and scales. Because the sources
list a whole menu of methods, and some of them
sound, well, frankly, they sound like a reality
TV show elimination. They range from the simple
to the downright brutal. The most common, by
far, is the graphic rating scale. This is the
standard rate from one to five checklist, right?
Yes. You list a bunch of traits, dependability,
quality of work, initiative. And you rate them
on a scale. It could be 5 points, 7 points. I've
even seen 20 -point scales. On a scale of 1 to
20, how much initiative do you have? That seems
impossibly granular. Who knows the difference
between a 14 and a 15? Nobody. It creates this
false sense of precision. A 14 and a 15 are basically
the same thing, but the number makes it look
all scientific. But the bigger controversy comes
with the employee comparison methods. Okay. This
is where we stop comparing you to a standard
and we start comparing you to each other. Ah,
the Hunger Games approach. In a way, yeah. There's
the rank order method. Yeah. That is literally
listing your subordinates from best to worst.
Number one, number two, all the way down. But
what if I have a team of 10 superstars? Someone
still has to be ranked worst, even if they're
amazing. That is the fundamental flaw. You could
have the best team in the entire company, but
on paper, half of them look below average just
by definition of the ranking. That's terrible.
Then there's paired comparison. You take two
employees, you pick the best, then you take another
two, pick the best. You repeat this over and
over until a full hierarchy forms. It sounds
like a tournament bracket for people's careers.
It is. But the most controversial version of
this whole idea is forced distribution, which
is often linked to a practice called top greeting.
Is this the bell curve thing I've heard about?
Yes. The force fit method. Managers are required
to place their employees into a normal distribution.
You must have, say, a top 20 percent, a middle
70 percent and a bottom 10 percent. You must.
Even if it's not true. Even if it's not true.
And top grading is where they take that bottom
percentage, the bottom 10 percent, and they fire
them. fire them. Often, yes. It was made famous
by Jack Welch at General Electric. The idea is
to constantly prune the workforce to raise the
average level of talent. But doesn't that just
destroy teamwork? I mean, if I know that for
me to stay safe, you have to be in the bottom
10 percent. I am not going to help you with your
project. That is the primary criticism. It creates
a cutthroat, toxic environment. It turns teammates
into rivals. I can't imagine working like that.
Microsoft used a version of this for years and
famously abandoned it because employees said
it created a culture of cannibalism. People were
actively sabotaging each other. It also assumes
that performance follows a bell curve, which
in many high performance jobs, it just doesn't.
You might genuinely have a team of all stars.
So are there any methods that try to be less...
I don't know. Arbitrary. Well, there's a movement
toward behavioral methods, things like bars.
That's behaviorally anchored rating scales. Bars.
I love these HR acronyms. What is bars? So instead
of just a generic one to five for a word like
communication, the points on the scale are described
by specific narrative examples of behavior. OK,
give me an example. So a five might say. consistently
anticipates communication breakdowns and proactively
addresses them with the team while a one might
say frequently fails to return important emails
within 48 hours oh that seems much more helpful
it's concrete it gives you a specific target
to aim for it is better much better but it's
incredibly expensive and time consuming to develop
because you need to create these specific examples
for every single job role in the company of course
there's also bos behavioral observation scale
which is similar, but it rates the frequency
of these critical incidents. How often does the
employee do X? And we can't ignore the role of
technology here. The source mentions electronic
performance monitoring. This is the new frontier,
isn't it? It really is. This is the modern evolution
of all of this. Computers recording huge amounts
of data on multiple dimensions of your work,
keystrokes, email sent, time on calls. The benefit
being... that it potentially removes human bias
because the computer doesn't care if you dress
well or bring donuts. It doesn't care at all.
It just cares about the data. But it introduces
this massive new problem of surveillance. Right.
The big brother aspect. It's a huge concern and
it can measure activity. Are you typing? But
it really struggles to measure thought. If my
job is to solve complex problems, I might be
most productive when I'm staring out the window
thinking. But the computer just sees that as.
idle time. So you're being judged by an algorithm
that can't understand the most valuable part
of your job. That's a whole other level of anxiety.
It is a totally new one. So somewhere along the
line, companies realize that maybe one boss's
opinion isn't enough, especially with all these
biases. So enter the 360 degree feedback. Right.
The concept here is triangulation. Let's get
more data points. You get evaluations not just
from your supervisor, but also from your peers,
your subordinates, and sometimes even your customers.
The idea being that if everyone, your boss, your
team, the people who work for you, if they all
say you're difficult to work with, it's probably
true. Theoretically, yes. It should reduce bias
by providing a more comprehensive view of the
person. But here is where the research throws
a massive curveball. Okay. Studies show that
the source of the feedback doesn't actually change
how the employee behaves afterward. Wait, really?
So if my boss tells me I need to improve my communication
or my peer tells me the exact same thing, I react
the same way. It doesn't matter who says it.
In terms of influencing your subsequent behavior,
the research says, no, it doesn't really matter.
And there are huge risks with peer ratings. Like
what? Well, peers might be biased by friendships.
They'll rate their friends higher. Or they might
fear retaliation. If I rate you low, you're going
to rate me low next time. It's mutually assured
destruction. Or mutually assured inflation. Everyone
just rates everyone high to keep the peace and
the data becomes meaningless again. There's also
the anxiety of impression management. You end
up spending more time trying to look good to
your peers. You're basically campaigning for
votes than actually doing your work. And what
about asking the employee to rate themselves?
The self -assessment. This is a really tricky
one. The sources warn about something they call
flawed self -assessment. Which is a very polite
way of saying we were all delusional about our
own ability. Oh, yeah, basically. Psychological
research, like the Dunning -Kruger effect, shows
that self -perception often fails to align with
reality. Low performers often dramatically overestimate
their abilities because they lack the very competence
needed to realize they're incompetent, while
high performers might actually underestimate
themselves. So the people who need the most help
are the ones who think they're doing great. Often,
yes. It's a real paradox. However, despite that
inaccuracy, the source notes a very, very important
benefit of self -assessment. Participation. When
employees get to participate in the process by
rating themselves, their satisfaction with the
whole system increases dramatically. They feel
like they've been heard. So even if I'm completely
wrong about how great I am, just the act of letting
me say it makes me hate the process less. It's
about procedural justice, feeling like the process
was fair. Exactly. It gives you a voice, and
that's powerful. So we've got all these different
methods, all these deep -seated biases. This
leads to this massive conflict in the world of
work that the sources call the scientist practitioner
gap. This is a major theme, yeah. You have this
huge disconnect. On one side, you have academia,
the scientists, saying appraisals work, they
improve effectiveness, they identify competencies.
And on the other side, you have literally everyone
else saying, please, for the love of God, make
it stop. Right. Practitioners and employees perceive
them as uncomfortable, stressful, and a source
of deep distrust. And if the person being appraised
doesn't trust the employer or the process, the
entire exercise is completely pointless. And
there's some pretty famous management theorists
who actually agree with the employees on this,
right? I see a mention of total quality management
or TQM. Yes. W. Edwards Deming, who is basically
the father of the entire quality movement, was
a huge critic of individual performance reviews.
He hated them. And his argument was what? The
argument in TQM is that the system dictates performance
far more than the individual does. Can you explain
that a bit more? Sure. Imagine you work on an
assembly line. If the machine you use is slow
or the parts you're given are defective, you
simply cannot be a high performer no matter how
hard you try. My performance is capped by the
system I'm in. Exactly. Deming argued that blaming
the individual for what are actually seldom flaws
is not only unfair, it's counterproductive. You
should be fixing the system, not yelling at the
worker. That makes so much sense. If the process
is broken, reviewing the person is just cruel.
Precisely. And this kind of skepticism is what's
driving this big new trend. We are seeing a real
shift away from the traditional dreaded annual
review. Thank goodness for that. The biggest
criticism is that annual feedback is just too
infrequent to be useful. If you screw something
up in January and you don't hear about it until
December, how are you supposed to fix it? You
can't. You've probably been making that same
mistake for 11 months without knowing. Exactly.
So companies are moving toward what they call
continuous performance management. Which means
what exactly? It means more frequent informal
check -ins, weekly or monthly. It's less about
giving someone a grade and more about coaching
and removing roadblocks. The source says about
a third of U .S. private companies are switching
to this kind of model. Yes, the trend is significant.
The focus is shifting to talent development and
business agility. It's really hard to be agile
as a company if you only set goals and give feedback
once a year. Now, we absolutely have to talk
about the legal side of this because we said
it at the start. At the end of the day, these
are legal documents. They absolutely are. And
this is where companies can get into a lot of
trouble. If a company fires someone and that
person sues for wrongful termination or discrimination,
the first thing their lawyer will ask for is
their performance appraisals. Their exhibit A.
So if I fire Bob for... Poor performance. But
I gave him five stars on his review three months
ago because I wanted to avoid an awkward conversation.
You have a massive legal problem. The inconsistency
is fatal in court. The jury will see that and
immediately distrust the company. And the sources
mention specific laws this relates to, like Title
VII of the Civil Rights Act, the ADEA, which
is age discrimination, and the ADA for disabilities.
So how does a company protect itself legally?
The defense is objectivity, or at least the appearance
of it. To be legally sound, appraisals have to
be job related. They must be behavior based.
And the criteria have to be within the control
of the employee. So no vague statements? No.
They need to rely on specific functions, not
global assessments like Bob is a bad fit or he
has a bad attitude. That will not hold up. It
sounds like those behaviorally anchored scales,
the bars we talked about earlier, would be much
legally safer. Much, much safer. They provide
specific documented evidence of behavior, not
just a manager's opinion. Now, here's where it
gets really, really interesting for anyone listening
who works in a global company. The culture clash.
The source says you can't just copy paste a U
.S. style review system into another country
and expect it to work. This is a fascinating
area of cross -cultural management. Performance
appraisals as we know them are deeply, deeply
rooted in Western and particularly American cultural
norms. Norms like assertiveness and individualism.
I'm number one. Correct. In what we call assertive
cultures like the U .S. or Germany, we value
personal accomplishment. We see the appraisal
as a way to ensure equity. If I work harder,
I should get paid more. Feedback is seen as a
gift, a tool for self -improvement. Yeah. Tell
me what I did wrong so I can fix it and get that
promotion. That's the mindset. Exactly. But now
let's look at cooperative or low assertiveness
cultures. These are cultures that value interpersonal
connection and group harmony far more than individual
standing. So many parts of Asia or Latin America,
for example. Yes, often. In these contexts, the
very act of differentiating employees, of ranking
one as best and another as worst, is seen as
disrupting group harmony. It's considered offensive.
It breaks the team cohesion. It's actively damaging.
And direct critical feedback in these cultures
is often viewed as threatening and obtrusive.
It's not seen as coaching to help you. It's seen
as a personal attack or a way to make you lose
face in front of your peers. Wow. So if an American
manager goes into a subsidiary in, say, Japan
and tries to implement a forced distribution
system. It will almost certainly fail spectacularly.
It creates social separation in a culture that
values social integration above all else. The
implication is crystal clear. Management practices
are not universal truths. They are cultural artifacts.
That is a huge takeaway. We assume business is
business everywhere, but business is run by people,
and people are products of their culture. Precisely.
You can't separate the two. So, wow. We've been
on quite a journey here. We started with a universal
dread of the annual review. That knot in your
stomach. Exactly. We looked at the noble objectives,
trying to solve that principal agent problem,
trying to align the workforce. And then we uncovered
the messy, messy reality of data collection,
how counting widgets misses the point. But judging
people is just riddled with biases. Things like
the halo effect and my favorite, the idiosyncratic
rater effect, which means it's not even about
you. Right. And we looked at the tools from the
simple one to five scales to the brutal force
rankings. We saw how technology is changing.
the game with electronic monitoring, and we touched
on the massive legal risks and the cultural blind
spots. It just highlights so perfectly that the
performance appraisal is this textbook example
of a system designed for pure logic that often
fails completely because of human psychology.
That's the core tension, isn't it? We try to
turn messy human behavior into clean data points,
but the instrument we use to measure it, the
human manager, is inherently flawed and biased.
It really is. As Buckingham and Goodall said,
The rating tells us more about the raider than
the ratee. Which makes you wonder about the future
of all this. Where is it all going? It does.
And that raises a pretty provocative thought
to leave our listeners with. Let's hear it. We
are seeing two completely diverging trends right
now. On the one hand, you have this big push
toward teamwork, total quality management, and
psychological safety. A world which suggests
the individual review should just go extinct.
It's an outdated concept. Okay, that's one path.
But on the other hand, we have the rapid rise
of electronic monitoring and big data, which
could make individual measurement more precise,
more constant, and more invasive than ever before
in human history. So the question is, will the
performance review die out, a relic of a bygone
era? Or will it just mutate into something new,
something where the computer is the one giving
us our score? Every single day. That is the question
we're facing. Something to think about the next
time that meeting invite pops up on your calendar.
Thanks for listening to Deep Dive. We'll catch
you on the next one. Goodbye, everyone.