Gotcha, the Annual Review Legacy
I'm sitting here on a rainy morning in Northeast Indiana enjoying my cup of coffee, looking out at the wet Patio as the boys are getting ready for school. This morning I scrolled through some podcasts, listened to some clips, and what hit my podcast feed sparked some memories and actually got my gut wrenching.
One clip laid out three questions every manager should ask in a one-on-one. What's one thing that went really well since we last met? What's something you would have done differently? And what did you learn? Simple. Powerful.
Another clip featured a leader who said he no longer does annual reviews at all. His year is filled with regular one-on-ones, and when review paperwork is due, he copies and pastes from his notes. He said it removed all the angst and fear around annual review season.
And that's when my gut started wrenching. Because it is the beginning of annual review season, and I haven't had one in three years, yet I can still feel the dread of seeing that calendar invitation land in my Outlook. I hated my calendar every September.
I think back to the gotchas. The reminder about a missed email nine months ago. A mistake in a slide deck shared with a customer three months back that nobody mentioned until it showed up in my review as evidence. Even worse are the comments shared from other managers. The glossing over of everything that went well to justify a 2% cost-of-living adjustment that told me exactly what my year was worth.
But here's what I've come to realize sitting on the Patio. The annual review isn't the real problem. It's a symptom. The real problem is that we are terrible at communicating with each other, up and down the chain, in real time.
Think about it. What good does it do your company to wait nine months to tell someone about a missed phone call? What does the employee learn from that? Nothing, except that someone was keeping score.
And that's the deeper problem. Annual reviews flow in one direction. The boss evaluates the employee. The boss decides what goes in the file. The boss controls what gets addressed and what gets buried. The people at the bottom carry all the dread, all the angst, and none of the leverage.
This doesn't stop at the office door. I think about the consulting work I do helping pig farmers raise pigs better. I can design the best nutrition program in the world, but it all revolves around communication. If the farm manager doesn't tell the crew what changed, or the barn guy doesn't call when a feed bin goes empty, that program dies on the whiteboard. An empty feed bin that goes unreported costs the operation real money and real performance that you never get back.
I've written about annual reviews before and how broken they are, and I'll probably write about them every September. But this morning on the Patio, I'm not interested in complaining about the system. I'm interested in what replaces it.
Turn the fear into a positive. Make those regular one-on-ones a priority!
Turn those conversations into the place where you and your employee or your supervisor have open, honest discussions about how to get better at the job. Not once a year. All year. What went well. What would you change. What did you learn.
Do that, and there's no bear trap waiting in October. There's no gotcha file. There's no gut wrenching over a calendar invite. There's just two people who've been talking all along, and a review that writes itself.
Delayed communication helps nobody. Not the employee. Not the pigs. Not the bottom line. The best time to have the conversation is right now.