Sam Culbert in the Wall Street Journal: Get Rid of the Performance Review!

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Sam Culbert is a crusty and very wise professor from UCLA and author of many books including, most recently, the charming Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work. Sam has a fantastic article in today's Wall Street Journal called "Get Rid of the Performance Review!" I was struck by his proposal, both because it was so well reasoned and because, when I raised a similar question on this blog a few months back, in Performance Evaluations:Do They Do More Harm Than Good?, I was bowled over by both by the number and detail of the responses. In fact the responses were one of the things that led a group of us at the Stanford d.school to launch a year-long project aimed at re-inventing performance evaluations. I urge you to read Sam's article, as his argument that most evaluations are so destructive that they are beyond repair will resonate with millions of people out there who give and get performance evaluations.

Although an entire industry of consultants, HR professionals, and software firms seem bent on devoting more and more time and money to performance evaluations, all the energy devoted to these things over the years have done little to change Sam's observation about the difference between the promise and the problems:

The Promise: Performance reviews are supposed to
provide an objective evaluation that helps determine pay and lets
employees know where they can do better.
The Problems:
That's not most people's experience with performance reviews.
Inevitably reviews are political and subjective, and create schisms in
boss-employee relationships. The link between pay and performance is
tenuous at best. And the notion of objectivity is absurd; people who
switch jobs often get much different evaluations from their new bosses.

Sam's article is also in the spirit of design thinking, as in many cases, after people have spent years trying to perfect some procedure, gadget, or feature that they — usually mindlessly — accept as something they cannot do without and then a breakthrough happens when some clever person (often someone who isn't an expert in the field) comes along and removes it or unwittingly goes forward and succeeds without it. Then everyone realizes that they never needed it at all. Apple is the master of this approach — you may have seen that their new laptop has no mouse button and, for many years, Apple has had just one mouse button while windows systems have had two. One of my favorite illustrations of this phenomenon in this article on escape from a submarine, which shows that after decades of trying to develop better gadgets to help people escape from sunken submarines, researchers discovered the the best technology was no technology at all. Actually, as the article shows, they rediscovered this insight — there was good evidence from incident over 100 years earlier!

So, two insights here. First, I agree completely that performance evaluations are broken and need to reinvented and possibly replaced with something else. Or, to take an extreme view, perhaps they should be discarded and replaced with nothing other than regular and informal honest feedback in the context of trusting relationships. Second, there is a design principle here that is always worth remembering: Creative people, often unwittingly, often have a huge impact by removing things that everyone assumes are essential. Design is as much about what you take away as what you add.

P.S. Check out Pete's great comment, I especially love is quote, 'As George Orwell said, "To see what is in front of your nose requires a constant struggle".' What a great a great line!

Comments

5 responses to “Sam Culbert in the Wall Street Journal: Get Rid of the Performance Review!”

October 20, 2008

Nivi

Didn’t Peter Drucker figure this out (along with everything else) in his essay on Management by Objectives? =)
http://tinyurl.com/5mv9d5

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October 20, 2008

Jan

When projects get into trouble, the project cannot afford to wait to fix the problems. They need to do an immediate analysis, not who’s to be blamed but what went wrong and why, produce a plan how to fix the problem, and implement the learning throughout the organisation. This means immediate feedback from Managers and peers, and having the focus on fixing the system, not blaming the person. What troubles me is HR’s blind faith in how performance reviews will improve operations in a company. Sometimes I feel that HR itself is the problem.

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October 26, 2008

Wally Bock

I agree that the performance evaluation system is broken. And I’m for scrapping the current system. But Culbert’s “solution” merely changes the form and the jargon. For any system of regular, formal performance evaluation to work effectively and fairly, it must be based on the only evaluations that matter: the ones done by supervisors with their team members several times a day. That’s not happening now because we don’t select people for supervisory roles based on their ability and willingness to supervise. We make matters worse by not teaching them the simple techniques of frequent supervisory conversations. We don’t evaluate them on that part of the job or, for the most part, support them in learning it or carrying it out. Until and unless we do that, no significant changes are really possible.

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January 3, 2009

Dave Polacheck

Great to see all of this pressure being placed on a process that is broken in so many organizations. There’s missing piece in the recent chain of blog critiques of the typical performance review. In most companies it is purely transactional, meaning it’s a single interaction between employee and manager, after which HR scurries around trying to track down the paper trail for their files. To me this is the primary flaw. Where I’ve seen this process provide something of value is when the performance review is an early step in a bigger process, and it’s followed by each manager reviewing their team with their manager (and HR if they’re able to operate at this level).
Herein lies the accountability for the manager to put thought into a career plan, be able to thoughtfully speak about each of their employees’ contributions, aspirations, etc. If a manager can’t provide meaningful leadership then they are stripped naked in these reviews and in the end it becomes as much an assessment of their leadership as a search for talent within the organization. A manager who can’t intelligently (and specifically) justify their ratings and comments about about their team, who doesn’t churn out talent to the broader organization, who’s views of their employees appear to ignore feedback from others (yes I’m a fan of NON-anonymous multi-rater mechanisms), show themselves unworthy of their leadership role. The company that’s willing to reward, promote or remove managers based on how they demonstrate their leadership in this way is one that’s getting something out of this process.
That being said this is and always will be a HUMAN process, and therefore has wide variability. No matter what practices we put in place we will have them applied well in pockets, poorly in others, and the majority somewhere in the middle. The best practices I’ve seen have a common thread of visibility — ensuring that no performance review is solely a private interaction between 2 people and instead that the review process becomes part of every managers’ performance.

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April 20, 2010

Johnnie Sorrentino

“Sam Culbert is a crusty and very wise professor from UCLA…”. Yup, I agree. After reading Sam’s excuse for a good article about performance reviews, I agree; he is crusty. Has this fossil just stepped out of the 1960’s or is his senile mind locked there, stuck and can’t get out. After years of constant work and improvement on a performance planning system that was interlocked with business planning and profit planning with two global firms in the 1980’s and 1990’s, I had an organization that was 100% satisfied with the system that we had in place and were dynamically changing to adapt to the workplace and more important adapt to our customer environments, needs and wants.
I simply see this as another example of “do as I say and not as I do because I say what I say because I don’t have the capability or culpability to do what I say.” With today’s challenging economy, the WSJ is suffering from a serious drought of good news…well from any news at all for that matter, so publishing this article is simply like bad breath – and as everyone knows, bad breath is better than no breath. “If its not fun, it’s not worth doing.”

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