Sweating Through Peformance Reviews

OK, about last week's entry: Stay it is. Thank you, mille grazie, merci beaucoup. Meanwhile...

It is performance review season, and if I had to pick the #1 thing I am delighted to have left behind when I retired, my unhesitant, emphatic answer would be performance reviews. Commuting, office politics, living for the weekend, dumb meetings that should have been emails, murky emails that should have been meetings, histrionic coworkers, and irregular hours—all were better than reviews.

How I loathed sitting down with a boss—any boss, even a good boss—and receiving “constructive” feedback. 

One of my two worst bosses, a dour individual, regularly ran late for these encounters. She made me sweat for over half an hour while she put the finishing touches on her stiffly administered remarks behind closed doors.

I am lucky to have ended my career with a superb manager. Her performance reviews warranted no rational anxiety; they were like going to a gentle periodontist. If I had to get a gum graft, it might as well have been with her.

You might infer I had a poor work record based on my abhorrence of reviews. Not so. My reviews were positive, with one exception, across nine bosses with wildly different management styles.

The one time I got banged up, the in-over-her-head manager, who had just received an excoriating review from the board of directors, told me that “everyone” on the management team was getting poor reviews. If she was getting bad marks, then we were, too.

Then, there is the chimerical practice of assessing oneself before the fateful encounter. “Excels at prioritizing tasks,” “ensures high quality of work consistently,” “job knowledge skills and understanding of work”—check, check, check, blah, blah, blah.

When I left my last job at the American Heart Association, the vast HR apparatus of that humongous organization required quarterly performance check-ins. This struck me as crazy, and I am surprised there was no mass rebellion. Can you imagine having to go to the periodontist four times a year? They seemed well on their way to having daily reviews.

I am hard-pressed to think of any situation outside of work that resembles a performance review. There may be a parallel in couples’ therapy or parent-teacher conferences. But the comparisons are flawed.

Another thing I noticed from working for 40 years is that HR departments—like Lucy did to Charlie Brown—continually move the ball. When I got comfortable with one set of performance metrics, these kooks changed their minds. Imagine if spouses, teachers, or personal trainers did the same.

Today, I am happy to be done with the misery of performance reviews. The closest thing I have to a performance review is Joe telling me to get the dishes out of the sink and stop wearing my shoes in the house.

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