Team performance and culture
Performance reviews people actually value: five ways to fix yours
Performance reviews often bring out groans and grimaces. They don’t have to. Built around honest, reflective conversations, a review cycle becomes one of the best tools a team has for building trust and improving performance.
Mention performance reviews and most people wince or roll their eyes. The process feels like paperwork, the conversations feel risky, and the ratings rarely seem to change anything.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Review cycles built around reflective, open conversations between managers and the people they lead are an essential practice for high-performing teams. Done well, they make space for recognition and appreciation, for naming what needs to improve, for honest reflection and goal setting, and for addressing the elephants in the room. They’re opportunities to build trust, repair relationships, and push each other to be our best professional selves.
Here are five lessons from our work helping organizations build review processes that strengthen culture and performance.
1. Communicate the purpose
Start by making the purpose clear to everyone involved. We usually name four goals for a review process:
- Improve practiceFeedback that helps people get better at what they do.
- Focus on what mattersKeep attention on the organization’s key goals.
- Stay lightweightEasy to run, so the time goes into conversation, not paperwork.
- Open honest dialogueMost important: ongoing, honest feedback in every direction.
When the cycle is complete, ask participants for feedback against those same goals. It keeps you accountable to the purpose and tells you whether the approach is working.
2. Keep it simple
Achieving those goals doesn’t require cumbersome scoring systems, rating sheets, or bonus formulas. Most of those get in the way of what matters: honest communication in every direction that helps people focus and improve. Our basic process has three steps.
- Self and upward reviewsEveryone reflects on their own progress and writes upward reviews of their manager, before receiving any feedback themselves, so upward feedback isn’t colored by what’s coming down.
- Manager reviews and one-on-onesManagers write their reviews and hold one-on-one conversations. People hear the feedback directly, and can talk it through, before they see it in writing.
- Close the cycleManagers finalize written reviews, close out the process in whatever platform you use, and follow up where needed.
Some teams set a dedicated drafting window before one-on-ones; others let managers draft as they go. The overall timeline can be tighter or looser depending on the organization. You can add a 360 element later. We usually recommend practicing 360 feedback outside the review process first, then building it into the cycle once people are comfortable.
3. Value both practice and results
At each stage, people respond to a short set of reflection questions. Four is plenty, as long as they ask about both inputs and outputs.
- The skills, competencies, mindsets, and effort people bring every dayThe goals achieved, targets hit, and progress made on key objectives
- Most directly within a person’s controlShaped by many factors, especially in changing environments
- Travel with people across roles and careersRoll up to team and organizational objectives
People need, and want, feedback on what they bring to the work. Those inputs are the most within their control to improve, and the most useful for their broader growth. Results matter too, and goals that roll up to team and company objectives are ideal. But that’s hard to do well in dynamic environments where everything is evolving.
The best review processes make space for evidence-based conversations about both. Over time, the link between them should tighten: better practice should lead to better results. (It’s the same reason we argue for goals that can adapt when the work is changing.)
4. Set the conversation up for success
Help people practice feedback conversations and build confidence giving and receiving feedback. Provide guidelines and guardrails for the one-on-ones, and a toolkit that gives everyone common language.
The guidelines we give clients center on dignity. A performance review is a chance to show people they are seen. Berating someone doesn’t dignify them. Neither does withholding feedback they need.
A good toolkit includes a simple framework of competencies that apply across roles and levels, sample one-on-one agendas, and guidelines for giving and receiving feedback. Not everyone will need these tools, but they should be there for those who do.
The framework we use most is our Five Fundamentals of Management. It sits in the capabilities layer of our work: the skills managers practice every day to build trust, grow their people, and keep the team performing through change. Because the same five fundamentals apply to every manager, they give reviews a shared language, and they make growth visible from one cycle to the next.
- Trust + ConfidenceEstablish and repair trust, and build confidence in yourself and others.
- DelegationCommunicate clear expectations, match work to capability, and hold people accountable.
- Coaching + DevelopmentKnow the difference between managing and coaching, and support growth beyond the current role.
- Hard ConversationsKnow when one is needed, frame feedback against clear expectations, and repair what gets strained.
- AdvocacyKnow when and how to advocate, with which leaders, for yourself and for others.
At the center: Self-awareness. Each fundamental starts with knowing your own strengths, blind spots, and patterns.
Leadership competencies matter too. For leaders, we often add the four domains of team performance: vision, process, relationships, and problem solving.
“I’ve used it [the Five Fundamentals of Management Framework] consistently for the past few review cycles and it helps provide a structure to compare previous reviews to see where growth/change has occurred.”
Finally, remove technical friction that distracts from the conversation. A simple platform like Lattice, which several of our clients use, keeps the mechanics out of the way, and we can configure and manage it so that layer is off your plate.
5. Leave room for flexibility
If you want the process to strengthen culture, leave room for people to be themselves. Especially in low-trust environments, there’s pressure to over-engineer the process and dictate every detail. It may feel safer in the short run, but it backfires. Design the process for the people you want to keep and develop, and the managers you want to empower, not for the lowest common denominator. You should be able to part ways with low performers when necessary without engineering the whole review system around that scenario.
When launching a new process, we usually include a statement like this in the guidelines: this process won’t be formally or formulaically linked to pay, promotion, or other HR decisions, although the evidence it generates can, and should, be one valid input when those decisions are made.
Flexibility needs support. Train managers well on the process, and make sure everyone has access to a thought partner, in HR or, ideally, outside the organization, when they need one.
Reviews people actually value
In their words: employees at Joyful Reading Co. (then Zoobean), from post-review surveys
“I appreciated the organized way to leave feedback. It was much easier to provide both positive and ‘things to work on’ type feedback when it’s aligned with a larger overall framework. I’m glad we were able to have these conversations ‘face to face’ instead of just reading feedback left for us.”
“I liked the format with being able to review myself and then my manager as well as it being more of a dialogue.”
“I wanted to make sure that any feedback I was giving was tied back to the [Five Fundamentals of Management] framework. This would ensure that my comments were received in a thoughtful and objective way.”
“It was helpful to not only self reflect on my performance, but to have my manager provide insightful, honest, and encouraging feedback. I had a difficult time highlighting my own key strengths and accomplishments for Q1. He helped me spin the narrative I was writing for myself by highlighting accomplishments I took for granted because I was stuck on what didn’t work. I appreciate the space to be authentic and vulnerable.”
Designed and run well, performance reviews become a process people appreciate. As cycles continue, the quality of feedback tends to improve and the value grows. People start to trust that it really is about the dialogue, and they invest more time in preparing meaningful feedback, delivered with dignity.
- Can everyone say what the process is for?
- Does it take more time to fill out than to talk through?
- Do people get feedback on their practice, not just their results?
- Do they hear feedback in conversation before reading it?
- Does upward feedback actually reach managers?