Fully Meets

What an odious idiom: Fully Meets. Two innocuous words that, on their own, are perfectly harmless, but when cast together form the black essence of all that is wrong with performance reviews.

I can say with some relief that I haven’t had a performance review since 2001 and I don’t miss them. I’ve been independent for the last 15 years, so the only review I get is whether I’m invited back to do further pieces of work. That suits me better – it’s less ambiguous and nuanced. I don’t have to read between the lines. I don’t have to endure the obligatory “areas for improvement”, the weasel words, the inartful attempts at threading the needle of equivocation. I’ve escaped all that, but the lingering sting remains.

To be fair, I wouldn’t argue performance reviews aren’t necessary – they are – but those bell curves and forced distributions, the needling managers and the insipid politics – that part can go. I watched normally harmonious teams descend into rancor and petty tit-for-tat, I saw tortured finessing of language lay the faintest taint of decay upon herculean efforts. I saw well-meaning contributors crushed in those invisible gears of quantification. And I saw the oblivious stares of victims boxed into mediocre trajectories because of it.

Then again, as a manager, one sees the worst of people: the pettiness, the laziness, the duplicitousness and the hypocrisy. The only negative review I ever gave was due to incessant morale-eating gossip (by a communications manager no less) that nearly tanked a project. And of course that review was reversed by more senior managers who were afraid to stand their ground. It was a valuable lesson for me: there’s no percentage on either end of the performance review equation. So I haven’t had to do one since then, and I’m glad for it.

So what’s the point, then?

For me it was that I couldn’t endure participation in such a system. That’s not to say I don’t provide feedback – I do it all the time – but I try to keep it constructive. When I see room for improvement, I explain how the work product could do the job better, how there was room for misunderstanding, how missteps can undermine the confidence of the audience in the rest of it. The adversary is the universal gap between those doing and those receiving and the impediments to bridging that gap, not the person writing the report or doing the task supporting the project. We’re all on the same side.

Once again, I’ve stated the obvious, so maybe I’m just reminding myself. Which brings me back to Fully Meets.

I recently included a chapter in my novel (called Fully Meets) which depicts a career inflection point during a performance review. The recipient of that review rejects that verdict and immediately resigns his position. It was a gratifying (if painful) situation to depict, but was essential to my protagonist’s development. It’s less a denial of a specifc review than a full repudiation of such a system. Personally, I think this same impulse is behind much of the surge in independent contracting over the last 20 years, or maybe I’m projecting. I don’t recall getting such a review myself, but in those moments the noose of conventional employment felt the tightest to me, and by subordinating myself to it, I felt complicit. I think others do, too.

So as we swing through the holidays and into the currentless days of January and review time, remember: be the manager you liked the best, and be the contributor you liked the most. Life is short and keep the misery to a minimum.