Performance of Performance Reviews

Steven Sinofsky:

Michael Lynch wrote a fascinating, albeit somewhat disheartening, post on his personal experience with Google’s performance review and promotion process. There was quite a bit of discussion so I thought I’d update this post from 2013 on the topic.

Much has been written recently about performance ratings and management at some large and successful companies. Amazon has surfaced as a company implementing OLRs, organization and leadership reviews, which target the least effective 10% of an organization for appropriate action. Yahoo famously introduced QPRs, quarterly performance reviews, which rates people as “misses” or “occasionally misses” among other ratings. And just so we don’t think this is something unique to tech, at the end of every year Wall St firms begin the annual bonus process which is filled with any number of legendary dysfunctions given the massive sums of money in play. Even the Air Force has a legendary process for feedback and appraisal.

Like so many company processes, when a company is doing “well” then the processes are exactly the right ones and magical. When a company is not doing so “well” then every process is either a symptom or the cause of the situation.