From the October 20, 2008 Issue an article by Samuel A. Culbert, PhD, Professor of management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In this article, Dr. Culbert lays out a compelling and thought-provoking case for abolishment of the traditional performance review and replacement with a performance preview. He makes 6 good points in his argument against the traditional performance review.

1. The mind sets held by the two participants (boss and employee) in a performance review work at cross-purposes. The boss wants to discuss performance and improvements while the employee is focused in issues such as compensation.
2. Claiming an evaluation can be objective is preposterous. Where you stand determines what you see.
3. Pleasing the boss so often becomes more important than doing a good job.
4. Personal development should be an important part of a person’s job. However, people don’t want to pay a high price for acknowledging their need for improvement—which is exactly what they would do if they arm the boss with the kind of personal information he or she would need to help them develop.
5. The boss in the performance review thinks of himself or herself as the evaluator, and doesn’t engage in teamwork with the subordinate. It isn’t “How are we going to work together as a team?” It’s, “How are you performing for me?”
6. It’s immoral to maintain the façade that annual pay and performance reviews lead to corporate improvement, when it’s clear they lead to more bogus activities than valid ones. The more positive an atmosphere we can create at work, the more positive an impact it has at home. In short, what goes around comes around.
   
   

In my experience, as both an employee and a boss, his points struck a chord with me and I recognized, from personal experience, the arguments he was making. The old style of regularly scheduled performance reviews does tend to steer the employee to aim his/her efforts at pleasing the boss rather than actually aiming to do a good job and perform well. The work environment becomes a game of perception management and drains precious energy away from the worthwhile and dividend-paying tasks and, ultimately, morale and quality suffer. There has to be a better way, a genuinely new and improved way of promoting straight talk relationships between bosses and employees and keeping precious energy focused in the high payoff places. Dr. Culbert may be on to something when he says: “It’s the boss’s responsibility to find a way to work well with an imperfect individual, not to convince the individual there are critical flaws that need immediate correcting, which is all but guaranteed to lead to unproductive game playing and politically inspired back stabbing. Keep in mind, of course, that improvement is each individual’s own responsibility. You can only make yourself better.” Doing away with the traditional performance review may start a positive trend of fostering better team relationships and keeping self-improvement in the realm of the individual.