Annual Reviews - Final Thoughts

In talking with several people around the office about the low value of giving ratings during performance reviews, I realized there was yet another reasons they suck. Aside from the previous stated reasons of setting false expectations, they also focus employees self-improvement efforts into the wrong areas.

I think that a good leader encourages the most productivity from a team by planning and guiding work around each individual's strength. If you assign the quiet introspective super coder in the corner the job of external team communications, you are setting him/her, the team, and the project up for failure.

What does this have to do with ratings? Glad you asked. If you give a person any rating less than the highest, he/she will usually focus their efforts on improving the areas where they were the weakest. The mental calculus is simple - (Rating of GREAT + Rating of IMPROVE)/Overall Average Rating = Rating of GOOD. So they want to change the IMPROVE so that the resulting equation evaluates to GREAT.

But this doesn't help the individual, the team or the project. If they area needed to improve is drastic, then yes changes need to be made. But if the super coder starts spending his/her time trying to take on the persona of social hub rather than cranking out awesome code, then the manager has failed to get the most out of the team.