Bill popped his head into Jan’s office as he was leaving for the evening.

“Jan, do you have a minute? I have to do performance reviews tonight. I was going to drink Scotch and work my way through all of them.”

Jan laughed and said, “Sure. Scotch might make you feel good, but it will definitely not solve your performance review problem.

“Why are you still doing performance reviews? I stopped doing them. I worked with HR and convinced them performance reviews were a useless relic of the past. What do you want to get out of performance reviews?”

“Me, I don’t want anything out of them. I do them for HR.” Bill was as sure of this as he was of the fact that he needed liquid courage to write them.

“That’s nonsense. You have one-on-ones, right?”

“Well, I mostly have them. I mostly have them every other week.”

Jan gave him the what-are-you-thinking? look. “That’s a problem. If you don’t have regular one-on-ones, you can’t do performance reviews. But the problem isn’t the review. The problem is feedback and building a trusting relationship, isn’t it?

She explained more. “The idea behind a performance review is that you provide feedback to your employee. Now that we are agile, do you have any idea what your people are doing on a daily basis?”

“Uh, no. They work independently. Sure, if they need me, I help. But I don’t help much anymore.”

“OK, so why would you do performance reviews?”

“I guess I can’t,” Bill responded.

“Exactly. You need the team to provide feedback to each other. Do they know how to do that?”

“Sure. They’ve been doing it all along. I’ve been coaching some of them on how to provide feedback when they’ve been a little confused on how to do it. Sometimes I even suggest the right words to use.”

“Excellent. So do you need to provide a performance review to anyone your team?”

Bill thought for a minute. “No, everyone here works together on one cross-functional team. But I have a few people in Colorado who work as a group and are not part of a cross-functional team. What do I do about them?”

“Whom do those people work with? Can those people ask for feedback from the people they work with?”

“Sure, I guess they can.”

“The question is this: What value do you add as a manager in this equation? Can you possibly know enough about what these people do to provide them feedback? Or are you just mucking up the works?”

“Hmm, I think I’m just mucking up the works,” Bill admitted. “But what do I do instead?”

“How about you provide them feedback about the work you can see? Maybe even the work you can see that they perform as a team? Don’t people want to know where they stand?”

“Well, they want to know where they stand relative to one another, right?”

Jan took a deep breath. “No. Do you want to know where you stand in relation to all the other managers?”

Bill thought for a second and said, “No, I guess not. I was going to say I thought I was a great manager. But from the questions you’re asking me, I guess I’m not. I don’t really want to know where I rank in the manager list.”

“Exactly. People need feedback. They don’t need ranking. Besides, how can you rank testers against developers against business analysts or product owners? They all work as an interdependent team. You can’t say, ‘This person is number one. This person is number two.’ That’s craziness.

“But people do need feedback from the people they work with. Do you work with them?” Jan persisted.

“No.”

“OK. Then how do you propose to give them feedback, especially when you haven’t been keeping up with the one-on-ones?”

“OK, Jan, you’ve convinced me. Now, how do I convince HR?”

“I know just how to do this. Come with me.”



People Need Feedback, Not Ranking

Everyone needs feedback about their work. If you’ve done something great, you need to know—sooner rather than later. And if you’ve done something that wasn’t great, you need to know that, too.

But people don’t need to be stack-ranked against each other. That doesn’t provide people any information about how they perform their jobs.



Self-Assessment Doesn’t Work, Either

We, as humans, are not so good at assessing ourselves, either. We are subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where incompetent people overestimate their skills. They believe they are actually competent, or even superior. To make matters worse, they do not recognize these skills in other people.

On the other hand, some people who are competent suffer from imposter syndrome, where they feel as if they are not competent and not responsible for their success. Some days you just can’t win.



Feedback Works

What does work is feedback. Here is some reinforcing feedback you might provide to a tester: “I noticed that you spent a lot of time deciding which tests to automate and which tests to explore. That made a difference in our ability to regression test quickly. We can run our regression tests fast, and everyone can run them. Thank you.”

Does it matter who provides that feedback? No. Does that feedback strengthen the team? Yes. Does that feedback reinforce what the tester should do more often? Yes.

Here is some corrective feedback you might provide to a developer: “I’ve noticed that yesterday and today, you checked in code just before you left for lunch. It happens that both days, those check-ins broke the build. You weren’t gone long, but you know we have a policy of no broken builds. Let’s problem-solve together to fix this, OK?”

You’ve addressed this problem before it got big. It’s a two-day problem, not a two-week problem or a two-month problem. It’s certainly not something that has remained on someone’s “file” for the past year.



Feedback Is a Team Problem, Not a Management Problem

Everyone on the team needs to be able to provide feedback to everyone else on the team. Managers can help by teaching how to provide feedback. They can coach people on how to use the words. They can provide an environment in which it’s safe to give and receive feedback. They can work with HR to eliminate the ranking system.

Ranking destroys a team’s ability to work together. Feedback can enhance it. Which would you choose?

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