Banish Standard Performance Reviews

Har­vard Busi­ness Review pub­lished a fan­tas­tic piece called, Rein­vent­ing Per­for­mance Reviews, that I con­sid­er a must-read for CEOs everywhere.

It’s about Deloitte’s ini­tia­tive to ban­ish the typ­i­cal per­for­mance review in favour of some­thing ‘…square­ly focused on fuelling per­for­mance in the future rather than assess­ing it in the past.’

Final­ly!

Deloitte is toss­ing some old stan­dards out the win­dow. No more annu­al reviews. No more 360 peer reviews.

They’re going sim­ple and lean.

Here’s an exam­ple. They’ve devel­oped a rapid method to get lead­ers to iden­ti­fy their most valu­able employ­ees. For each team mem­ber, imme­di­ate team lead­ers ask themselves:

1. Giv­en what I know about this person’s per­for­mance and if it were my own mon­ey, would I award this per­son the high­est com­pen­sa­tion and bonus?
2. Giv­en what I know about this person’s per­for­mance and if it were my own mon­ey, would I always want this per­son on my team?
3. Is this per­son at risk for low performance?
4. Is this per­son ready for pro­mo­tion today?

I high­ly rec­om­mend you take the time to peruse the full arti­cle in detail. It will like­ly cause you to recon­sid­er your entire approach to per­for­mance reviews.