Tradeoffs

“Performance reviews tied to reward make a zero-sum tradeoff against openness, trust, and safety.” Amen to this post from Elizabeth Ayer about the problems with performance reviews. I will also echo her point that performance reviews almost invariably drive individual responses to systemic problems—placing an extra-heavy burden on people from minoritized backgrounds as well as obscuring the system-level changes that would be more fruitfully addressed. Ayer has some competent strategies for maneuvering through a situation in which you cannot escape the performance review, but I for one hope we can start to build towards the kinds of workplaces that send them into the sun where they belong. One alternative path: transforming reviews into opportunities to uplift, to assess how well people are cared for, whether their needs are being met, and what would help them meet their own high expectations.