Here is an excerpt from an interview of Samuel Culbert by Ladan Nikravan in which he explains why companies should get rid of the performance review, eliminate the intimidation, change the politics, and hold the bosses accountable for making every employee a success. He asserts that traditional performance reviews are destroying employee morale and killing the bottom line.

To read the complete interview, check out all the resources and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.

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“Instead of improving performance, the annual review is robbing organizations of their most valuable asset — trust.”

Samuel Culbert, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Get Rid of the Performance Review! How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing — and Focus on What Really Matters, sat down with Talent Management magazine to explain how to give employees evaluations they can believe in instead of the fraudulent ones they currently receive.

What’s wrong with the annual pay and performance review? 


It’s very simple — it doesn’t do anything it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to be objective and tell employees what the company thinks about the employee, but performance reviews are not objective, and the evaluators are not objective. Studies show if you change the boss, the reviews change. That’s because the metrics they use for evaluating employees and scoring them don’t mean the same thing to different people. One manager’s team player is another boss’ conflict avoider. While we’re on the point of metrics, what does a 2.5 on listening skills mean? I don’t know. No one does.

The performance review puts a bat in the boss’ hand. It’s supposed to help employees improve, but the last thing an employee wants is to tell his or her boss what’s wrong and be forthright about a course of action in an area they would like to improve. What you don’t want are people pretending they have competencies and skills in areas they don’t have competencies and skills. But, with the performance review, you have to pretend. What we’ve got in companies, what we have in this world, are flawed, imperfect people. Get these imperfect people getting results for the company. That’s what you’re supposed to get results for.

The performance review puts pleasing the boss ahead of getting results for the company. It doesn’t determine pay. The market determines the pay.

Why do you think so many companies keep doing them? 


It’s because of what performance reviews do accomplish. They allow bad managers to get away with bad behavior and never be called on it. They intimidate employees, and they keep them kind of quiet as a way of ensuring the boss’ definition of what the company needs and should have becomes the employee’s, but it’s as invalid as can be.

They rob companies of the most important, effective management tool a company could have, which is a trusting relationship. What you want with employees and their bosses is a way of remedying situations when things aren’t working out right and having an open and honest dialogue, and not to worry about whose job is what. What it is supposed to do is make it possible for the job to get done. What should be evaluated is the boss’ ability to make every employee working for him or her a success instead of worrying about each individual’s personality defects as defined by the boss.

Why do they keep doing it? 


They don’t know any better. They’re not even experimenting with other ways, and there are much better ways. It’s what people have always done and nobody wants to stick his or her neck out and get it done differently and try something saner. At one level, you also have to put a lot of the blame on the human resources department. What area of the company knows more about the mental anguish, the anxiety and the downtime created by performance reviews than human resources? They get all the stories. What group, what executive knows more about the fraudulence of what managers say about their employees? Human resources. They keep the files; they make sure nothing’s forgotten. This is an awfulness in companies, and the most bizarre fact is, it keeps going on, and the people who should be the idea leaders in fixing it, they’re just not doing their jobs.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Ladan Nikravan  is an associate editor at MediaTec Publishing.