Most organizations implement performance management backwards.
They focus on individual achievement while hoping for team success.
And in the end, they undermine both.
The problem is with where we measure, not how.
Personal output, skill gaps, growth areas, contributions against role expectations are all looking at the individual.
This seems like a logical place to start, but creates a fundamental problem: it puts self-preservation above collective achievement.
When my year-end review depends solely on my output, why would I prioritize helping others?
To see the cracks, look where there are hand-offs between functions.
Consider quality: if engineers are evaluated only on how “good” their code is, they have little incentive to help colleagues improve. They will invest in perfecting their deliverable, and defer as much as possible anything that doesn’t contribute to this goal.
Collaboration with peers, end user experience, overall system stability, and even code reviews, will be put in the back seat.
This pattern shows up in any solution built in a vacuum, without collaboration.
Beautiful designs ignoring technical complexity, perfect product specs lying on unrealistic timelines, changes to shared systems without considering side-effects.
If the deliverable is optimized for individual success, the collective product will suffer.
Performance reviews compound these problems through their retrospective nature. There is nothing you can do for something that occurred months earlier. To get better, you need feedback while the opportunity to change things has not passed—the best source of which are the people around you
Traditional evaluations routinely violate this principle.
A better approach is to bring the focus to the collective outcomes to measure individual success.
This shift requires rethinking how we assess things.
Instead of asking
Did this person complete their assigned tasks?
we should ask
Did this team achieve its goals?
The former creates silos; the latter builds bridges.
The achievements of our civilization came through cooperation, not isolation. High performance teams understand this truth and design evaluation systems that reflect it.
To test your organization’s approach, examine how performance is evaluated.
What percentage of individual reviews reflects team outcomes?
If the answer is “little” or “none”, congratulations: you’ve just identified a structural barrier to collaboration.
The next time you evaluate performance—yours or someone else’s—ask whether you’re measuring what truly matters: the individual trees, or the health of the entire forest?
And remember:
There are no winners on a losing team, and no losers on a winning team.
Fred Brooks
references
Photo by William Warby on Unsplash
Leave a Reply