Leadership and People Management: Foundations to Practice · Performance Management
Why Annual Reviews Alone Are Insufficient
A single formal performance review conducted once a year is, on its own, a genuinely weak mechanism for actually improving performance, since it violates several basic principles about how feedback and behavior change actually work.
Feedback delivered months after the specific behavior it addresses, which is structurally what an annual review does for most of the events it eventually covers, suffers from exactly the same timing problem covered in Module 5's discussion of feedback: the specific situational details have faded from memory, and the delayed delivery itself can feel unfair to a recipient who had no earlier indication that a specific behavior from many months ago was actually a genuine concern.
- Feedback delivered months after the behavior it addresses suffers the same timing problem as any delayed feedback: faded memory and a sense of unfairness at the delay.
- Annual reviews are disproportionately influenced by recent performance, since recent events are more vivid and available in memory than earlier events in the period.
- In a well-run ongoing feedback practice, nothing in a formal annual review should come as a genuine surprise, since significant concerns should already have been raised closer to when they occurred.
- Annual reviews still serve a genuine purpose: synthesizing broader patterns and formally documenting performance for administrative decisions, distinct from ongoing informal feedback.