Performance Review Hell
One of the many liberating things about being retired is the absence of annual performance reviews. Unless I count my grandchildren assessing my baking or grading my ability to draw a unicorn or some other complicated creature. I had an intense dislike of performance reviews in my work life. I was never considered a performance problem (that I know of) but the act of being reviewed often made me feel as unsettled as wearing pajamas to work when it wasn’t pajama day.
One year, leading up to the annual review process, three of my colleagues and I found ourselves in new non-traditional roles, defined only by a brief job description. At our boss’s request, we set out to document the expectations of the roles in more detail. Many drafts later, we still hadn’t agreed upon the content but the document wasn’t due yet and it was for our eyes only after all, so we kept at it. Our boss however, passed the draft along to our internal clients at performance review time and asked them to use it to assess each of us. It was a disaster. My colleagues and I were furious. It was no surprise when our clients marked services as undelivered. We hadn’t yet agreed to what services we were responsible for. I refused to sign off on my review. My boss pressured me into signing, telling me non sign-off would trigger an apocalypse in Human Resources. I signed but noted my disagreement with a scathing rebuttal in the free-form comments section. I doubted anybody read those things closely but I felt better.
A few years later, I was in a role with clearer expectations but a calendar glitch and my unreliable mini-van derailed my performance review. Our vehicle was truly a lemon and it only broke down at the most inconvenient times. On my way back to the office from a lunch appointment, the mini-van started grinding and screeching as if it was possessed. Pedestrians stopped to stare and I pulled into the nearest parking lot. I called a tow truck to rescue my vehicle, and phoned a friend at work to rescue me. My friend told my boss what was going on. While I waited, he called me and said, “Well, I know people will go to great lengths to get out of their performance reviews! Haha. Good one. Just get back safely.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I found out later that the performance review we moved because of a scheduling conflict the previous week got rescheduled to that day at 1:00. For some reason, I wasn’t included in the reschedule notice so I wasn’t invited to my own performance review. Good one, for sure.
In one of my most memorable performance reviews, my boss told me I was invisible – his way of saying I needed to speak up more in meetings. He explained by telling me I needed to be more like Richard, one of the cast of characters my boss brought with him when he joined our company. Richard was a chatty likeable guy but my colleagues and I would exchange painful glances when he started talking in meetings. We attempted to pick out relevant points in his flowing faucet of words but at some point, it seemed like Richard was Richard’s sole audience. As he gathered steam, he seemed to grow taller in his chair, delighting himself with new and brilliant revelations. When he was done, he was quite pleased with himself. The rest of us were just tired. I guess my boss valued saying something above saying nothing even if the words amounted to nothing in the end.
This same boss and his cronies joked about the need to bring a box of tissues to performance reviews at their previous company. And they were proud of the anecdote where they pinned a guy against a wall in a meeting. I wonder if the poor guy contradicted popular opinion. Or maybe he fell asleep listening to Richard.
A few years later, I ended up with a soft-spoken boss. During the only review I had in his short tenure, he told me I talked too much. I don’t think he’d ever met Richard.
I was fortunate to have uneventful reviews for the most part but I didn’t like those ones either. I loved giving positive feedback but had difficulty receiving it. Maybe it was my upbringing. If someone said something nice about me, how did I know it wouldn’t jinx me? What if the universe was listening and taking notes, ready to pounce and put me in my place when I least expected it? I found myself slipping my hand under the table and curling my two middle fingers into my palm – the evil-eye gesture of my Italian childhood. I pointed my hand toward my boss and then twisted it and pointed it toward myself for good measure but didn’t go as far as spitting. I thought that might be weird.
My favourite reviews were the ones closer to my retirement date. I had an amazing boss during those last few years and I told him how uncomfortable I was with performance reviews. So instead, we had relaxing conversations about my retirement plans, travel destinations, and our favourite concerts. I knew if he had feedback for me, I would have heard it by then and not been surprised in a yearly sit-down. I had no problem signing off on those reviews.
After retiring and bidding farewell to the hell of performance reviews, the only formal appraisals I subject myself to are delivered by my five and nine-year-old grandchildren. They offer unfiltered assessments based on a simple rating scale. Two thumbs up for good, two thumbs down for bad, thumbs sideways pointing to each other for really, really bad, thumbs pointing away from each other for really, really good. They don’t care if I talk too much or not enough and tissues are not required.
