Why Performance Reviews Make Companies Worse (And What Actually Works)...

Performance management systems: the corporate treadmill to nowhere. Organisations preach the gospel of improvement, then build systems so convoluted they’d make Kafka weep. Ratings are political, feedback is a weapon, and calibration meetings resemble gladiatorial combat. The result? A process so dark and detached from reality it should be a corporate snuff movie.

Jimmy Barber and James Lawther aren’t here to sugarcoat it. They’re here to dissect why these systems fail: it’s because they’re designed by “Human Resource Professionals” who don’t understand humans. The hosts pull no punches: from the absurdity of ranking employees like livestock to the farce of annual reviews that demotivate 95% of the workforce. But they don’t just rant. They offer a lifeline. What actually improves performance? Regular, honest conversations. Clarity on purpose. Psychological safety. And, a radical idea, treating people like adults.

The episode tackles two critical questions: If you could redesign performance management from scratch, what would you do? And if you’re stuck with a broken system, how do you survive it without losing your mind (or your soul)? The answer involves less process, more humanity, and a healthy dose of cynicism.

Key points:

• Performance systems are built for control, not improvement.
• The best performers often just look good, which isn’t the same as being good.
• Focus on systems, not people, to lock in performance.
• Regular feedback beats annual reviews every time.
• If you can’t change the system, learn to play it.

Transcript

Speaker 2 0:04

Hello, I'm James. Hi, I'm Jimmy. And welcome to A Job Done Well. The podcast that helps you improve your performance and enjoyment at work.

James 0:16

are we talking about today?

Jimmy 0:18

Hi, James. today we're going to talk about one of your favorite subjects,

James 0:24

What's that

Jimmy 0:25

Performance management.

James 0:26

Yes.

Jimmy 0:27

Hold that thought, hold that thought. But the reason why we're talking about it is organizations talk about the importance of performance, and then they just build systems that make improving performance almost impossible.

James 0:40

Yeah.

Jimmy 0:41

You have, you have ratings that are all political, feedback's all about justifying a, a poor rating. You have these validation or calibration

James 0:50

Yeah.

Jimmy 0:51

just like gladiatorial battles.

James 0:54

you want to scoop your eyeballs out with a teaspoon.

Jimmy 0:58

Anyhow, overall, the system takes over, and the actual job, helping people do better work, helping people improve performance, gets completely lost. So we were challenged by one of our, audience to say, "All right, well, you know, I

James 1:13

Easy to bash it.

Jimmy 1:15

on it. Ease to bash it, tell us what you'd do then." So today we're going to do two things, 'cause we thought that was a fair question. We're going to say, what would we do with a blank piece of paper if we had free reign to change performance management systems? And secondly, just as important, because most people don't have that luxury, we are going to talk about if you don't own the system,

James 1:36

What would you do?

Jimmy 1:38

you... How you manage your people inside that system.

James 1:40

Yeah. All right. Looking forward to it. Now, the trick for me is to not start frothing at the mouth, particularly as this is a video. I'll look like a rabid dog. You'll be able to see it, couldn't you?

Jimmy 1:51

don't worry, I'll edit it

James 1:52

Thank you.

Jimmy 1:53

start

James 1:54

Yeah. So go on then, why do performance management systems frustrate everybody? What would you say to that as a question?

Jimmy 2:02

Well, I think they are designed from a, an organizational perspective. So they are designed to cover off a whole load of bases about how people manage performance and how you get consistency and, and, and. They're done from the organization a-and systems perspective, not the individual. So

James 2:22

Which, yeah. But sorry to pile in, but I doubt-- it's what really surprises me. So these things, and I s-promise I will not bash HR too much in this podcast, but they come out of HR, so you'd think they would understand people, but they don't. They have a very sort of process bent to them, and the human seems to be ignored in the whole pr-process.

Jimmy 2:41

They do, but without going down too much of a rabbit hole here, I think therein lies one of the problems is you allow in organizations allow HR teams to go off and design stuff and own stuff, and they own the culture, and they own performance management and, and they own the people. That's wrong. The-- Fundamentally, the organization owns it, and the people and the leaders should own it. And so you're-- Yes, you're right, but we abdicate responsibility to the wrong people.

James 3:11

And so then the other question for me is why do they always... go on, they often seem to create worse behavior. So performance seems to get worse off the back of these systems than better. So I think that's something we should talk about a wee bit.

Jimmy 3:24

It is, and one of my favorite examples of that is that, you have, you have this rating in the middle, don't you? And, in some organizations,

James 3:31

Good.

Jimmy 3:34

good or strong,

James 3:35

and everybody, every, everybody takes it to mean average.

Jimmy 3:40

Yeah, but, but it takes some effort to make being called good into a negative,

James 3:45

It is.

Jimmy 3:46

You know, "You're a strong performer, James, and you

James 3:48

It... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it should be very strong.

Jimmy 3:51

that's, flawed. And I think then, they become more and

James 3:55

but

Jimmy 4:00

And one of the things, and w-we've both done this many times. One of the pet things I find is that easier to pay somebody off, write a check, pay off somebody who's not performing well than it is to manage their performance fairly and accurately through a process. the reality in most organizations. So rather than waste years of your life trying to manage performance, you just write a check.

James 4:27

And then the other thing is it just seems to be a sort of, oh, once every six month or once a year exercise in seeing if you can piss off everybody in the organisation in one fell swoop.

Jimmy 4:38

Yeah. Yeah. And you give some people a really high rating, and they're happy for about ten minutes, and then everyone else who didn't get the high rating, which is ninety-five percent of your people, are pissed off for the next six

James 4:49

Yeah.

Jimmy 4:50

Well done.

James 4:50

And we worry why we've got a motivation problem. Yeah

Jimmy 4:54

do you think that performance management systems are ineffective, James?

James 4:59

So I would argue that there are-- You're gonna like this. This is good law of the logic. There are two parts to any organisation, right? You've got the people and the system. The system being everything that's not the people. So far, this is flawless, right? But

Jimmy 5:13

It's

James 5:13

this-- You like it? I like a good bit of simple logic. Performance management is all about trying to improve the people. You know, so it's all about goals and incentives, and, you know, we must have the best people, and yada, yada, yada, yada. And frankly, it's just lazy management because unless you are, I don't know, Manchester United, and you can afford to pay for the best people, everybody wants the best people. You've got, you know, well, living in Nottingham as we do, there are what? Two or three big corporates here. It's just a roundabout of people going from one to the next, to the next. So if you think it is going to get you the best people you are sadly mistaken. So there's my first problem with it, just lazy thinking. The second thing is that- it's in employee's interest to look good, but that's not the same as being good. So you get this whole thing about, you know, performance is subjective. Well, what are you measuring? Well, you show me what you're measuring, and I'll show you how I'll behave. And we all know stories about people cheating on their targets and finding workarounds, yeah. The other thing is it just kills cooperation between people. So it just yeah, drives sub-optimization. So that, you know, focusing on people I think is the wrong thing.

Jimmy 6:23

Just on... Sorry, James, just on that, You can look good and be good. It's just the challenge is it's easier not worry about being good and just look good.

James 6:34

Yes.

Jimmy 6:34

that's the-- There, therein lies the problem. You don't have to do all the hard work to be a top performer. You just need to be able to look good.

James 6:42

Yeah, and to be honest, it's-- you're right, but if everybody else is cheating, it takes a big man not to cheat.

Jimmy 6:50

Yeah.

James 6:50

Yeah. And then, so the other thing is the thing about the best people, right? There are organisations, so McDonald's, for example. I shouldn't really pick on McDonald's, but McDonald's never, ever claims to have the best people. I've never seen, you know, "Come and work for our high-performing team" at McDonald's advertised. But they make a shedload of money, which comes back to my point about the system. You know, if you focus on the system, You stand a much greater chance of improving performance, and you can lock it in 'cause even if you did have the best people, they'll always leave. So I just think the whole thing is the tail wagging the dog, right? The power is in the system. I think we worry about people far too much.

Jimmy 7:27

And I think you're, you're right on that, that McDonald's point, though, because they don't have the best people, but their, their, their food's okay. You know what I mean? It's, it-- They've got to, to a standard, and it's always consistently at that standard.

James 7:39

gives the customer what they want. Yeah.

Jimmy 7:41

They maintain that standard absolutely immaculately wherever you go in the world, that's what you get.

James 7:48

So yeah, the system I would argue.

Jimmy 7:51

Yeah. I'm very impressed, James, by your level of maturity

James 7:55

not frothing yet.

Jimmy 7:57

the negative side of performance management without absolutely losing your shit. But reality is you do need to do something. And so, we can say how much we hate it, but the thing is, organisations do need to have some way of consistently managing their people and attempting to get better performance out of them.. Bias does exist, and so you need to find ways of managing consistently and getting bias out of how your people are, are managing at times. es- particularly when you're in a big organisation and you're trying to do that at scale, you know, it's very... all very well if you and I are running a little tiny organisation and we can see everyone and we can watch everything, you can manage it in a certain way. When you've got 10,000 people, how do you know consistently that performance is being managed effectively and fairly?

James 8:53

Yeah, but see that point though, so I agree, you do need to do something, but what is it that you actually need to do? So, you know, what would you argue actually improves performance?

Jimmy 9:05

So I think there are certain things that I've seen that improve performance. Things like having regular, honest conversations with

James 9:14

Yeah, feedback's always a good thing. Totally agree. Yeah.

Jimmy 9:17

but being really specific about the feedback, not, "You've done really well last week, James." It's, "When you did this, that was

James 9:24

Really helpful. Yeah.

Jimmy 9:26

being really specific. So frequent conversations with specifics. Clarity on what people are here for. We talk a lot about purpose, but being clear whether that's organisational level, at team level, are you clear with what good looks like for your people? What are the priorities? Why are we here? And what are, what are the trade-offs we're willing to make? Often in all of those things, we leave an amount of ambiguity, so people are not clear what they're trying to achieve.

James 9:56

Yeah, I'd agree

Jimmy 9:57

Have an environment where stuff can go wrong for a

James 10:00

Yeah, and then get on it really quick.

Jimmy 10:03

Exactly. Pivot quickly. Don't just carry on flogging the same projects, the same dead horses. And I think back to the, encouraging people to make mistakes. Is your- Culture. One where people feel psychologically safe, where they feel comfortable to admit problems and not, just not ignore them and bury them and pretend they're not happening. And they can take accountability for things without fear of

James 10:32

Yeah. Retribution, yeah.

Jimmy 10:34

Yeah.

James 10:35

That one's really powerful, right? If you can't admit you've got a problem, you're never gonna get any better.

Jimmy 10:40

Yeah. And you've got to have the capability, the manager's capability that matters i-in, you know, in many ways more than a process. So a good manager can outfor-outperform a, a poor system when it comes to having performance conversations. Know, so how do you make sure that, that, that capability is there? And where you can the, the punishment and the development because, I went through most of my career thinking that coaching was a remedial thing. You

James 11:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jimmy 11:12

I realise, you know, actually you coach f- elite-- in elite sports are coached. You're coached to improve, not for punishment.

James 11:21

Yeah, okay. But let's see, you've got, if I've counted these right, you've got about six things there which are saying improve performance, right? So you've got what? Honest conversations, frequent honest conversations. You've got to be really clear. Getting on top of things quickly, so fast course correction. Psychological safety. Managers having the conversations, and actually focusing on coaching as a good thing rather than a remedial thing, right? So I would agree with all of that. The problem I have is that when you look at-- and it depends on the organisation you work in, but a lot of these big corporates, they have these, you know, ten percent rank stacking, and you're gonna whip people out. You've got individual bonuses. You've got annual reviews. You've got vitality curves. You've got cross-calibration. All of that crap, and actually, that has got nothing whatsoever to do with those six things that we've talked about. So yeah. So I think the process, the process that organisations go through, and interestingly, the process which many will tell you is best practice, just does not achieve those outcomes that you've just talked about.

Jimmy 12:27

That's very true. So let's tackle the challenge then, James. would we actually do if we had a blank piece of paper and we were there to improve

James 12:36

Well, okay. So I think it's probably we've got different cards on this one, right? So you're a man who's actually done this, so in an organisation, you took it out, yeah? And I'm obviously Mr Process and System, so I'll go at it quite systematically. So as a man who has actually done it, what did you do, what happened, and what did you learn from it?

Jimmy 12:55

So a bit of background. I worked in one organisation and- Myself and, the chief people officer, we were very aligned in our attitudes toward p-performance management. So we worked together and figured a way of removing a lot of the old-fashioned performance management processes. And, we had some successes. Not everything worked perfectly, that's one of the key things is, One of the mantras we picked up was progress not perfection. So don't try and design the perfect solution before you start to try stuff out. So some of the things that we found worked well is having, a loop between hiring and, and and performance. So Once you've recruited someone, the people who'd do-done the recruitment, you know, push them out into the business. You don't really look back and say, "Are the recruitment methods I'm, following actually being successful?" So when you get a high performer, how did you get them? Where'd you get them from? What was the source? What was the process that was followed to identify them? So that

James 13:56

So it's that feedback loop, so you know whether what works or not. Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy 14:01

Yeah. The second bit was, incentivizing the the overall. So we incentivized on how the organization was performing, not the individual, and that's how bonuses were paid. And funny enough, all of a sudden, everyone got very interested in how the organization was performing. Whereas before, they were all bothered about their little bits and what they were doing, and they were pretty indifferent to the overall. That completely transformed when we changed how people were, were incentivized.

James 14:32

and I think that's really important 'cause you're getting away from the sub-optimization, you know, some idiot worrying about their handle time, whatever the hell it might be, which is totally irrelevant.

Jimmy 14:40

And the other thing that, that linked into that was making sure that people thought about how they were impacting the the outcomes. And it's a bit of a cliché, but we talked about, you're either serving the customer or you're serving someone who is serving the customer. So just think, it doesn't matter what job you're doing, but just having line of sight between what you do and what the end result is that you're trying to get for the

James 15:03

Yeah.

Jimmy 15:06

other couple of things, I think one was, really focusing on the capability that your managers have. They really do need to be invested in to have the right conversations. It is not as straightforward as we may all think to really have regular performance conversations in a way that's motivational for people. So have you invested in that capability? That's not about, a whole load of structure and processes and guidelines and, forms that stop you from thinking. That's just about the, the ability to have that conversation

James 15:38

And that comes back to our-- what we spoke about the other day, the Pygmalion effect. You know, if you tell people they're good, they'll be good. Whereas if you keep telling people they'll be bad, they're bad. So where is the emphasis of that conversation going? Are you picking on the good stuff or the bad stuff?

Jimmy 15:53

And, accepting that in any organisation there will be good and bad stuff, and, you have to have an environment that nurtures imperfection because that's, that's the real world. And as soon as your environment i-i or your culture is not accepting of imperfection, that's it, you're gone. Because people will then focus on just telling the spun-out story rather than the reality. So they're some of the things that worked for us.

James 16:20

But

Jimmy 16:20

And yeah,

James 16:21

did it actually work? I mean, what was the outcome? Did it improve the performance of the business?

Jimmy 16:25

The organisation performed well. And so, it wasn't without challenges, and that's the reality is any system approach, whatever you wanna call it, it's gonna have some downsides. So you just have to keep, to your point previously, keep looking at them and improving and improving.

James 16:42

And what happened in the end then?

Jimmy 16:45

Well, interestingly enough, James it did, it did work well, but I left the organisation, as did, my colleague in HR, and, I doubt it had the support from above, and I did hear, on the grapevine that they had changed things back again.

James 17:00

Yeah, there is a little bit of, "It's a crutch. Everybody else does it, therefore we should do it."

Jimmy 17:04

It takes a bit of bravery to say, "No, I'm not going to carry on flogging the, the dead horse,"

James 17:09

Yeah.

Jimmy 17:10

some people are more comfortable doing.

James 17:12

And so I'm a little bit more... How would I put it? So I'm a wee bit more analytical about this, right? So how would I actually go about doing it? So the first thing, I think, the first problem with a lot of performance management systems is they try to do everything in one go, right? You've got, "We want to make pay decisions on it. We want to do development conversations on it. We want to promote people on it. We want to get rid of people on it." Right? So you've just ended up with this huge, unwieldy beast of a thing. So the first question, I think, is to be very clear about what all the outcomes you want are, and just write them down, right? 'Cause then when you've written those down, you can start to challenge Is that what I'm getting? And I really would urge people to get some data. If you can get, you know, data, employee satisfaction, whatever the hell it might be, and see if it's actually working for you, so much the good. If you can't get data, just have some focus groups, but get some real feedback on how well this process is working for you, and is act- is it actually improving the performance of your business? 'Cause if it's not, don't do it, right? Then you're into split your processes up, right? Because you've got so many things going on, it's all linked together, it's just unwieldy. So if you want a development process, have a development process. If you want a pay process, have a pay process. Yeah? If you want to roll out your strategic objectives through your objective setting process, have one of those, right? But the problem is you've got this huge sort of Swiss Army knife of a process, when really what you want is a bunch of scalpels. So split it up so then it's much easier and less unwieldly. And then one by one I'd just go through and redesign it. It's the classic, you know, Post-It notes on the wall. What do I do now? Does it work? Do I like it? Don't I like it? What am I gonna do differently? But then the most important thing is to test it. So roll it out, see if it works or not. And then don't get suckered into this whole thing about best practice, 'cause best practice only works for an individual organization. No two organizations are the same, so the best practice isn't the same. And then finally, after you've tested it, run it for a year, see if it works, and have another go. Because a lot of these things, people stake their reputation on it, but redesign and redesign and redesign. You know, there's a reason why iPhone... What are they on to? They're on 17 now, are they? Something like that.

Jimmy 19:25

Something

James 19:26

Yeah, but they just keep on improving it. So keep on improving your process. Don't stick with what you've got. So that is what I would do, but that links really strongly to, I think, what you've said.

Jimmy 19:36

Yeah, and just to pick up on a couple of points there, James, I think your point around you're trying to create the Swiss Army knife of processes that are gonna solve all these problems. The reality is they can't, and therefore the reality is in this one size fits no one.

James 19:50

Yes, absolutely.

Jimmy 19:52

Then as I said, progress not perfection. Keep trying to change and evolve the-- what you're doing. 'Cause there-- if you wait for there to be the perfect universal answer, it doesn't exist, so you'll be waiting a long fucking time.

James 20:03

Yeah. Now, but the problem is it's all very easy to talk about this, right? However, in my experience... So I in my last job I was a reasonably senior manager in an organization. I got this performance management shoved down me throat. And so I said to the HR lady, I said, "Well, how about we run a test and we try something else? And I just got a flat no. Right? You are doing this whether you like it or not, James. So the question for me is, if you are having this rammed down your throat and you have no choice, what's the best way to do it? What would you do?

Jimmy 20:34

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's

James 20:36

Yeah.

Jimmy 20:40

the process that they had. So I think you're stuck within this, I think there are things that you can do, and it go back a little bit to some of the things that drive good performance that we talked about. Don't wait for the formal cycle. Have regular conversations with your team a-about how they're doing. Not just how the work's going, how are they doing, how are they improving, what are they struggling with, how they're developing, But do it on a regular basis. Don't wait for the annual cycle to force you to do that. That might means that you're effectively removing surprises. So when you're sitting down and talking to someone about their end-of-year review, nothing in that should be a surprise. If you ever write down a review or write down your prep notes and you think to yourself, "These are words that James will not have heard from me before," that's when you know you've got a problem. I think sometimes you have to just translate some of the corporate language into normal language. I mean, there's a whole lexicon of stuff that where you talk about,

James 21:53

I've got stakeholder management opportunities. I've had a lot of those.

Jimmy 21:57

Good for your development,"

James 21:58

had a lot of that as

Jimmy 22:00

you with some

James 22:00

well. Yep. So

Jimmy 22:02

So,

James 22:03

away from those. Is that what you're telling me?

Jimmy 22:05

yeah, just talk straight to people. Be honest about things, I think the other thing is also lot of performance management happen in waves. So, you're asked for three-sixty feedback at one point in the year. Keep some notes through the year

James 22:19

Yeah.

Jimmy 22:21

We get ki-- hit by recency bias, and so I can remember what you did in the month before that's what I put down as the examples of the feedback and keep notes on th-- on

James 22:31

Sorry, you're absolutely right. But to that point, there always seem to be a lot of people presenting and doing stuff in the last month of the year. Do you remember that?

Jimmy 22:40

There was. A-as everyone tries to get

James 22:41

Yeah, absolutely

Jimmy 22:43

other thing I-- You know, the other thing I found, James, in one organisation that, that I, I worked in, first-- I, I was in a reasonably important position, but first year I got a load of feedback requests, and it's a bit like, doing the washing up. If you do it really well, you keep getting asked to do it. So I give lots of really good feedback, really specific, q-really good quality, and I realise that next year I've got even more requests, and you get a reputation for, A, you're important, you're helpful, you give good feedback. Don't do

James 23:13

Don't do that.

Jimmy 23:15

that way lies

James 23:16

Yeah, all right. So keep your own evidence and rewa-- and avoid the whole recency bias thing. Yeah, what else?

Jimmy 23:23

Reward honesty. If, if some of your team talk to you about problems and stuff that goes wrong, treat that as a positive. Rather than that's gonna be on the negative side of the checklist when it comes to year-end. talk about their openness, their curiosity, their desire to improve their innovation rather than they made a mistake.

James 23:44

Yeah.

Jimmy 23:45

I think you have to get your head right as well in this. Have the-- approach it with the right mindset. Don't just become, cynical. I mean, we both have been cynical at per-certain points in our

James 23:55

I've never been cynical in my entire career.

Jimmy 23:58

You have

James 23:58

This is where we're gonna edit this bit out.

Jimmy 24:01

But the point is, you get really cynical and pissed off about it, the only person that impacts is you and your ability to do your job. not gonna change the system, so just find ways of thinking as, as positively as you can about it without it impacting you too much.,, People become really entitled to their performance. So, you know, I get a very good rating or whatever it is. Next year, turn up and do the same again. I'm gonna get another very good rating, and that's what my right is every year. You have those people, don't you?

James 24:33

Yeah,

Jimmy 24:33

year, they get that

James 24:34

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jimmy 24:36

Make sure you-- pe-people have to earn it because if it becomes their entitlement, they stop performing. And then your results go down, and you're wondering why. Well, you've got a load of top performers that are no longer performing.

James 24:47

Yeah, go on.

Jimmy 24:49

There are a couple other things. Think about showing your appreciation for people outside of performance

James 24:53

Oh, yeah, absolutely. A simple thank you will work wonders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally agree with that.

Jimmy 24:58

can, it absolutely can do. The bar for good performance isn't always perfection. quite often, in hindsight, I've seen your performance, I know now what perfect would have been, and I apply that hindsight lens to your performance and say, "If you did that, that would've been great." Yeah, you're not perfect, and you didn't know that at the outset. And I think ultimately, when you come down and you have the discussion with your team members, I think you do have to, in the nicest possible way, own the message. I know it's a bit of a cliché, but if you're sitting there going, "Well, I thought you were very good, but they all made me give you a good rating," that is not gonna be motivational for that person at all. There's a bit of, short-term pain for long-term gain in some of that. So I think there are practical things that you can do within a system. What about you,

James 25:49

Well, this is I, kind of this, it's good Jimmy and bad James on this one, right? So, that's that's, that's very politically correct. My honest view is it's toxic, right? It's absolute bollocks. The first thing you've got to do is you've got to make a decision, right? Do... Is it, am I gonna stick with this job or not, right? Second thing is, if you've decided you're gonna stick with it, then you've got to suck it up. So find ways to make it work for you. And then if it's the full on,, 10% rack stack, the whole nine yards of it, if you've got 100 people working for you, you are gonna tell 10 people they are useless at the end of the year. You've got no choice about it, right? So I'm full on for finding ways to cheat the system, right? So everybody who leaves, yeah, make sure that you've dropped a wo- a word in HR's ear about how bad they were before they left, just so you can give them the boot after the event. Yeah. Everybody who gets promoted, well, they're below standard, aren't they? 'Cause they've just been promoted. But there are ways to circumvent the system. Everybody else is cheating. It creates cheating. If you're gonna stay, you might as well go with it, So there you go. That is my rather jaundiced view of it. I could write a book, couldn't I? Ways to cheat at performance management. It could be the Amazon management bestseller.

Jimmy 27:03

I think both are legitimate. I, I mean, I don't think my advice was necessarily politically correct. It was more pragmatic versus... Actually, yeah, I, I agree. If you have to work in that system, then finding ways to circumvent it is perfectly legitimate. And, we've both done it at various times and, to various degrees. I mean, I remember one of the, the experiences we had, just the presenting of your people's performance. Observe what works, what works,

James 27:33

your notes. Yeah

Jimmy 27:35

your notes and practice how you're going to deliver it. Even something straightforward like that can make a difference between, getting one rating and getting another. And it shouldn't be that way, but the reality is. So just get good in that example at delivering the, the message to whatever senior group you have to deliver to. That's not about cheating the system. That's, that's playing the system at the end of the day.

James 28:01

Is

Jimmy 28:01

smart

James 28:02

that right? Play the system. Anyway, so let's summarise that then. So we talked about two things then, right? If you can change the system, these are the things we should be doing or thinking about, and if you can't, those are the these are the ways to, what was it? Play the system rather than cheat it.

Jimmy 28:17

Yeah. And, and you got, you gotta be realistic about it. People don't go into their end of the year performance review and think, "This was a great growing experience for me. Wasn't it wonderful?" Just be realistic. They, they do form an opinion of you, and you wanna make sure that opinion of you is, is personal to you rather than letting the system influence how people think about you.

James 28:41

And then I think the other thing that's really important, and we talked about it towards the start, were there are things which do improve performance, yeah? Frequent conversations, clarity, da, da, da, all of that good stuff. That's really important. Your HR system probably does not mandate that, but those are the things you should be doing during the year because frankly, people will realise you're not a bad boss if you're doing those things, and you just have to work within the system that's there.

Jimmy 29:07

So hopefully we've answered both questions, which was, piece of paper, what would you do? And if you haven't got a blank piece of paper and you have to work within a system, are some ways you can find to the system a little bit.

James 29:20

Okay. Super. I'm not frothing yet. Are we all right?

Jimmy 29:25

done well, James. You have grown as a

James 29:27

Yeah. Thank you very much. All right.

Jimmy 29:30

Well done.

James 29:30

talking to you. I'll speak to you next week.

Jimmy 29:32

speak soon.

James 29:33

Ta-ra.

Speaker 29:34

We cover a whole host of topics on this podcast, from purpose to corporate jargon, but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well. Easier said than done. So if you've got unhappy customers or employees, bosses or regulators breathing down your neck, if your backlogs are out of control and your costs are spiraling, and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised just keeps failing to deliver, we can help. If you need to improve your performance, your team's performance, or your organization's, get in touch at jimmy@ajobdonewell.com or james@ajobdonewell.com.