| > An immediate review system, which in this case sounds like just a forum for immediate complaints/reprimands, sounds terrible because given a negative situation the feedback hasn't had any cool-down time. It sounds very toxic, tactless, lacking introspection, and easily decorated with anger. You've described basically any feedback mechanism at all. Cooldown time or not, a 360 feedback system only works in a culture that enables it. The feedback will be toxic if the culture is toxic. The timeliness of the feedback isn't likely to change that. > Performance reviews in general are more formality than anything in my opinion. Ah, and now we come right to it. You don't actually believe in a system of employee evaluation. That's your opinion. You're free to have it, but it implies that feedback is not a path to skill or career development, and I deeply and fundamentally disagree with that premise. > At the end of the day I can gauge how my impact is respected across a company on a mgmt/executive level by the money that lands in my bank account. If you think that's all that reviews are about--gauging impact, ascribing blame, or simply analyzing failures--you're already missing the point. Feedback is about many things: * Identifying and lauding successes. * Feedback to address performance concerns. * Feedback for skill improvement. * Feedback for career development. If you don't think you have anything to learn from your peers or your managers that can help you in these areas, well... we'll have to agree to disagree. |
Your bullet points can be addressed in productive 1-on-1s with your direct report manager and regular check ins between your team and project management to critically discuss recent milestones and what emergent work has been created from them.
I agree with your points, but I feel the formal corporate review process does not sufficiently facilitate them and instead succumb to the pitfalls highlighted where they only focus on the negatives. It is not that I only think reviews are for that, it's that I think those things are a bad end state where formal reviews converge.
The 360 review does not contribute meaningfully toward creating a learning organization. It is not the right mechanism for feedback and reparative methodologies.
We're not building technology. We are building organizations who are building technology. If we are not focusing on the way in which people are doing the work that they are doing as a feature of the actual work, then we are not building a learning organization.
An effort to create continuous feedback is a better gesture than a yearly review, but this article/video is a fluff piece. If the feedback you're getting in a 360 review is in any way new information, then you're not exhibiting the elements that make a good team in the first place.
If you're attempting to aggrandize feedback behind formality and process, even in the name of immediacy, I think it's counterintuitive.
Feedback needs to be a native mechanism that is implicitly built into the way we are working -- not a sidebar conversation. That's what postmortems are for.