For decades, performance management has had an identity crisis. What should be a process to inspire, develop, and align employees has instead become an experience employees fear, managers dread, and HR departments begrudgingly enforce. Performance reviews have drifted into the realm of organizational compliance—more akin to ticking a box than empowering a human.
It’s no wonder we’re stuck.
Performance management, as it stands today, relies on flawed tools and processes. Chief among them? Human memory.
The Flaws We Can’t Ignore
Let’s talk about memory. Decades of behavioral science research show that memory is a slippery, unreliable thing, prone to distortion and bias. Managers are expected to recall an employee’s behavior, contributions, and outcomes over the past 6, 12, or even 18 months. And not just recall—they must evaluate these moments with razor-sharp accuracy, strip them of bias, and distill them into an objective, actionable conversation.
Spoiler: It’s not happening.
The data tells us why. Recency bias skews managers toward overweighting recent events, while the halo effect colors how one standout moment (good or bad) influences an entire evaluation. Confirmation bias sees managers interpreting employee behaviors through the lens of pre-existing judgments. These biases—and others—turn what should be a developmental moment into something unreliable and demotivating.
And then there’s the deeper, systemic failure: most performance systems are anchored to one side of a false dichotomy. They either align employees to organizational objectives, treating humans like gears in a machine, or they cater to individual growth at the expense of organizational alignment.
The result? A frustrating experience for everyone involved—and a missed opportunity to build something better.
A New Vision for Performance
It’s time to stop asking humans to be perfect recorders of the past and instead lean into what we do best: facilitating connection, insight, and growth.
The solution isn’t to remove humans from performance conversations. It’s to equip them with tools that balance human intuition and technology, enabling us to overcome the limits of memory and bias.
Imagine capturing behaviors, interactions, outputs, and outcomes in real time—not to create a surveillance state, but to build a richer, more accurate picture of performance. Imagine that data being surfaced when it matters most: during conversations that inspire growth, not fear.
This isn’t about grading employees. It’s about amplifying their strengths, uncovering their potential, and aligning personal growth with organizational goals. It’s about fostering trust and dialogue, rather than judgment and compliance.
Performance management doesn’t have to be broken. With the right balance of technology and humanity, we can fix it. Let’s redefine what it means to grow, together.
