I have experienced the pain and the pleasure of annual performance reviews. The pain is when some passive-aggressive leader drops the bomb on you that your work was not up to expectations. I clearly needed to own some of those issues. However, many times these leaders lacked the courage to have difficult conversations or were looking for someone downstream to blame. This post by Chris Lima is a must read:
“In those days we were all told that the way the world worked was to wait until a review to talk about roles, responsibilities and salary.
And more importantly, our expectations were managed that it might take several years to grow into the role we felt we could do right away. Several years!
I don’t know why we didn’t rebel back then. We put up with it. We waited. And because we did it back then, we can easily fall into the trap that people should put up with it now. But it was insane then and it’s still insane now.
- No one wants to wait for a yearly review to get feedback.
- No one wants to wait for a yearly review to talk about their current and future role.
- No one wants to wait for a yearly review to talk about their salary.
- And no one wants to wait for a few years to get recognized for their meaningful work.”
1 Comment
ignivvyrpq · January 23, 2026 at 11:52 pm
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