Covey says Performance Reviews are Meaningless

If you have been keeping up with my recent rant about performance reviews, you will understand how sweet it was to read this column in Chief Learning Officer Magazine called Beyond the Performance Review by Stephen Covey, in which he says:

"The old-time performance review has become a meaningless ritual, a holdover from the Industrial Age mindset of treating people like interchangeable parts in a machine. If you’re a business leader in the 21st century, you know that employees are by far your most important asset. You treat them as volunteers, just as you treat customers as volunteers, because they choose to volunteer the best part of themselves—their hearts and minds—to your firm. And they have more choices than ever about where and what they will volunteer."

To be fair and accurate, Covey does not go so far as to say scrap performance reviews, but he does advocate scrapping anything that resembles a traditional performance review (which most companies use today).

By the way:

I took part in a lively Podcast discussion about the "scrap the performance appraisals" discussion with Bren Connelly, Rob May, and Laurence Haughton. It was a great discussion that unfortunately suffered from technical challenges. So I will warn you, that you will need to turn your head phones way up and be in a quiet place to hear it all. Otherwise, it was fun and interesting.

Click here to listen.