Professional Facepalms: A Six-Part Series

Because if you can’t laugh at your own career mistakes, someone else will.

Part #5 - Feedback Isn’t Optional

How to stop treating performance reviews like the in-office equivalent of bloodletting for distance (or something else equally gratifying).

In Part 5 of Professional Facepalms: A Six-Part Series, we examine why it’s important for you to know what your boss really thinks about you. By hearing it said. Out loud. To your face. While you’re at your desk. Awake.

The Annual Ritual of Dread (A Brief History of Performance Appraisals)

Before we swan forth into my personal quagmire of feedback avoidance, let’s first take a moment to review and admire the long and winding history of performance appraisals.

Let’s start with some definitions. The “performance appraisal” is, at its core, an evaluation of an employee’s past performance used by management to inform decisions related to the employee’s compensation and promotion. It is a key component of a broader management tool referred to as “performance management”, an umbrella term used to describe the ongoing process of setting goals for the employee, coaching them for sustained improvement, and providing them with continuous feedback. Appraisals look back at what you did. Performance management looks ahead to what you might do — assuming your last appraisal didn’t result in you being downsized.

The earliest example of performance appraisals can be traced back eighteen centuries to the Wei Dynasty in China. History’s first-ever HR manager was the so-named “Imperial Rater”, a court official employed by the emperor who would use a nine-point scale to rate members of the ruling family on their performance of everyday tasks. It became the first standardized way to evaluate “government talent” (an oxymoron if there ever was one). But “standardized” doesn’t necessarily mean “fair”, because as Chinese philosopher Sin Yu wrote, “The Imperial Rater seldom rates men according to their merits, but always according to his likes and dislikes.” So, if you were pals with the Imperial Rater, you were golden. If not, you were one misshaped egg roll away from being thrown under the nearest rickshaw. Needless to say, this made the Imperial Rater about as popular amongst members of the ruling family as that annoying dragon who kept showing up uninvited to swallow the sun whenever there was a solar eclipse. At least if you banged on some pots and pans for five or six minutes, the dragon would eventually leave and the sun would be back up in the sky. The Imperial Rater, on the other hand, was both barely tolerated and impossible to fire, thus establishing the very definition of “civil servant”.

And while the Imperial Rater may have set the bar low for objectivity, it turns out that bar stayed exactly where he left it. More on this later.

I’m pretty sure China’s geographic proximity to nearby countries helped pave the way for their adoption of meritless evaluation — a tradition now proudly and indelibly etched into the annals of Olympic figure skating.

But I digress.

More recent attempts at methods to convey annoyance and contempt for an employee’s shortcomings date back to the 1800s at Robert Owen’s textile mills in Scotland, where supervisors used coloured blocks to rate workers’ performance. This was actually a stroke of genius, since (it being the Industrial Revolution and all) the children working in the mills would excitedly collect these blocks to trade with their friends or use them to build whimsical models of Victorian architecture, forgetting all about the eighteen-hour shift they had just put in. (Spoiler alert: This is not true.) It became, no doubt, the inspiration for Lego. (Spoiler alert: Nope.)

By World War I, formal appraisals were introduced by Walter D. Scott (founder of the creatively named “WD Scott & Co.” company), but they didn’t really catch on until the 1950s, when businesses shifted toward using personality-based systems to measure performance. Thankfully, using personality as a metric for performance fell out of vogue by the time I entered the workforce; it may have marked the first time in history that someone failed a performance appraisal before they began their career.

By the time the 1970s rolled around, so many appraisal systems were subjective and opinion-based that it was starting to cause legal problems. Cases went to court, lawyers got rich, cases got settled, lawyers got rich. Pretty soon, the legal bills started to create line items on tax returns that rivaled the GDP of a G7 nation, and companies were forced to rethink their approach to performance management. The result was the introduction of something called psychometrics (which is just a fancy word for the science of measuring psychological attributes, like intelligence, abilities, and personality traits). If you’ve ever been subjected to a Myers-Briggs test to determine your personality type, you’ll recognize that as a psychometric. Then, the “360-degree feedback” craze came onto the scene, where employee evaluations were sourced from multiple perspectives and not just the opinion of your boss. Suddenly everyone had a say in your performance, from your manager to that knob who doesn’t clean the coffee room microwave after the chili he was reheating unceremoniously detonates inside.

Chili shrapnel. This could’ve been avoided if the guy who gave his “two cents” on your performance had spent it on a square of plastic wrap instead. Seriously.

In Canada, performance appraisals arrived quietly, implemented with good intentions and mild discomfort, in keeping with our national approach to confrontation. They became more standardized in the late 20th century, especially in government and larger corporations. But even today, many small and mid-sized businesses treat them like a New Year’s resolution: well-intentioned, inconsistently applied, and often abandoned altogether within a couple of months.

Micro-Appraisals and Macro Avoidance

Of course, when I first encountered performance appraisals, I didn’t know any of this. I just knew they involved paperwork, awkward conversations, and a palpable sense of foreboding. Kind of like writing your will, only with fewer laughs.

When I started my career in 1990, performance appraisals weren’t really a thing. Or maybe they were, and we just weren’t doing them. Either way, I wasn’t losing sleep over it. My philosophy was simple: if I was screwing up, someone would tell me with a convivial “Pull your head out of your ass and straighten up!” and I’d correct course.

Even when annual reviews became “a thing,” I still didn’t see the point. I was doing my job, as was everyone else on the team. Why spend hours crafting goals, rating competencies, and pretending to care about “development plans” when we could all just keep pushing the rock up the hill?

I embraced performance reviews with all the passion that I’d normally reserve for a prostate examination. And when I eventually had people reporting to me, I avoided giving performance appraisals with that same verve. They didn’t need me to annually rank their “collaboration skills” on a scale from “does not play well with others” to “CEO material”. I was already offering support and encouragement throughout the year, plus helping them right their ship whenever they strayed or stalled. I felt like I was basically doing micro-appraisals throughout the year as opposed to a proper one annually. By the way, this is an alternative to the annual performance appraisal known as “continuous feedback”, which is something I didn’t even know at the time. I just figured it was more effective than the “continuous condemnation” model.

Why I Hated Giving Them (And Why That Was a Problem)

Giving performance reviews is awkward. It’s like trying to critique someone’s karaoke performance without crushing their soul. So you want to be honest, but not brutal. Encouraging, but not coddling. Specific, but not nitpicky.

Speaking of honesty without brutality, I’m going to go out on a bit of a tangent here, but stick with me. When it comes to honesty, be it with family, friends, clients, or coworkers, it must be paired with kindness. Like the love and marriage Frank Sinatra sang about, “you can’t have one without the other.” There’s a saying that I’ve really come to appreciate that sums it up nicely:

Honesty without kindness is brutality. Kindness without honesty is manipulation.

So remember that. If you’re going to be honest with someone, be kind as well. And vice versa. And maybe just be kind as a general rule. That works too.

OK, back to what I was talking about…

Anyway, I hated the performance appraisal process. The forms. The development goals. I’d stare at the appraisal template like it was a textbook about quantum physics written in Dutch.

And the rating scales that try to pigeonhole complex cross-sections of human behavior into discrete bite-sized metrics, which is great for spreadsheets but terrible for nuance. Using a rating scale for performance appraisals is a little like using a ruler to measure emotional intelligence. They also invited bias, inconsistency, and the occasional argument with myself over whether “Exceeds Expectation” or “Outstanding” best describes someone’s ability to take initiative. Not everything can be quantified with a letter or a number, especially human behavior. It was fairly uncommon for me to give the highest rating for a competency, simply because I reasoned that there was always room for improvement. And sometimes, I’d mark an “X” between two boxes, just in the hopes that my little act of defiance would somehow get back to the egghead who designed such an inadequate rating scale in the first place. (It didn’t. And my manager just ended up thinking that I wasn’t intelligent enough to mark a box properly…which, ironically, didn’t bode well for my performance appraisal).

So many of my answers seemed to depend on the day I was filling out the form. And so much of my time was spent revisiting, second-guessing, and changing my answers, ratings, or comments. It was like a work in progress that had a deadline of “the day after never”. I quickly learned that when I was doing a performance appraisal, I needed to employ two strategies:

A. I needed to complete the form in one sitting to avoid inconsistent evaluation from one day to the next, and
2. Once it was completed, I needed to trust my process and judgement, and lock it down. No revisits, no changes.

But at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter why I hated doing performance appraisals. What mattered was that I was avoiding doing something that really needed to be done. And while our team may have been high-performing, everyone — even the top performers — still deserved clarity, recognition, direction, and support.

The Great Canadian Shrug: How We Really Feel About Feedback

And it clearly isn’t just me who had a less than cordial relationship with the performance appraisal. I recently read a statistic that I just made up that said that 94% of employees surveyed think performance appraisals are a tremendous waste of resources, and that 98% would rather get paper cuts in between their toes over being on either side of the desk when one is taking place.

All kidding aside, it did actually turn out that I wasn’t alone. A 2023 study on employee experiences with performance appraisals found widespread dissatisfaction with traditional systems, citing the previously mentioned problems related to subjectivity and inconsistency.

In Canada, the sentiment is mixed. Government agencies and large corporations tend to follow structured appraisal systems that are often tied to pay and promotions. But in smaller businesses, especially in tech and creative industries, feedback is often informal or sporadic. Some companies have ditched annual reviews altogether in favor of a continuous feedback model (which I alluded to earlier), peer reviews, or periodic check-ins that sound suspiciously like therapy sessions.

Still, performance appraisals serve a purpose. They provide documentation for HR, help identify training needs, and — when done well — offer employees a roadmap for growth. They’re also a legal safety net for companies when things go sideways.

Why Feedback Still Matters (Even If You Hate It)

Despite my aversion, I’ve come to appreciate the value of performance appraisals. Maybe not the confusingly worded forms or the ridiculous scales, but the conversations. The chance to pause, reflect, and connect. To acknowledge effort, celebrate victories, unpack failures, address concerns, and set a course for the future that is both clearly understood and agreed upon.

Feedback isn’t just about fixing problems. It’s about reinforcing strengths, building trust, and creating a culture where people feel seen. It’s also a two-way street. Employees can share their goals, frustrations, and ideas — assuming they’re not too busy Googling “how to fake enthusiasm in a performance review.”

And yes, appraisals offer legal protection. They document expectations, track progress, and provide evidence if termination becomes necessary. But they also protect relationships. They prevent misunderstandings, resentment, and the slow erosion of morale.

Reflection

Looking back, I wish I’d taken performance appraisals more seriously — not as a bureaucratic chore that was being forced upon me, but as an opportunity…that was also being forced upon me. My cheekiness aside, I’m certain that I missed chances to mentor, recognize, and guide because I let my indifference with the process obscure my vision to see its potential.

I also underestimated how much people value formal feedback, even if they never explicitly said it to me out loud. Not just praise, but honest, constructive input. I assumed silence necessarily meant satisfaction when it didn’t.

And while I still think rating someone’s problem-solving skills on a five-point scale is absurd, I now see the bigger picture. Performance appraisals aren’t about precisely measuring and recording every facet of a team member’s abilities. They’re about connecting with them to establish where they’re at, then giving them the feedback, tools, and support they require to take them where they need to be.

Lesson Learned

Feedback in the form of a performance appraisal shouldn’t be treated as an optional task. It’s essential. As necessary as the casual chinwag about how things are going, or the email that says “Nice job!”. It all matters.

As professionals, we owe it to ourselves and each other to communicate clearly, consistently, and compassionately. To stop equating performance reviews to passing a kidney stone the size of a marble. We need to start looking at them as part of the job, like meetings, emails, and meetings that should’ve been emails.

So, psych yourself up. Schedule the review. Have the conversation. Read the drivel on the form and categorize fragments of human behavior into one of the five options available. In the long and storied history of performance appraisals, there has never been a core competency called “Enthusiastically completes performance appraisals”. But when there is, you’ll be the first to get an “Outstanding” for it.

Or maybe the “X” will be between “Exceeds Expectation” and “Outstanding”. After all, there’s always room for improvement.

Like what you read? I write, rewrite, overthink, rewrite again, and eventually post these things in hopes they resonate. If something struck a chord, sparked an idea, or — most importantly — made you laugh, please drop a comment below. Sarcasm is welcome, cruelty is not. So be honest, and be nice. It’s possible to do both.

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