Your Performance Reviews Are Damaging Your Team (Science Shows Why)

When Deepak fired his top-performing sales executive, his board thought he'd lost his mind.

The numbers were stellar. Client satisfaction was high. The executive checked every box on their performance metrics. Yet something was deeply wrong, and Deepak, CEO, knew it.

"The results were great," he told me later, "but the strategies used to get those results were destroying our culture."

Here's what traditional performance management missed: His executive was hitting targets by undermining colleagues, hoarding information, using scare tactics, and creating a toxic environment that was silently driving away talent.

Can you relate?

If you're measuring what's easy instead of what matters, you're not alone. But there's a science to getting performance management right and it starts with understanding this truth: behavior drives results, but the results you are measuring may not be the most important ones.

Just ask Dr. Simon, a brilliant doctor known for his attention to detail in complicated cases. His satisfaction scores were plummeting despite his excellent clinical outcomes. The reason? His interactions with patients left them feeling discounted, undervalued, and not listened to. While Dr. Simon was incredible at finding patterns and underlying health issues that most doctors miss, he was losing patients to less brilliant doctors because of his interactions.

If only measuring clinical outcomes, the CEO of Dr. Simon's practice would have found himself in troubled times quickly.

Here's what behavior science teaches us about performance management:

1. Results are lagging indicators. By the time you see them the behaviors that created them - good or bad - are well practiced.
2. What you measure becomes what matters. Marcel, a CEO of a behavior health company started only monitoring clinician billable hours. The result? More billable hours....and more unethical behavior, client complaints..and ultimately poorer client outcomes. When he pivoted and began measuring billable hours, client satisfaction and outcomes, and compliance with their code of conduct, he saw not only a rise in billable hours, but overall services were better too!
3. The strongest behaviors are often not measured by traditional performance appraisals. Remember Deepek's sales executive? His numbers looked great because the damage he caused wasn't being measured.

Think about your current performance management system. Are you tracking:

• What people achieve, but not how they achieve it?
• Individual results, but not team impact?
• Outcomes, but not the behaviors driving them?

Here's the catch: when you focus on behaviors, results will follow! The same is not true the other way around. Results do not determine behaviors.

When you focus on behaviors, results will follow!

Need proof? When Yara took over HR at a major consulting firm, she completely redesigned their performance system, focusing it on behaviors instead of outcomes. She measured knowledge sharing, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration. Within six months, both revenue and retention improved - without ever making them explicit targets.

Ready to refocus your performance management system? Follow these steps:

1. Identify your critical behaviors. What specific actions drive your most important outcomes?
2. Make the invisible visible. Create clear, objective and observable measures for these behaviors.
3. Build behavior-based feedback loops. Don't wait for quarterly reviews - behavior needs immediate consequences. In fact, this might be even more important than a quarterly review.
4. Align your reinforcement systems. Focus on reinforcing the behaviors and not rewarding the outcomes, which may or may not be a reflection of the right behaviors.

Your next behavioral cusp is hiding in plain sight - in the daily behaviors your current system ignores.

Ready to transform your system but not sure where to start? Let's talk. In our complimentary session, we'll map your critical behaviors and design a system to measure what really matters.

Remember: You get the behaviors you measure, not the ones you hope for.