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The email landed in my inbox at 4:47pm on a Friday: "Hi Greg, just confirming you've completed all your direct reports' annual performance reviews by Monday's deadline."
I stared at that message for a good thirty seconds before doing something I'd never done in fifteen years of management consulting. I replied: "No, and I'm not going to."
What followed was the most liberating career decision I've made since leaving corporate life in 2018. Because here's what nobody in HR wants to admit: annual performance reviews are not just useless, they're actively damaging your best people and protecting your worst ones.
And if your company is still clinging to this bureaucratic relic, you're hemorrhaging talent to competitors who figured this out years ago.
The Annual Review Scam Nobody Talks About
Let me paint you a picture. It's November, and managers across Australia are frantically trying to remember what their team members accomplished in February. They're scrolling through emails, checking project timelines, and basically reverse-engineering twelve months of performance into a neat little ratings box.
Meanwhile, employees are crafting self-assessments that read like job applications, highlighting achievements while carefully omitting anything that might be construed as failure or weakness. It's theatre, and everyone knows it.
I've sat in on hundreds of these sessions over the years. The good managers hate them because they feel forced to manufacture problems for high performers ("Sarah's excellent, but I need to find something for her development goals"). The bad managers love them because they finally have a formal process to paper over their complete inability to provide ongoing feedback.
But here's the kicker - 67% of employees report that their annual review had no impact on their day-to-day work. None. It's literally a waste of everyone's time, yet we keep doing it because "that's how it's always been done."
That's not management. That's administrative box-ticking disguised as leadership development.
Why the Traditional Model Is Broken Beyond Repair
The fundamental assumption behind annual reviews is that human performance can be accurately assessed, compared, and predicted using standardised metrics applied retrospectively. It's complete nonsense.
Think about your own work for a moment. Does your performance stay consistent across twelve months? Of course not. You have brilliant weeks and terrible weeks, breakthrough projects and complete disasters, periods of high motivation and times when you're just getting through the day.
Now imagine trying to capture all of that complexity in a numerical rating system designed by someone who's never done your job. It's like trying to review a restaurant based on one meal you ate there eight months ago.
I learned this lesson the hard way in 2016 when I was working with a mining services company in Kalgoorlie. Their top-performing project manager had a genuinely terrible Q2 - family issues, health problems, you name it. But he absolutely crushed Q3 and Q4, delivering two major projects ahead of schedule and under budget.