Like Seth Godin’s ‘Tribes’ and ‘Poke The Box’, ‘Evil Plans’ is a guidbook to adventure by shedding an almost surgical light on what’s possible. I can’t recommend it enough, and as a short blast of good sense and inspiring stories, it’s definitely worth a read. However, tied to the theme of this blog, I found amidst the messages a very simple idea that we often ignore. And almost always, ignore at our peril.

Talking to a co-worker after reading this book about employee evaluation and performance management, this book came up. I was talking about the way performance management seems tied to salary review, and can be seen by employees as a justification of denied reward- i.e, a system which identifies reasons to deny pay rises, not reward them. And by different paths, my colleague and I hit upon the same phrase. Employee reviews need to be about helping people achieve their own ‘evil plans’ – about helping them get paid to do something they love doing anyway.

We’ve made a horrible error, somewhere. We’ve made ‘performance review’ into a gauntlet that employees need to run, with the idea that, if they get through relatively unscathed, there’s a slightly larger pot of gold at the end. We’ve let money become the benchmark – it’s universally applicable, so I guess that made sense, once upon a time. Money means a better life, right? More cash, nicer things, bigger holidays. The universal standard for increased happiness – the mild increase in personal freedom that having more money implies. And yet, this isn’t really true at all. And it’s sucking the will to work out of people’s hearts.

Why aren’t we using an employee review differently? Why isn’t it a process of levelling up, RPG style, to the next professional plane? Why isn’t it a chance, not to withhold money, but to map out the next stage of a career? Why are we trading on satisfying  KPIs with minimum numerical value, without giving those numbers meaning by showing where the brackets end? Why is it about your performance instead of your skills? Why is it about what you didn’t do on paper, rather than what you did do in real life? And why is it something that so many employees dread, or loathe, or deride?

The answer to the last one is simple. We haven’t made it fun. We’ve made it mandatory. We’ve made it a ticked-box, a satisfied process, a checklist item on the ‘be a good manager’ sheet that’s overtaken common sense and good education. We’ve made this whole thing about ‘do this and you might not be disciplined/get more cash’ instead of saying ‘Let’s see what we can do to make you better/get you a better job/build your skills.’ We’ve made performance the benchmark, not people. We’ve reviewed outcomes and not progress.

Read ‘Evil Plans’ – I guarantee there’s something in there for you. And when you’re done, ask yourself if your organisation is helping people live their own evil plans. Ask yourself whether you’re building careers and crafting passionate, engaged people. And ask yourself whether your organisation is driven by satisfied targets, or by the ideas, dreams and joie de vivre  of your people. Because if it’s people, then reducing them to a measurable, subjective, minimum-standard performance review is the easiest way to ge them to look for new challenges elsewhere.