Breaking Down Silos with Performance Reviews — A Lesson From HSF
I have never encountered an organization that says it wants its people to be less collaborative, or more siloed, and wants to reward people who only look out for themselves.
Yet, every performance review or fitness report inherently measures the individual’s performance — narrowly defined by their parochial role within an organization. Even a 360 review only looks up and down within the same silo as the individual and does nothing to identify work between the silos.
This system enables several sub-optimal elements. First, it allows self promoters to rise above the rest by virtue of making themselves seem better than the rest. Second, it rewards siloed performance, creating leaders who think in silos and empires.
Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF), an international law firm, changed their performance reviews to assess not just individual performance but individual contribution to other’s performance (slides 19–20 of this study by CEB). They ask each employee to include, for each individual performance bullet point, the 2–5 other employees that were essential to their success.
What I like about this approach is that it allows you to map the people that cross boundaries and find how work is actually getting done. You would expect that there will be local clusters around each organization but also that there will be people that cut across the organization in unexpected ways.
Once you can measure these people — the glue that helps the organization get things done — then you can take steps to reward and retain them. HSF’s approach allows them to redefine who is a top performer. And while it is certainly possible to game the system a bit, at any reasonable scale, since it’s a decentralized survey of the most collaborative people in the company, only those who truly do go out and work across the organization to make everyone better will get recognized, making it slightly harder for self-promoters to push their way forward.
This post is written as a lesson for the military — but let’s be honest, most performance review systems even in the private sector could stand to be reformed in order to better align the desired behaviors with the rewarded behaviors.
For the Military
Everything in the armed forces is geared around the team. In fact, while I was in the Marines, being called an individual was routinely one of the biggest insults that could be hurled at you. Given this, it has always surprised me that our promotions are so reliant on a system that allows self promoters to push themselves forward. And it never sat well with me to put myself forward, knowing that everything I accomplished was done because of the performance of other Marines.
We’ve all known incredible performers, who just couldn’t or wouldn’t brag about their own success in language that resonated. If that performer got put under a superior officer who also couldn’t write the kind of fitness reports needed for promotion boards, then those Marines would easily be overlooked in favor of an average performer who knew how to make themselves sound infallible.
The opinions expressed are solely that of the author
