Those Performance Reviews - The Myth of Constructive Criticism

 Let's cut to the chase. If a mentor or even a supervisor wants to provide well-intentioned recommendations on how you can improve your professional performance, they should be doing that in a private totally off-the-record informal conversation. Not via a formal totally on-the-record performance review. 

The official performance review has always served as a kind of documentation for termination. In the GE empire that Jack Welch has created the system was known as rank-and-yank. If what was checked off on your performance review and the textual comments put you at the bottom of your group, you were out. The formal review process released the corporation from any legal liability in the firing. And since it was a firing it skipped that paying unemployment insurance cost.

Currently, in this choppy economy in which cost-reduction can mean survival more and more businesses are using the performance review to quickly downsize the manpower expense. An added advantage of this kind of termination is that it does not transmit a signal of business financial distress the way an official layoff does.

With good reason a junior lawyer is concerned because the performance review was "lukewarm." Here is the thread on Reddit Big Law. During the pandemic boom many law firms over hired. To retain the talent they boosted annual salaries to nosebleed levels. Now with a slowdown in demand they are saddled with expensive overcapacity. As one response indicates to that Reddit post, it has become commonplace for those law firms to position and package the review in such a way as to be the initial step in swinging the ax for performance reasons.

Given these dynamics it is downright naive to trust the contention that superiors want to "help" you by officially evaluating your performance negatively. That is, they claim they intend to motivate you to better performance. If that were really the situation, with no document trail they would be mentoring you. That guidance would be very specific. Not the vague statements on a performance review.

Takeaway: Beware performance-review time. That could put you on short time at the business.

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