If the critique is fair, timely feedback also gives you a chance to change instead of letting it build up until they hate you. Imagine your wife/husband told you they always hated your cooking. Why not tell me before instead of while we're divorcing?
If you're guaranteed to get feedback, it's always better delivered in a timely fashion.
Imagine you talk to your manager and coworkers regularly to get feedback but you don't put the negative feedback into a formal software system that encourages politics and backstabbing!
You're right though that the feedback should not be anonymous, I've seen that in action and it just leads to the kind of Machiavellian scheming you describe.
But if (non-anonymous) colleague writes in a system that she thought I was brusque to her, that I wasn't communicative enough during a project, I'd rather know immediately so we can talk it out rather than have her lob it like a bomb at the end of the year.
So if a colleague writes an email to your manager, your managers manager, HR, and to your future manager about your poor handling of an issue you would take that well?
Better than to an email addressed just to you?
The point of this system is to get that feedback immediately instead of down the road.
You want to junk review systems completely, OK. But if you're going to have a review system, better to get that info in the moment.
I'd also add that negative feedback of others makes you (the complainer) also look bad, so there's a built-in incentive for career-minded people to be judicious in their response.
I'd argue it has the potential to make it better since it creates a papertrail and transparency. I'd rather that than Joe Angry Developer sneakily badmouthing me to my boss or my co-workers behind my back.
Worst case it seems like a lateral move as far as politics goes.
How would you respond if I file a HR complaint about you or send a complaint to your manager?
Better than if we had just had a quiet word?
Or now rather than blowing off steam by complaining to another colleague that e.g. you don't want to delegate your co-worker will formally report it into a system used to manage compensation and career progression.
Others will game the system and make sure people write lots of positive comments about them. Now when it comes to the next pay cycle I have dozens of positive comments and you have a couple of positives and a few negatives. Guess how that will work out for you?
It encourages people to complain in the heat of the moment.
Etc etc etc.
Not to mention that people who want to badmouth you behind your back still will.
These things only matter when you need to justify a raise or cover your ass for a termination.
To stretch your analogy... if your spouse doesn't tell you they hate your cooking, that's the real problem: trust and communication. Asking them for feedback after every meal won't help resolve the real problem.
But often, it's not.
A lot of colleagues and managers are too timid to provide timely feedback, they think they need a formal moment like an annual review to speak up.
Do you believe every single employee and manager has the skillset you describe to be open, honest and trustworthy? If not, then having a system to help shepherd feedback isn't a bad idea.
If you're going to get 360 feedback, wouldn't you prefer to have it in a timely fashion instead of getting blindsided monthly, quarterly, or yearly?
Or is the very concept of a 360 where you have issues?
We need to be focusing on the context around failures and what the factors were in a situation where a person's actions contributed to a failure. Why did what they were doing make sense to them at the time?
This isn't captured in a 360 review cycle, nor this particular one. I just don't think it fits the tech paradigm of blamelessness/blame-aware at all.
I am struggling to find any reasonable point in this process. Performance reviews in general are more formality than anything in my opinion. At the end of the day I can gauge how my impact is respected across a company on a mgmt/executive level by the money that lands in my bank account. The review cycle from mgmt really does not address any other intricacies.
You've described basically any feedback mechanism at all. Cooldown time or not, a 360 feedback system only works in a culture that enables it. The feedback will be toxic if the culture is toxic. The timeliness of the feedback isn't likely to change that.
> Performance reviews in general are more formality than anything in my opinion.
Ah, and now we come right to it. You don't actually believe in a system of employee evaluation.
That's your opinion. You're free to have it, but it implies that feedback is not a path to skill or career development, and I deeply and fundamentally disagree with that premise.
> At the end of the day I can gauge how my impact is respected across a company on a mgmt/executive level by the money that lands in my bank account.
If you think that's all that reviews are about--gauging impact, ascribing blame, or simply analyzing failures--you're already missing the point.
Feedback is about many things:
* Identifying and lauding successes.
* Feedback to address performance concerns.
* Feedback for skill improvement.
* Feedback for career development.
If you don't think you have anything to learn from your peers or your managers that can help you in these areas, well... we'll have to agree to disagree.
Your bullet points can be addressed in productive 1-on-1s with your direct report manager and regular check ins between your team and project management to critically discuss recent milestones and what emergent work has been created from them.
I agree with your points, but I feel the formal corporate review process does not sufficiently facilitate them and instead succumb to the pitfalls highlighted where they only focus on the negatives. It is not that I only think reviews are for that, it's that I think those things are a bad end state where formal reviews converge.
The 360 review does not contribute meaningfully toward creating a learning organization. It is not the right mechanism for feedback and reparative methodologies.
We're not building technology. We are building organizations who are building technology. If we are not focusing on the way in which people are doing the work that they are doing as a feature of the actual work, then we are not building a learning organization.
An effort to create continuous feedback is a better gesture than a yearly review, but this article/video is a fluff piece. If the feedback you're getting in a 360 review is in any way new information, then you're not exhibiting the elements that make a good team in the first place.
If you're attempting to aggrandize feedback behind formality and process, even in the name of immediacy, I think it's counterintuitive.
Feedback needs to be a native mechanism that is implicitly built into the way we are working -- not a sidebar conversation. That's what postmortems are for.
Feedback is important.
Negative formal feedback... not so much.
...and the employees "wanted" this? I doubt it.
Seriously, did I misinterpret this? Not trying to be a troll.