I don't think that's an opposing viewpoint.

If a manager discovers a long-standing issue whilst preparing for the performance review, then yes, they absolutely must "swallow hard and bring it up".

But not having noticed or provided feedback about that issue at any point in the past is still a failure of management.

I was a manager at Intel during the Grove era. The ranking & rating process of those days forced a team of 8 or so peer managers to look at the performance of all of their reports together. Having 7 other managers point out an issue with one of your reports tends to help you get calibrated. Is it a failure of management to be poorly calibrated about your own people? Yes, a common one.

Hence the hard swallowing.

In my view, giving someone a negative review is only one among many options for dealing with a performance issue. You could always give a neutral review (in terms of the overall rating) and discuss the issue with them verbally, or pledge to resolve the issue in the next year.

If it means you have to let someone have a neutral review that they don't deserve... swallow hard, and start managing after the review is done.

Remember that your employees will be interpreting the review in light of the corporate culture, which they are fully aware of. They will also know whether the problem that you discovered is real or not.

The cost-benefit still doesn't make sense to me. He's talking about doing a very expensive & generally counter-productive activity in the off chance that you might uncover some insight about your employee. I usually tell people the first half of High Output Management is good, but to skip the second half...

> swallow hard

I think that's the moment the "failure" is realized.

That's an opposing viewpoint to "If anything in your performance review is a surprise, then I have failed as a manager" if and only if managers are infallible.