Podcast Summary:

At Work with The Ready
Episode 39: Performance Management "Needs Improvement"
Hosts: Rodney Evans & Sam Spurlin
Date: December 15, 2025

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode dives into the deeply flawed world of traditional performance management systems in organizations, particularly the annual review process. Rodney and Sam take a critical look at why these systems not only fail to achieve their intended outcomes but often harm performance and morale. They explore:

• Why traditional performance management is broken.
• The psychological effects on employees and managers.
• How to reimagine performance management from scratch.
• The role AI might (and shouldn’t) play in both perpetuating and fixing these systems.

Throughout, the tone is irreverent, practical, and people-centered, aiming to spark more humane and effective ways to help people grow at work.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The State of Performance Management: What's Broken?

• The Annual Review "Game" [03:05-05:34]

  • Most organizations conduct annual (or biannual) reviews based on self-assessments, manager evaluations, goal check-ins, and forced rankings.
  • The process is convoluted, time-consuming, and demoralizing—"nobody generally feels particularly good about it at the end."
  • Quote:
    “It's a very convoluted and time consuming process where nobody generally feels particularly good about it at the end.” – Sam (04:33)

• Too Many Jobs, Done Poorly [06:08-06:53]

  • Performance management tries to develop employees, evaluate them, decide on promotions, and justify compensation—all at once.
  • It does none of them well.
  • Quote:
    “You're never going to create a process that does all four of those things at the same time. It's not going to happen.” – Rodney (06:46)

• Lack of Clarity: Who is this for? [08:21-09:32]

  • The process is designed as a compromise for everyone, but ends up serving HR needs for documentation more than anyone’s growth.
  • Quote:
    “The structure of them really ultimately is for HR...But then we pretend...it's really about...conversations with employees. No, it’s not.” – Rodney (08:22)

• Psychological Harm [14:07-15:59]

  • Poorly designed performance reviews damage relationships and psychological safety and leave managers “in an untenable situation.”

• Time Sink and Bureaucracy [11:18-12:06]

  • Managers disappear for weeks to complete reviews, especially in large organizations. This leads to wasted time and energy, sometimes now "outsourced" to AI for efficiency—but the core problems remain.

2. What People Should Be Complaining About

• Missed Growth Opportunities [16:02-16:59]

  • The worst part isn’t just inconvenience, but the missed chance for real professional growth and timely, helpful feedback.

  • Quote:
    “People want to develop a sense of craft…if this is our process…you’re getting very little of that actual growth that you may be hungering for. That is sad and a missed opportunity.” – Sam (16:27)

• Manager’s Lack of Agency and Support [14:07-15:59]

  • Managers are held accountable for performance but given neither the authority nor resources to impact the process or support employees.

3. The Core Design Flaws and How To Start From Scratch

• Clarifying Purpose [17:17-18:01]

  • Stop calling it “performance management”—the whole meaning and intent needs to be clarified first.

  • Quote:
    “I probably start with not calling it performance management…especially when they go together like that.” – Sam (17:21)

• Design for Development and Performance [18:13-20:21]

  • If the system's purpose is actually to develop and increase performance, center the individual as the user.

  • Reduce dependency on titles and promotions by focusing on real, ongoing feedback and growth.

  • Quote:
    “If you center the individual as the user, it completely changes the design of anything…what is a process that is designed to give people enough information, but also enough scaffolding and also enough safety that they can stretch?” – Rodney (19:19)

• Feedback Should Be Rhythmic and Contextual [21:19-22:49]

  • Feedback must match the realities of people’s lives and the ebb and flow of work—sometimes people sprint, sometimes they need to maintain.

  • Quote:
    “No system that I've ever seen…really taps into the fact that work is alive and it grows and decays…We should have feedback that mirrors that.” – Rodney (21:19)

• Feedback Isn’t One Size or One Time [23:41-25:01]

  • True feedback is multimodal: micro-to-macro, fast and slow, team and individual.

  • ASCATS: A simple, micro-feedback format (After this session: Anything I should Start, Continue, or Stop?), invented by Rodney. [23:57]

• Clear, Context-Specific Definitions of ‘Good’ [26:08-27:43]

  • Instead of vague competency matrices, define concretely what is expected at each role/level in terms of actual skills and outcomes.

  • Quote:
    “Do the hard work of specificity, like every other fucking thing we talk about on this show.” – Rodney (28:23)

• Adapt Expectations Over Time [28:50-29:18]

  • Definitions of success must be revisited and allowed to evolve.

4. The Human and Psychological Realities

• Feedback Must Match the Stretch Zone [29:18-32:02]

  • Feedback should aim for an optimal level of challenge—not so high it’s demoralizing, not so low it’s unhelpful. Match feedback and expectations to current ability/context.

  • Quote:
    “I do think a lot about the like, stress and like, performance curve...we have to give feedback in the context of where they are.” – Rodney (29:18)

• Trust as a Foundation [32:02-32:57]

  • High-trust environments make for better, more actionable feedback. Without trust in the feedback-giver, nothing works.

5. The Role (and Limits) of AI in Performance Management

AI in the Status Quo: More Efficient…Badness

• Automating a Broken Process [34:05-35:02]

  • If applied to existing systems, AI just automates poor processes faster (e.g., generating bland feedback summaries).

  • Quote:
    “Doing bad faster is just more bad.” – Sam (34:36)

Designing AI-Aided Feedback Systems from Scratch

• Annotating Actual Work and Feedback [35:14-39:18]

  • AI could analyze a person’s entire quarter—emails, Slack, docs—to help them reflect more effectively before feedback sessions.

  • • An AI “agent” could serve as an additional, neutral voice in feedback sessions, filling gaps (e.g., offering customer perspectives).

  • AI as post-feedback sensemaking partner—helping interpret, suggest actions, and remind users over time.

  • AI in the "flow of work": Nudge behaviors, provide context-specific reminders, mirror patterns.

• AI Enables Deeper, Nonjudgmental Self-Work [40:17-45:38]

  • AI can offer truly unbiased mirrors for deep self-reflection—not limited by human relationships or social constraints.

  • Quote:
    “No human being is ever going to give you the kind of picture of that without bias that AI is.” – Rodney (41:43)

  • Quote:
    “If what it’s telling me is true when I feed it my calendar and it tells me, ‘You are in these places that you should not be because you said you’re not going to do this anymore’—it’s right…It is a mirror in a way that no one who wants to maintain a relationship with me is going to be.” – Rodney (42:21)

• Holistic and Emotional Feedback [45:43-45:38]

  • AI can integrate data about emotional state, physical sensations, and deep background in ways colleagues generally can't.

• Team-Centric Feedback and Invisible Labor [46:02-48:20]

  • AI can observe and synthesize team dynamics, surfacing unseen contributions and imbalances in teaming.

  • Quote:
    “The opportunity that we’re not using AI for is how are we performing as a team…AI will be able to do with and for our closest working groups that no traditional performance system is ever going to do.” – Rodney (46:53)

• Reimagining Talent Mobility [49:02-50:20]

  • In large organizations, AI could help match people to roles/projects more individually, seeing beyond the limits of a manager’s perspective to find better fits elsewhere in the organization.

  • Quote:
    “If you have an AI that is really aware of needs in the organization and what you're actually good at...suddenly you've got a really interesting opportunity for some mixing and matching to put people in contexts where they will thrive.” – Sam (49:32)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We're here to talk about Sam’s performance.” – Rodney, jokingly as Sam reveals he’s left The Ready (02:49)
• “If the first principle of performance management is mitigate legal risk, it is less likely to make performance worse. When we pretend the first principle is to improve performance—that’s why it makes performance worse.” – Rodney (10:33)
• “So many organizations—their feedback is just this ‘once a year, one size, and generally quite big.’ That is asinine.” – Sam (21:19)
• “Do the hard work of specificity, like every other fucking thing we talk about on this show.” – Rodney (28:23)
• “Doing bad faster is just more bad.” – Sam (34:36)
• “It is a mirror in a way that no one who wants to maintain a relationship with me is going to be a mirror.” – Rodney (42:21)
• “You want to have different levels of feedback, at different cadences, not just once a year.” – Sam (24:04)
• "AI can be used in the flow of work...not everything must be an abstraction that gets summarized later in a box." – Rodney (48:20)

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:05 — What is broken about traditional performance management (annual reviews, forced rankings, goal checklists).
• 06:08 — The four “jobs” smooshed together in performance management—development, evaluation, promotion, compensation.
• 14:07 — Real psychological harm and unintended consequences for managers.
• 16:23 — The missed opportunity for real growth conversations.
• 17:17 — Redesigning from scratch: start with purpose, not “performance management.”
• 21:19 — Feedback should be continuous, the process needs both rhythm and context.
• 23:57 — Bite-sized feedback, “ascats” and different cadences.
• 26:08 — Why clarity about roles, levels, and what “good” means matters.
• 29:18 — The performance/stress curve: feedback must match person’s zone.
• 34:05 — If AI simply automates a bad system, it makes things worse.
• 35:14 — How AI could actually help (self-reflection, additional perspectives, nudges).
• 40:17 — AI as a powerful, nonjudgmental sensemaking partner for self-work.
• 46:02 — Team performance, invisible labor, and future roles for AI.
• 49:02 — AI could help people move into organizational contexts where they can actually thrive.

Takeaways

• Traditional performance management is broken because it's trying to do too much and ends up serving no one well—especially not employees or managers.
• Meaningful feedback should be frequent, contextual, multidirectional, and safe—centered on growth, not legal or bureaucratic CYA.
• AI, if simply layered onto old systems, only accelerates dysfunction. But if intentionally designed, it can:
  • Enable nuanced reflection and learning.
  • Surface invisible contributions and help teams grow.
  • Support deep self-work and emotional processing, not just bureaucratic box-checking.
  • Unlock talent mobility and teaming not visible through traditional management lenses.
• Real change starts by clarifying the actual goal—to help people and teams do better work, grow, and thrive.

For those new to these ideas:
This episode is a call to critically examine (and perhaps burn down and rebuild) your organization’s approach to performance feedback, embracing more human, distributed, and tech-enabled ways of helping each other get better at work.