The Development Lie: Bonus Article - We're Measuring the Wrong Things

The Lie We Tell Ourselves

"Performance reviews are necessary for managing people effectively and help organizations make better people decisions."

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's the fundamental problem: we're not even clear on what performance reviews are supposed to accomplish. The data reveals the confusion: 95% of managers are not satisfied with traditional performance management processes, yet we continue using them to make critical decisions about people's careers, compensation, and development (Folks HR, 2025).

The confusion runs deeper. Are performance reviews meant to:

• Evaluate past performance?

• Develop future capabilities?

• Justify compensation decisions?

• Create legal documentation?

• Motivate employees?

Most organizations try to make performance reviews do all of these things simultaneously—and fail at each one. We've created a system that's composed of backward-looking judgment sessions, punishing the exact behaviors we claim to want: learning from mistakes, taking risks, and growing from challenges.

We reward perfection over resilience, creating exactly the opposite conditions needed for high performance. I've long posed this question to leaders: "What if we rewarded overcoming past mistakes and challenges instead of holding them against people?"

Solving the Purpose Problem: One Clear Focus

The reason performance reviews fail is that we're asking one conversation to serve five different masters. Instead of trying to simultaneously evaluate, develop, compensate, document, and motivate, what if we focused on just one clear purpose: helping people become more effective?

This single focus eliminates the confusion and transforms everything:

• Evaluation becomes exploration: "What did you learn?" instead of "What did you achieve?"

• Development becomes natural: Growth is the primary goal, not a secondary benefit

• Compensation follows performance: When people improve, results follow

• Documentation becomes meaningful: We're recording learning and progress, not just compliance

• Motivation increases: People engage when they feel they're growing, not being judged

With this clarity of purpose, we can finally design performance conversations that actually work.

Challenging the Orthodoxy: What If We Flipped Every Assumption?

Research on contrarian thinking shows us the power of questioning fundamental assumptions. When we apply this approach to performance reviews, we uncover some revolutionary possibilities:

Traditional Assumption: "Reviews measure past performance." The Opposite: What if reviews focused on future potential and learning goals?

Instead of "How did you do last quarter?" we'd ask "What do you want to master next quarter?" We'd rate people on growth trajectory, not just current output—an approach supported by decades of research on human development.

Traditional Assumption: "Individual performance ratings." The Opposite: What if we measured collaborative impact?

"How did you help others succeed?" becomes the key question. We'd measure network effects—who became better because of you? This aligns with research showing that collective performance often matters more than individual achievement.

The radical idea: What if the goal wasn't to evaluate people but to help them become more curious about their own growth? Research on motivation and learning suggests this shift from judgment to curiosity could transform how people engage with feedback.

What the Research Actually Shows

Growth Mindset Beats Punishment Mindset

Carol Dweck's decades of research provide compelling evidence for rewarding growth over perfection. Her studies show that "students who believed their intelligence could be developed (a growth mindset) outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed (a fixed mindset)."

More specifically, Dweck has found that "fixed-mindset individuals dread failure because it is a negative statement on their basic abilities, while growth mindset individuals don't mind or fear failure as much because they realize their performance can be improved and learning comes from failure."

Her research demonstrates that "every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time they can get smarter." Yet our performance review systems create fixed-mindset environments—they make people prove their worth based on past performance while hiding their growth areas.

Psychological Safety Drives Performance

Amy Edmondson's Harvard Business School research proves something counterintuitive: high-performing teams report more failures than low-performing teams; not because they fail more, but because they're psychologically safe enough to admit mistakes and learn from them.

In her landmark study "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams," Edmondson found that "when organizations engage in a new learning challenge, performance often suffers, or appears to suffer, in the short term. Moreover, by revealing and analyzing their failures and mistakes, a critical aspect of learning, work groups may appear to be performing poorly when they're actually learning."

Her research shows that psychological safety (defined as "a belief that one can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation") is the foundational condition for learning, innovation, and high performance. Traditional performance reviews create the opposite environment: one where admitting challenges becomes career-limiting.

Collaboration Drives Individual Success

Adam Grant's research in "Give and Take" reveals that the highest performers are often "givers", or people who contribute to others without expecting immediate returns. His studies show that "success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others," challenging the individual-focused approach of traditional performance reviews.

Grant's research demonstrates that givers achieve extraordinary results when organizations create the right conditions, particularly when collaboration and helping behaviors are recognized and rewarded rather than exploitation being allowed to flourish.

The Data on Current Systems

The numbers don't lie:

• 51% of workers consider their annual reviews biased or inaccurate

• 90% of performance appraisals are ineffective

• More than a third of U.S. companies have abandoned traditional performance appraisals entirely

The Fundamental Problem: We Get What We Measure

I often tell leaders: people will behave based upon how they are measured. If we don't change the measuring stick, the behavior won't change, regardless of any training or development we put forth.

This is the core issue with performance reviews. We say we want innovation, risk-taking, and learning from failure; then we measure and reward people for avoiding mistakes, hitting predetermined targets, and maintaining the status quo. The disconnect is profound.

Think about it: If someone knows they'll be evaluated on "zero defects" or "meeting all targets," why would they take intelligent risks or experiment with new approaches? They won't. They'll play it safe, which is exactly the opposite of what most organizations need to thrive in today's rapidly changing world.

The Revolutionary Question: What If We Rewarded Resilience Instead of Perfection?

Instead of asking "What did you do wrong?", what if we asked "How did you grow stronger?"

Traditional Review: "Sarah missed her Q2 targets." (Black mark on record)

Growth-Focused Review: "Sarah identified why she missed Q2 targets, adjusted her strategy, and exceeded Q3 targets—that's exactly the kind of learning agility we want to reward."

This isn't just a nice idea. It's a competitive advantage. Organizations that reward growth over perfection will attract and retain the kind of people who drive innovation and adapt to change.

The Growth-Reward Framework

Instead of Measuring Past Performance, Measure Learning Velocity

• "What surprised you about yourself this quarter?"

• "What assumption about your work got challenged?"

• "How did your thinking evolve?"

• "What challenge did you overcome and what did you learn from it?"

Instead of Individual Ratings, Focus on Collective Impact

• "How did you help others succeed?"

• "What did you learn from a mistake that made the team stronger?"

• "Where did you take a smart risk that taught us something valuable?"

• "Who became better because of you?"

Instead of Annual Events, Create Continuous Growth Conversations

• Weekly 5-minute learning check-ins replace formal reviews

• Real-time recognition of growth behaviors when they happen

• Quarterly "learning reviews" focused on future experiments

• Performance conversations that happen naturally, not on calendar schedules

The Psychological Brilliance of This Approach

When we reward learning from failure instead of punishing it, we:

• Encourage risk-taking (people won't hide from challenges)

• Normalize failure as learning (instead of career-limiting events)

• Reward growth mindset behaviors (the actual skills needed for success)

• Create psychological safety (people can be honest about mistakes)

Making the Change (Without Breaking Everything)

Phase 1: Add, Don't Replace

Start by adding one growth-focused question to existing reviews: "What challenge did you overcome this year? What did you learn from it?"

Phase 2: Pilot and Prove

Test the new approach with willing managers. Design performance conversations the way great coaches work with athletes. Focus on what's next, what to try, how to grow.

Phase 3: Let Results Lead

As teams using growth-focused reviews outperform those using traditional methods, the old system will feel outdated by comparison.

The Competitive Advantage

Organizations that reward growth over perfection will:

• Attract people who thrive on challenges rather than avoid them

• Create cultures of innovation where intelligent failures are valued

• Develop resilient teams that adapt quickly to change

• Build psychological safety that drives both performance and wellbeing

The Bottom Line

We've been measuring the wrong things at the wrong time with the wrong mindset. The research is clear: growth mindset beats fixed mindset, psychological safety drives performance, and learning from failure creates a competitive advantage.

We've created performance review systems that punish the exact behaviors we say we want—learning from mistakes, taking risks, growing from challenges. It's time to stop punishing people for being human and start rewarding them for becoming better.

What would happen in your organization if overcoming setbacks became the highest-rated performance indicator?

The teams that figure this out first will leave everyone else behind.

Alecia Edmonds is a strategic talent leader with 20 years of experience building people development programs that drive business results. She specializes in creating cultures where people thrive while delivering measurable impact.

Bibliography

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.

Folks HR. (2025). Essential Employee Performance Management Statistics in 2025. Retrieved from https://folksrh.com/en/blog/performance-management-statistics/

Grant, A. (2013). Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. Penguin Books.

Rock, D., Davis, J., & Jones, E. (2016). The Performance Management Revolution. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-performance-management-revolution