Surprise Performance Ratings

There are good surprises at work. A promotion. Unexpected recognition. Finding out someone brought a tasty snack. Your performance ratings should not be one of them.

Performance reviews are an important part of People Operations. Done well, they document progress, identify strong performers, highlight opportunities for development, reveal broader team strengths and gaps, and demonstrate that an organization is invested in employee growth. 

Companies approach them differently. Annual reviews. Semiannual reviews. Quarterly check-ins. No ratings. Competencies. Goals. Some combination of the above. I’m less concerned about the exact format than I am about one principle: 

Whatever is written in a performance review shouldn’t be news to the employee reading it. 

A performance review should document performance, not reveal it. Formal documentation doesn’t need to happen every day. Feedback should.

If an employee is missing expectations, they should know.

If they’re exceeding expectations, they should know that too.

A manager shouldn’t spend six months quietly being frustrated with someone’s performance, discussing the problem with their own manager, mentioning it to HR, adjusting assignments, and mentally downgrading the employee - without ever clearly telling the person whose performance is supposedly the problem.

Then review season arrives.

The employee receives a poor rating that they’re surprised by.

At that point, something has already gone wrong. 

Surprise is a symptom. Figure out what caused it. 

When an employee is genuinely being blindsided by a performance rating, I don’t think HR’s job should end with explaining the rating. I want to understand why the surprise happened. 

• Did the manager clearly communicate their concerns?

• Was feedback specific enough for the employee to understand that there was a performance issue?

• Did the manager soften the message so much that the employee reasonably didn’t understand the significance?

• Was the feedback given once, casually six months ago and never revisited?

• Did the employee receive the feedback and refuse to act on it?

• Does the manager avoid difficult conversations generally?

• Are other employees on the team equally unclear about where they stand?

The last question matters.

Where there’s one, there may be others. 

A surprised employee might represent an isolated communication breakdown between one manager and one direct report. Or, it might reveal something larger about how that manager leads.

If the same pattern appears across multiple teams, you may be looking at an organizational problem: a culture where managers aren’t expected, trained, or comfortable enough to give meaningful feedback. In this case the performance rating is a symptom. The management culture is the problem. 

You probably don’t need another performance management tool.

When performance management isn’t working, organizations often reach for infrastructure - a better HRIS, a continuous feedback platform, more ratings categories, a new reivew template, another manager form.  But, before investing in another tool, I’d ask a much simpler question:

Are managers actually talking to their employees about their performance?

One-on-ones are an obvious place for this.

• What’s going well?

• What’s getting in the way?

• What needs to improve?

• What has the manager noticed?

• What has the employee noticed?

• What feedback has come from others?

• What does success look like between now and our next conversation?

You don’t need a specialized software for those conversations. Feedback can happen in a meeting, over email, in a Slack. Sometimes it takes two minutes. The important thing is that it happens.

Feedback has a shelf life. If something happens today, talk about it today - or reasonably close to it. Feedback delivered near the behavior is easier to understand because everyone still has the context.

Compare:

"In yesterday's client meeting, when they asked about the implementation timeline, you committed to a date before checking with the team. Next time, I need you to confirm internally before making that commitment."

with:

"Over the past six months, you haven't demonstrated strong stakeholder management."

One gives an employee something specific to understand and change. The other requires them to reconstruct six months of interactions and guess what their manager means.

Positive feedback works the same way:

If someone handles a difficult situation exceptionally well, tell them.

If another leader compliments their work, pass it along.

If you see the behavior you want them to continue, reinforce it while they can connect the recognition to what they actually did.

Feedback is much more useful when employees can do something with it.

Poor communication doesn’t just affect the struggling employee.

There is another consequence when managers fail to address performance problems: everyone else can see them. 

Maybe employees don’t know everything happening behind the scenes - and they shouldn’t. But, teams usually have a pretty good sense of who consistently delivers and who consistently doesn’t. 

When strong performers repeatedly compensate for missed deadlines, fix someone else’s mistakes, absorb extra work, or watch expectations seemingly go unenforced, they start drawing conclusions. 

Perhaps there are consequences happening privately. But if poor performance continues indefinitely, the perception becomes:

It doesn’t matter. 

That’s dangerous. Nothing makes accountability feel optional faster than watching the people meeting expectations repeatedly carry the people who aren’t.

Good performance management isn’t only abut helping one struggling employee improve. It’s also about demonstrating to the rest of the team that expectations mean something. 

Surprise erodes trust. 

That is particularly important when the surprise is negative. Imagine spending a year believing you’re doing reasonably well. Maybe your manager has said “good job.” Your one-on-ones have seemed normal. No one has told you there’s a significant problem. Then you open your performance review and discover that your manager has apparently been dissatisfied with your work for months.

Even if every criticism is legitimate, the employee is now processing two things:

The performance feedback itself. And Why didn’t you tell me?

That’s when trust starts to erode.

• If my manager knew I was struggling and didn’t give me a meaningful opportunity to address it, can I trust their feedback going forward?

• If I though our conversations were candid and apparently they weren’t, what else am I misunderstanding?

• And if the organizational signs off on the process, is this how performance is handled there?

A performance management problem can quickly become an employee experience problem.

No surprises does not mean no disagreement.

There is an important distinction here. An employee can understand their manager’s concerns and still disagree with their rating. That’s okay. 

No surprises does not mean everyone has to agree. It means the employee should understand how the organization arrived at the conclusion.

• They’ve heard the feedback before.

• They’ve been given concrete examples.

• Expectations were clear.

• There was an opportunity to respond.

• There was opportunity to improve.

The final rating might still be disappointing. It just shouldn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. 

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Managers have to manage

HR can build a thoughtful performance framework. We can define competencies, create rating scales, establish review cycles, train managers, facilitate calibration, send increasingly desperate reminders that reviews were due last Friday.

What HR cannot do is manage every employee on behalf of their manager.

A manager who doesn't communicate with their team isn't fully managing their team.

• Giving feedback is part of the job.

• So is recognizing good work.

• So is addressing poor performance.

• So is having uncomfortable conversations before they become crises.

Performance management isn't an HR process that managers occasionally participate in.

It's a management responsibility that HR helps managers do well.

The performance review should be the recap

When review season arrives, an employee should already have a reasonably accurate understanding of how they're doing. The review brings the pieces together.

• Here are your accomplishments.

• Here's where you've grown.

• Here's what you do exceptionally well.

• Here's where we still need improvement.

• Here are the priorities for what's next.

There may be nuance. There may be disagreement. There may even be disappointment.

But there shouldn't be shock. Because unaddressed issues tend to fester.

Addressed issues have a chance to be resolved.

If an employee learns for the first time during their performance review that there's a serious problem with their performance, don't just ask what's wrong with the employee. Ask what happened during all the conversations that should have come before it.

Because if the rating is the first time they're hearing the feedback, the performance review isn't where the problem started.

I help organizations build practical performance processes that give employees clear expectations, equip managers to have better conversations, and turn formal reviews into a useful part of an ongoing feedback cycle rather than an event everyone dreads.