Is this fight happening? I’m ready to see Zuck do to @elonmusk what @elonmusk did to Twitter.

Is there a better way to conduct performance reviews? @josh_io, CEO of @confirmhr, believes Confirm’s new #tech will save #HR teams months of work and reduce #bias. Here’s how. By @deanna_cuadra https://t.co/zo2z3xrNtO

Last night, I got to spend time with my friend @josh_io and 30 talented founders. We talked about overcoming imposter syndrome, hiring challenges, and other lessons I’ve learned from scaling @cartainc. Thanks to Josh and everyone else who came out. I left feeling so inspired.

FULL POST:

Today we know performance reviews are the symptom of a bigger problem: the nature of our work has changed faster than our ability to measure it. We need to unlock the full potential of our smartest, most creative contributors. We owe it to them. The status quo deserves a PIP.

How often does this happen? Our research shows that managers over or underestimate their employee’s performance nearly half the time.

In this example, Tracy and Michael get the same manager ratings. But the people in their networks know the truth.

In every company, there is a small percentage of 10Xers creating massive impact. Bill Gates understood this. He said there were a few people at Microsoft who “made the company.” ONA offers a new baseline to calibrate against. It doesn’t always support the manager’s rating.

At Confirm, we use organizational network analysis (ONA) to measure performance based on every employee’s view of one another. ONA measures work in the way it really happens: through networks.

But companies are stuck in the industrial past. So they force fit the power law into a bell curve. That’s one of the reasons they use calibrations. And politics run rampant.

But in networks, top performers maximize impact—disproportionately. Sometimes we call them “10Xers.” The true talent distribution isn’t a bell curve. It’s a power law.

Performance reviews produce bell curves. In early manufacturing, this made sense. The top performers made the fewest mistakes. That’s why most workers are “average.”

Today, we work in networks. We’re global. We connect in Zoom and Slack. Traditional performance reviews weren’t built for this world of work.

Performance reviews were created in the 1920s. Manufacturing was booming. Most jobs were hierarchical, solitary, and repetitive. Only the manager’s opinion mattered.

We’re hearing a lot about the return of performance reviews. @davidimurray and I started testing our perf software 18 months ago. Now we run cycles for our customers at @confirmhr every day. Perf is broken. But not for the reasons we thought. Here’s why—and how we fixed it. 🧵