Part 1: The Case for Agile Performance Management

Over the past few years, I've watched more and more organizations in favor of something more responsive and human. I've been paying attention to this shift for a while now, and I wanted to share what I've learned from experimenting with different performance management approaches.

I hope this helps you rethink how performance reviews work in your organization.

The history of performance reviews

Here's a fun fact that should make you question everything: performance reviews were invented during the Industrial Revolution, back in the early 1900s. The process became mainstream in the 1950s and has evolved to include things like SMART goals, management by objectives, and 360 feedback.

Let that sink in for a moment. The process many organizations still use today was designed when most people worked on assembly lines. Times have changed. Maybe our approach to performance management should too.

What is wrong with annual performance reviews?

Let me be blunt: almost everyone hates performance reviews. Employees dread them. Managers dread them. HR teams dread them. If nearly everyone involved thinks the process is terrible, maybe we should listen.

Here's what I've observed happening with traditional performance reviews:

They kill trust and collaboration. When you rank people against each other, they stop collaborating. Why would I help my colleague succeed if it means I look worse by comparison? It creates exactly the opposite culture you want.

The ratings are subjective. Here's something that really bothers me: performance ratings often say more about the person doing the rating than the person being rated. We all have biases. Some managers are harsh raters, others are lenient. Your rating might depend more on who your manager is than your actual performance. And yet critical decisions—promotions, raises, firings—get made based on these subjective numbers.

They're incredibly expensive. Think about the time involved: preparing for reviews, conducting them, writing them up, calibrating across teams. For a large organization, we're talking millions of hours per year. For a smaller company with 100 people, if everyone spends just 3 hours on the annual review process at $50/hour, that's$15,000. And that doesn't count the lost productivity from the anxiety and distraction they cause.

Now it's time to learn about what you can do to replace this dreaded practice with a process that's more agile and employee-friendly.

What is agile performance management?

If you're familiar with agile software development, you already know the core idea: build things iteratively, get feedback quickly, and adapt based on what you learn. Why not apply the same thinking to how we develop people?

Agile in software means being flexible and adapting to change—instead of planning everything upfront like building construction (foundation, then walls, then roof), you work in small cycles and adjust as you go.

Frequent, regular conversations

Here's the key difference: agile performance management is about continuous improvement on a weekly or monthly basis, not annual course corrections.

Think about it this way: if you're trying to change a habit or develop a skill, waiting a whole year between check-ins is absurd. Yet that's exactly what annual reviews do. The infrequent nature is a recipe for failure.

The frequency piece is crucial. I strongly recommend regular one-on-one meetings with weekly or bi-weekly check-ins as the foundation of your performance management approach. These tactical conversations are similar to retrospectives in agile software development—quick, focused, and action-oriented.

These tactical conversations should focus on near-term work and typically include questions like:

• What are your priorities for the upcoming week?
• Did you hit any roadblocks recently? Anything I can do to help?
• Any recent learnings you'd like to share?

Employee-centric

Here's what I've learned: people are different. They have different personalities, career goals, and working styles. A one-size-fits-all approach to performance management doesn't work—it never has.

You need a full view of each person's experience. What are their goals? What recognition have they received from coworkers? Where are they working to improve? This should be visible and accessible to team leaders and executives.

Aligned interests

I believe employees hate performance reviews because they know this process is based on evaluation, and there's very little interest in helping them improve through coaching. They can see right through this process as interests are not aligned. Instead of asking, "how can I help my team?", people have been asking, "what process can I implement to fire low-performers?"

Agile performance management takes another approach by aligning interests, where team leaders are genuinely interested in helping team members improve at their work. The difference is noticeable.

Data streams

Most performance management systems collect valuable employee data and feedback on an ad-hoc basis. For example, HR systems collect 360-degree feedback once or twice per year, an engagement survey is sent once per year, etc.

An agile performance management system is always-on, meaning employee data/sentiment is being constantly streamed into the system to help aid decision-making and help you uncover issues before they become a big deal.

Think about it – if you're trying to be "agile" but data is only collected on occasion, how are you agile in any way?

Hint: you're not.

Focused on the way people work

As we've discussed agile performance management, it's easy to think of the need for employees to be agile in their daily work, however, this applies to team formation too. Traditional org structures have trouble accounting for the true nature of how businesses work, especially in today's age. For example, it's common for a cross-functional team to "spin-up" inside an organization around a particular project. When the project is complete, the team "winds-down" until the next project begins.

These teams are hidden by tradition HR/performance management systems that build around an org-chart. Today's tools/technologies need to be able to allow teams to be created easily.

Recognition

Finally, agile performance management needs a "fun factor" to keep people engaged. For me, that's recognition.

People should be able to thank each other and give kudos whenever they want, not just during formal reviews. This could be as simple as a physical recognition board in the office, or a digital platform. Whatever you choose, make it easy for people to recognize each other's contributions. When recognition happens in real-time, it's way more meaningful than reading about something you did six months ago in an annual review.

How to get started with agile performance management

Are you sold on the idea of agile performance management, but unsure how to start the process? I've helped manage this process for numerous organizations (both large and small), and I have a few thoughts:

Run a pilot program

Many organizations jump right into trying to implement APM inside their organization. While I appreciate the enthusiasm, I strongly recommend running an internal pilot first with a team or department to iron out the kinks. This is a big step forward for your organization, so it's important to get it right.

By running a pilot, you can de-risk the process over the long haul by discovering and fixing issues that may pop up. In addition, if the pilot goes well, you now have meaningful (and real) data points to evaluate. Most importantly, you have internal advocates for the value of this new process.

Prove business value

Any perceived "disruption" to a business needs to have a valid reason. I recommend that you focus on the business value of making the switch. For example, does agile performance management save time by replacing the annual performance review? If so, make sure to calculate potential savings. To convince other leaders, you need to bring hard data and dollars, not just opinions.

Focus on the team leader

If you decide to evaluate agile performance management software, I strongly encourage you to find vendors focused on empowering team leaders and employees. Many software providers focus on building tools for HR leaders. While this approach makes sense in theory, if a vendor doesn't build a tool that managers actually want to use, HR/Executives won't get the data they need to make effective business decisions.

If you aren't collecting data on a consistent basis, your tool is useless.

Part 2: Beyond the Framework - What Agile Performance Management Missed

After implementing agile performance management practices, I started noticing patterns that reminded me of the early agile project management days. We had replaced annual reviews with weekly check-ins, but were we actually improving performance, or just checking boxes more frequently?

The Checkbox Problem

The issue wasn't with the frequency of feedback - that was genuinely better than annual reviews. The problem was that we had created a new set of rituals without fundamentally changing the underlying mental model. We were still:

• Rating people on scales
• Comparing team members against each other
• Focusing on what went wrong rather than how to improve
• Treating feedback as a manager-to-employee activity
• Using "data streams" to collect metrics that didn't actually help people grow

The weekly check-ins became status updates. The continuous feedback became a stream of minor course corrections. The recognition systems became popularity contests. We had made performance management more frequent, but not necessarily more meaningful.

The Missing Piece: Development Over Evaluation

What struck me was that most agile performance management systems were still fundamentally evaluative rather than developmental. They asked:

• "How well is this person performing?"
• "Are they meeting expectations?"
• "Do they deserve a raise or promotion?"

But they rarely asked:

• "What capability is this person trying to develop?"
• "What obstacles are preventing their growth?"
• "What experiments can we run to help them improve?"

This realization led me to explore alternative approaches. I looked at how sports coaches work with athletes - they don't rate performance every week; they focus on developing specific skills through deliberate practice. I studied educational research on formative vs. summative assessment. I revisited improvement kata and its focus on target conditions and obstacles.

Growth Trajectories Over Performance Ratings

I became convinced that the future of performance management wasn't about better rating systems or more frequent feedback. It was about shifting from evaluation to development. Instead of asking "how good is this person?", we should ask "what is this person working to become?"

This meant:

• Defining growth trajectories - What capabilities does each person want to develop? Where are they now, and where do they want to be in 6 months?
• Identifying obstacles - What's preventing them from getting there? Is it lack of practice opportunities? Missing knowledge? Unclear expectations?
• Running experiments - What can they try this week to make progress? How will they know if it worked?
• Coaching conversations - Regular discussions focused on learning and improvement, not evaluation

The Foundation: Continuous Improvement

This shift toward development and experimentation led me deeper into continuous improvement. The idea is simple: empower everyone in the organization to make regular improvements, both big and small. In manufacturing, they call this Kaizen (Japanese for "change for better"), but the principle works everywhere.

Why Continuous Improvement Matters

Companies that don't continuously improve don't last. The average lifespan of major companies has dropped dramatically over the past century. If you're not moving forward, you're falling behind.

But beyond mere survival, continuous improvement offers real benefits:

More productive - When you let people at all levels solve the problems they see every day, they come up with solutions that actually work. Executives can't possibly understand every issue—you need everyone contributing.

Greater agility - I've seen companies fail not because of market conditions, but because of their own internal processes. When you build a culture of continuous change, you create organizational flexibility that's rare and valuable.

Happier employees - People leave when they feel powerless to change things. When you empower them to fix their daily frustrations, they stick around and they're much happier doing it.

A culture of learning - This might be the most valuable benefit. Yes, you'll fail sometimes. But that's where the breakthroughs happen. Organizations that fear failure never learn the lessons that actually move the business forward.

The PDCA Cycle

I use a simple framework for continuous improvement: Plan–Do–Check–Act. It's basically the scientific method applied to making things better:

Plan - Spot an opportunity based on real data, not hunches. Define what success looks like and how you'll measure it. Get everyone aligned on what you're trying to achieve.

Do - Start small. Run a pilot before rolling anything out widely. This protects you from major mistakes.

Check - Measure what happened against your success criteria. Pay attention to unexpected consequences—sometimes the second-order effects are more important than the obvious ones. Collect feedback from everyone involved.

Act - Make a decision based on what you learned. If it worked, expand it. If not, learn from it and try something else.

This cycle became fundamental to how I thought about performance development. Instead of implementing "best practices" in performance management, I could run experiments:

• What if I replaced feedback with coaching questions? Let me try it for a month and measure the results.
• What if I separated development conversations from compensation? Let me pilot it with one team.
• What if I focused on capability development instead of performance ratings? Let me experiment and see what happens.

Applying Continuous Improvement to People

The same feedback loop that improves manufacturing processes can build better teams. The practical application became clear:

1. Regular one-on-ones - Weekly meetings where you learn what makes each employee tick, understand their struggles, and identify opportunities for growth.

2. Structured reflection - Ask basic questions every week or run weekly retrospectives. Create recurring feedback loops without adding excessive meetings.

3. Balance optimization with innovation - Look for small improvements, but don't miss the big opportunities. If everyone only seeks incremental changes, you might miss the market-shifting moves. It's a balance.

The PDCA cycle gave me a systematic way to experiment with performance management approaches. It wasn't about finding the "right" system and implementing it perfectly. It was about continuously experimenting, learning, and adapting based on what actually worked with real people in real situations.

The Role Clarity Problem

Another issue I discovered was that agile performance management assumed everyone knew what "good performance" looked like in their role. But that's often not true, especially in knowledge work where roles are ambiguous and constantly evolving.

People can't improve their performance if they don't have a clear picture of what excellence looks like. This requires investing time in making the implicit explicit - defining what great work means for different roles, what trade-offs are acceptable, what decisions people are empowered to make.

Part 3: My Current Approach - Performance as Learning

Today, my approach to performance management is radically different from both traditional annual reviews and the early agile performance management frameworks. I think of performance management as continuous learning rather than continuous evaluation.

Individual Development Plans with Target Conditions

Each person I work with has an individual development plan, but it's not a list of training courses or generic competencies. It's structured around target conditions:

• Current state: Where are they now in terms of specific capabilities?
• Target condition: What specific improvement are they working toward in the next 1-3 months?
• Obstacles: What's standing in the way?
• Next experiments: What will they try this week or sprint?

These aren't tied to performance ratings or compensation discussions. They're purely developmental conversations about growth.

Separating Development from Compensation

One of the most important changes I've made is separating development conversations from compensation decisions. When every conversation about performance is implicitly about "do I deserve a raise?", people become defensive. They hide weaknesses, oversell accomplishments, and avoid taking risks.

I have regular (weekly or biweekly) coaching conversations focused entirely on development and learning. These are psychologically safe spaces where we can discuss struggles, experiments that failed, and areas that need work.

Compensation conversations happen separately, less frequently, and are based on market rates, business impact, and scope of responsibility - not on performance ratings from weekly check-ins.

Coaching Questions Over Feedback

I've largely replaced traditional "feedback" with coaching questions. Instead of telling someone what they did well or poorly, I ask:

• "What were you trying to achieve?"
• "What actually happened?"
• "What surprised you?"
• "What would you do differently next time?"
• "What obstacle are you working on right now?"
• "What help do you need?"

These questions help people develop their own judgment and self-assessment capabilities rather than becoming dependent on external evaluation.

Peer Learning Communities

Performance improvement doesn't just happen in one-on-one conversations with managers. Some of the most powerful learning happens when peers share their challenges and experiments with each other.

I facilitate regular peer learning sessions where people share:

• What they're working to improve
• Experiments they've run recently
• What they learned
• Obstacles they're facing

This creates a culture where improvement is normal and expected, and where people actively help each other grow.

Transparent Expectations and Exemplars

One of the most important shifts has been investing heavily in making expectations transparent. For each role, we:

• Define what excellence looks like with specific examples
• Share exemplars of great work (with permission)
• Make decision-making frameworks explicit
• Clarify what autonomy people have

This doesn't mean rigid job descriptions or checklists. It means giving people enough context to evaluate their own work and make good decisions about where to focus their development efforts.

Metrics That Illuminate, Not Evaluate

I still track data, but the purpose is different. Instead of collecting metrics to evaluate people, I use data to illuminate patterns and opportunities for learning:

• Where do people get stuck most often?
• What types of work take longer than expected?
• Where are knowledge gaps causing problems?
• What skills are becoming more important?

This data informs our development priorities and helps us identify where people need support or training.

The Manager as Coach, Not Judge

Perhaps the biggest shift is in how I think about my role as a manager. I'm not there to evaluate people and decide who's "good" or "bad." I'm there to help people develop the capabilities they need to do excellent work and achieve their career aspirations.

This means:

• Creating opportunities for deliberate practice
• Asking good questions that help people think more clearly
• Identifying and removing obstacles
• Connecting people with resources and expertise
• Providing context about business needs and strategy
• Celebrating learning and growth, not just results

When Evaluation Is Necessary

I won't pretend evaluation never happens. Sometimes people aren't in the right role. Sometimes someone's growth trajectory doesn't align with business needs. Sometimes difficult decisions need to be made about promotions or layoffs.

But these evaluative moments should be rare and separate from the ongoing developmental work. And when they do happen, they should never be a surprise - if someone is struggling or misaligned, that should be clear from the ongoing coaching conversations.

Reflections on the Journey

Looking back, the evolution of my thinking on performance management mirrors . I started by rebelling against a broken system (annual reviews), embraced a more frequent but still fundamentally similar system (agile performance management), and eventually realized I needed to change the underlying paradigm entirely.

The shift from evaluation to development is hard. It requires managers to give up some control and trust that people want to improve. It requires organizations to separate development from compensation decisions. It requires investing time in making expectations clear and creating learning opportunities.

But the results are worth it. People are more engaged when they're focused on growth rather than ratings. Teams are more innovative when they're not afraid of being evaluated on every mistake. And perhaps most importantly, people actually get better at their work when they're given the space and support to deliberately practice and experiment.

Performance management shouldn't be something people dread. It should be an ongoing conversation about learning, growth, and becoming better at work that matters. That's the goal I'm still working toward, one coaching conversation at a time.