Every One-on-One Is a Performance Review
A leadership training session reminded me why regular feedback, recognition and development conversations matter more than saving everything for year-end.
Leading People · Feedback · Difficult Conversations · Potential & Development
During a recent leadership training session, I sat with people from different functions and with very different amounts of experience. Some had been leading teams for considerably longer than I had. Yet when we started talking about performance reviews, expectation setting and difficult conversations, the problems sounded remarkably familiar.
This article is inspired by real workplace and leadership experiences. I do not use real names, company names or identifying details. Roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context may be removed, generalised or combined to protect the people and organisations involved while preserving the underlying leadership reflection. Where conversations are referenced, wording may be edited for clarity and anonymity.
That was reassuring. Not because I was pleased to discover that other leaders struggle, but because it challenged the idea that there is some level of experience at which the human parts of leadership become straightforward. You can have managed people for years and still find yourself preparing for a conversation you would rather not have.
I often write from the perspective of consulting and customer-facing teams, because that is where much of my experience comes from. But listening to people from other disciplines reminded me how little some of these challenges care about our functional boundaries. The work might be different. The difficulty of recognising someone’s effort while explaining that something still needs to change is familiar.
It also connects to something I have reflected on before: being the technical expert and being able to lead people are not the same thing. Technical knowledge can help you understand the work. It does not automatically prepare you for the person sitting opposite you, or tell you how to balance encouragement, honesty and accountability in that particular conversation.
Experience matters, of course. It can give you perspective, confidence and more approaches to draw on. But I do not think leadership is a steady climb towards never finding anything difficult again. There are peaks and troughs. You can handle one situation well and then meet another that makes you reconsider how much you understood.
Performance reviews seem to bring a lot of that discomfort into one place. You want people to feel that their contributions have been noticed. You want to be fair about what they have achieved and clear about where they need to grow. You also know that the conversation can carry consequences beyond the feedback itself.
What struck me during the training was how much we ask the year-end review to do. We expect one conversation to represent twelve months of effort, decisions, behaviour, progress and setbacks. Then we wonder why the meeting feels so heavy.
A review that is supposed to cover the whole year can easily become a discussion about the last few months. Those are the examples closest to hand. The earlier contributions, the challenge someone overcame in the spring, or the improvement that happened gradually can become harder to reconstruct. By the time we sit down to prepare, we are trying to recover a year we should have been paying attention to as it happened.
My view is that the easiest way to have a year-end performance conversation is to make it a conversation you have been having all year.
That does not mean spending twelve months rehearsing somebody’s rating. It means noticing things while they are still useful to discuss. Recognise a contribution when the person can still connect your feedback to what they did. Address a concern while there is time to do something about it. Talk about progress while the person is making it, rather than waiting until you need evidence for a form.
If that has been happening, the final review becomes a summary of a shared conversation. Here is what we discussed. Here is what changed. Here are the patterns I have noticed. Here is where I think we should focus next. The person should have room to add their perspective, but they should not need to discover your entire view of their performance in that meeting.
I realise that saying “start at the beginning of the year” is not particularly revolutionary advice. It can sound a bit like telling someone with an overflowing inbox that they should answer their emails. Most leaders understand the principle. The difficulty is sustaining it when the calendar fills up and the urgent work keeps arriving.
For me, the opportunity is in the one-on-one.
When I say every one-on-one is a performance review, I do not mean every conversation should become an assessment. I certainly do not want someone to feel they are being scored every time they sit down with me. I mean that each conversation gives us an opportunity to talk about how the work is going, how the person is developing and what support might make a difference.
That might be five minutes on a meeting they led the previous week. What did they think went well? Was there a moment they found difficult? What did I notice that they might not have seen? There does not need to be a formal process around it for the conversation to be valuable.
It might also be a moment to celebrate something. Perhaps they handled a difficult discussion well, helped somebody outside their team or made a decision with more confidence than they would have a few months earlier. If performance only enters the conversation when something has gone wrong, we should not be surprised when people become uncomfortable the moment we mention feedback.
The expectation needs to be clear from the beginning. Our one-on-ones are not only for working through a list of updates. They are also somewhere we can talk about development, decisions, behaviour and the work you are proud of. Making that explicit helps the conversation feel like a normal part of our relationship rather than an unexpected examination.
There also needs to be room for the other person to disagree. I might have interpreted a meeting differently. I might not know about a constraint they were working around. Regular feedback should help us understand the work more accurately, not give me more opportunities to announce my judgement.
None of this means every one-on-one needs the same agenda. Sometimes the most useful thing is to listen to someone who is struggling. Sometimes there is a practical problem to solve, or they need space to think through something without immediately being coached. The opportunity to discuss performance should not become an obligation to turn every human conversation into a development exercise.
Formal reviews still have a purpose. They create a point at which we look across a period of time, consider the evidence and make decisions. But I want the formal process to capture the relationship and conversations we have already built, rather than compensate for their absence.
I left the training thinking less about how to deliver a better annual review and more about how to stop the annual review carrying so much weight on its own. There will sometimes be new information or a perspective that has not been discussed before. That is different from saving a concern for months and presenting it as something the person should already have understood.
If the most important feedback someone receives from me arrives at year-end, I probably waited too long to give it. And before I ask why they have not improved, I need to ask when I actually gave them the opportunity.
