The Review: A Ritual of Impossible Honesty

There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of most performance reviews, when both people in the room stop meaning what they say. It arrives quietly. The manager is midway through a sentence about development opportunities. The employee nods, makes a note, says something affirmative. Both are performing fluency in a script neither believes. The review continues. The form gets completed. The ratings align with prior conversations, with budget constraints, with unspoken hierarchies. Everyone knows the dance. No one names it.

We argue endlessly about the performance review, its frequency, its structure, its metrics. We debate whether it should be developmental or evaluative, forward-looking or backward-facing, tied to pay or separated from it. We redesign it, rebrand it, abolish it, then quietly reinstate it under a different name. But we rarely ask what the review reveals about the organisation itself: what it can and cannot hold, what it demands and what it refuses to see.

The review is not simply a tool that works poorly. It is a site where the fundamental forces of organisational life converge and expose their contradictions. It asks for honesty while punishing it. It creates meaning while draining it. It performs belonging while enacting exile. It attempts to stabilise dynamics it can never contain. To look closely at the review is to see something essential about how organisations relate to the people within them.

Power Dressed as Process

The performance review presents itself as neutral ground. A structured conversation. A moment outside the usual flow of work where performance can be assessed objectively, feedback given clearly, development planned thoughtfully. The form says so. The process documentation insists on it. The training for managers emphasises fairness, consistency, evidence.

But there is no neutral ground. The review is saturated with power from the moment it is scheduled. One person sits with the authority to define what counts as good work. The other sits in the position of being defined. This asymmetry is not incidental, it is the organising logic. The manager may speak gently, may invite dialogue, may genuinely want to support. None of this alters the structural reality: one person's interpretation carries institutional weight, and the other's does not.

This dynamic shapes what can be said. The employee knows, without being told, that certain truths are too costly to speak. That naming the dysfunction in the team might read as negativity. That questioning a priority might seem like resistance. That expressing uncertainty might be taken as lack of confidence. So they edit. They translate their experience into the language that will land well, that will not destabilise, that will allow them to remain legible within the system's terms.

The manager, too, is constrained. They operate within a ratings distribution they did not design, a budget they cannot change, priorities they may privately doubt. They know the person in front of them has been doing essential work the system does not measure. They know the rating they are about to give does not reflect the complexity of what this person contributes. But they also know that deviating too far from the norms, being too generous, too critical, too honest about the organisation's own failures, will create problems elsewhere. So they, too, edit. They smooth. They translate messy reality into the form's neat categories.

What emerges is not clarity but a managed performance of clarity. Both parties collaborate in producing a story the organisation can process, even when neither fully believes it. The review does not reveal truth about performance. It reveals the limits of what the organisation can acknowledge about itself.

And this is where the review begins to show its real function. It is not primarily about helping people develop or ensuring fairness. It is about managing the organisation's relationship with complexity it cannot hold. The review allows the organisation to believe it is rational, that it knows its people, that it makes decisions based on merit. It is a story the organisation tells itself. That the story frays under scrutiny, that everyone involved senses the gap between what is said and what is real, this is not incidental. The review works by producing this gap, by requiring both parties to participate in a fiction they can see through.

The Conversion of Unknowing

Performance is not a stable object waiting to be measured. It is interpretation, shaped by perspective, timing, visibility, and the frameworks we bring to it. The manager sees some things and misses others. They are present for certain moments and absent for others. They notice the work that aligns with their own priorities and overlook the work that supports someone else's. They remember the recent mistake more vividly than the quiet competence of months ago. They are influenced by how articulately someone describes their work, by how much someone resembles their idea of what good looks like, by who else is in the room when judgements are made.

The employee knows their own performance through a different lens. They know the work that never surfaced, the problems they solved before anyone noticed, the collaboration that held the team together, the complexity they navigated that no outcome can fully capture. They know, too, that some of what they did well will never be legible to the system. That the work they are most proud of might not fit the goals that were set six months ago, before everything changed.

And everything did change. Priorities shifted. Leadership turned over. The project got redefined. The team lost two people. The market moved. The strategy that made sense in January makes less sense now. But the review proceeds as though the ground beneath it were solid, as though the goals set at the beginning of the year were a meaningful baseline, as though performance could be assessed without accounting for the instability of the context itself.

The organisation cannot hold this level of uncertainty. It needs the review to produce something it can operationalise: a number, a category, a decision. So it demands that the manager translate unknowing into knowing, ambiguity into clarity, complexity into simplicity. The manager does this not because it is accurate but because the system requires it. The review collapses all the interpretive work, all the shifting ground, all the ambiguity into a single point on a scale.

The cost of this demand is borne by the person being reviewed. They experience the gap between the richness of their work and the thinness of how it is seen. They feel the dissonance of being reduced to a rating that does not account for what they actually did, how they did it, or why it mattered. And they learn, over time, that the organisation is not interested in the fullness of their contribution. It is interested in the version that fits the form.

What the review reveals, then, is not the truth about someone's performance but the organisation's need to not know. It must reduce complexity to maintain the illusion of control. It must convert the unknowable into the known, even when this conversion evacuates meaning. The rating is not the endpoint of careful assessment. It is the organisation's refusal to stay with the difficulty of real evaluation.

And this refusal has consequences that extend beyond the review itself. When people learn that the organisation cannot hold complexity, they stop offering it. They stop bringing their uncertainties, their questions about what good work even is, their observations about what the system cannot see. They learn to perform simplicity. They learn to translate themselves into terms the organisation can process, and they learn that this translation is also a kind of disappearance.

Words That Have Stopped Meaning

The review is full of language that points mostly to itself. "Exceeds expectations." "Needs improvement." "Development opportunity." "Alignment." "Impact." These are tokens exchanged in a ritual, not sense made together.

Consider "development." In the review, it almost always means something the employee is not yet doing well enough. It is deficit framed as opportunity. The language is gentle, but the meaning is clear: you are not sufficient as you are. What is rarely explored is whether the gap being named is real or constructed, whether it reflects the person's capability or the organisation's assumptions, whether closing it would actually make them more effective or simply more compliant with a particular model of good work.

Or consider "feedback." The review treats this as a transfer of information from someone who knows to someone who needs to know. But feedback is not neutral data. It is interpretation, shaped by the giver's frameworks, biases, position. When a manager says "You need to be more strategic," they are not describing a fact. They are making a claim about what strategic means, about how they see the employee's work, about what they believe the role requires. The employee might hear this and recognise something true. Or they might hear it and think: you have misunderstood what I am doing. You are asking me to perform a version of strategic that does not fit the problem. You are noticing my style and mistaking it for my thinking.

But the structure of the review does not invite this kind of interrogation. It positions the manager's interpretation as the one that counts. The employee can ask for examples, can seek clarification, can even gently push back. But they do so from a position of disadvantage. Their counter-narrative must be more careful, more evidenced, more deferential than the manager's original claim. And even then, it may not shift the rating.

What the review creates, then, is not shared meaning but the performance of it. Both parties speak the same language, use the same terms, agree on the same development goals. But beneath the surface, the words mean different things. The manager thinks they have been clear. The employee thinks they have understood. Both leave the room slightly confused about whether anything real was said.

This is not a communication problem that better training could solve. It is structural. The review depends on language that has been drained of specificity precisely so it can be used across contexts, across people, across time. "Strategic thinking" can mean a hundred different things, and this vagueness is useful. It allows the organisation to apply the same framework to wildly different roles, to compare people who do incomparable work, to maintain the appearance of consistency. But this same vagueness makes the language useless for actual sensemaking.

Over time, the repetition of hollow language corrodes something. People stop expecting the review to be a site of genuine reflection. They learn to translate themselves into the language the system can hear, and they learn that this translation is also a loss. The review becomes a place where meaning is performed but not made, where words are exchanged but nothing is said.

The Violence of Conditional Acceptance

The review is, among other things, a test of belonging. Not explicitly. No one says: we are deciding whether you are still one of us. But the ritual enacts this question nevertheless. The rating, the feedback, the development plan, all of it communicates something about the employee's standing, their value, their future in the organisation. To be rated highly is to be affirmed in your place. To be rated poorly is to be marked as precarious, as not quite fitting, as potentially disposable.

This creates a bind. The review ostensibly exists to support development, to help people grow. But it does so through a mechanism that is fundamentally evaluative, that sorts people into categories of worth, that produces winners and losers. And because everyone knows this, the review cannot be the open, exploratory conversation it claims to be. It is too risky. There is too much at stake.

The employee who receives critical feedback faces a double task. They must take in what is being said, make sense of it, decide whether it is fair, determine how to respond to it. But they must also manage what this feedback signals about their belonging. Are they still valued? Is their position secure? Have they been marked as a problem? This second task often overwhelms the first. The content of the feedback becomes secondary to the existential question it raises: am I still safe here?

And this is not paranoia. The review is the mechanism through which the organisation signals who is valued and who is not, who has a future and who does not. A poor rating is not simply information about performance. It is a withdrawal of belonging, often delivered kindly, often framed as concern for the employee's growth, but no less consequential for its gentleness. The employee knows this. The manager knows this. Both pretend otherwise.

The manager, meanwhile, is trying to manage belonging, not their own, but their responsibility for it. They know that what they say will shape how the employee feels about their place in the organisation. They know that harsh feedback might demotivate, that sugarcoating might confuse, that ambiguity might create anxiety. They are trying to manage the employee's sense of security while also fulfilling their role as evaluator. This is an impossible position. Most managers resolve it by softening the message, by framing criticism as encouragement, by saying difficult things in ways that obscure their difficulty.

But the employee usually knows what is not being said. They can read the gap between the words and the tone, between the rating and the reassurances. They leave the review with a knot of uncertainty: did I pass? Am I in trouble? Should I be worried? The review, which was supposed to clarify, instead produces a quiet dread.

And for those who are already marginalised, by identity, by role, by proximity to power, the review becomes even more fraught. They know their performance is being interpreted through frames they cannot control, that they are more visible in their failures and less visible in their successes, that they must work harder to be seen as competent, as strategic, as leadership material. The review may claim to assess everyone by the same standards, but it does not account for the fact that the standards themselves are shaped by who has historically been seen as valuable, as central, as belonging.

What the review offers, then, is not belonging but conditional acceptance. You belong if you perform well. You belong if you fit the model. You belong if you can make yourself legible in the organisation's terms. And if you cannot, or if the organisation decides you no longer do, the review becomes the site where that judgement is delivered.

This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. The review is designed to sort, to rank, to differentiate. It must produce hierarchy because the organisation requires it. But it must also deny that this is what it is doing. It must frame sorting as development, ranking as fairness, differentiation as meritocracy. The violence of this is not in the rating itself but in the insistence that the rating is neutral, that it reflects objective reality, that it has nothing to do with power or belonging or the organisation's need to make some people expendable.

What the Review Shows Us

The performance review does not fail because it is badly designed. It fails because it is asked to do something impossible: to make the organisation knowable to itself, to translate the complexity of human work into terms the system can process, to manage power without acknowledging it, to produce meaning from language that has been emptied of it, to enact belonging while performing judgement.

The review is not broken. It is working exactly as designed, not to reveal truth about performance, but to manage the organisation's relationship with what it cannot hold. It is a ritual that allows the organisation to believe it is fair, that it knows its people, that it makes decisions based on merit. And the fact that this belief does not hold, that it frays under scrutiny, that everyone involved senses the gap between what is said and what is real, this is not an issue. This is how the review works.

To sit in a performance review is to feel all of this at once. The pull of dynamics that cannot be neutralised. The discomfort of unknowing that the organisation converts into false certainty. The slow evacuation of meaning from language. The fragile, conditional nature of belonging. The review does not create these forces. It simply makes them impossible to ignore.

And perhaps that is what makes it so uncomfortable. Not that it fails to be what it promises, but that it succeeds in showing us what the organisation is: a system that cannot hold the complexity of the people within it, that must translate them into something simpler, thinner, more manageable. A system that demands we perform ourselves as knowable, even when we are not.

The review ends. The form is filed. The rating is recorded. Both people return to work. And the question the review poses, not in its words but in its structure, in the gap it creates between what is said and what is felt, remains. Not as something to answer, but as something to sit with. What would it mean to build something that did not require this kind of reduction? What would it mean to create space where people could be seen without being simplified, evaluated without being flattened, held without being sorted into categories of worth?

The review cannot answer this. But in its failure, in the discomfort it produces, in the gap between what it promises and what it delivers, it shows us where the question lives.