Evaluating performance, especially in the domain of knowledge work, can be challenging. While some functions have straightforward and easily measurable goals, like a salesperson's quota, other functions are more nuanced: lacking clear outputs or influencing outcomes without directly being responsible.
This is not too dissimilar from some roles in sports. For example, a hockey defenseman may not rack up many goals or assists, so on the surface, it may look like they aren't contributing. Looking a layer deeper into things that are less immediately visible, like their "plus/minus", or how much more their team scores or is scored on when they're on the ice, or other metrics that enable goals and assists to happen. There are more advanced metrics too, but the primary measures of their contributions often look questionable when compared to their front-line peers.
In a business setting, while no one will argue that more revenue is good, the outcomes associated with some other functions can either be outside the control of the individual being evaluated or a few layers removed from the two core measurables: adding revenue and reducing cost.
Beyond measurable outputs, also consider values. How do we reward the right behavior? I can get revenue by tricking customers and selling them an ill-fitting solution, but it creates negative effects on the company in the long term. Rewarding revenue is great, but how that revenue was earned creates challenges that make future revenue harder to get, especially if the company develops a reputation as sleazy or untrustworthy. For the individual, they may stay just long enough to collect their commission check and depart before the company's reputation deteriorates.
Behavior is harder to measure -- it is more qualitative than it is quantitative. It requires more careful and honest observation of ourselves and our peers. More critically, it means having a strong sense of what that sort of behavior looks like. This goes back to having a clear values system and being able to demonstrate those values in practice, because it becomes something you can lean on as a proxy for real behaviors across the team. Before you can evaluate performance against a behavior, you need to establish what behaviors you want to drive and how this looks like in practice -- much more challenging than "add revenue" or "reduce cost".
I want to spend time talking about how what kinds of insights we can gather and how to do so in a way that reduces the burden on employees and managers while being transparent, fair, and difficult to game for individual benefit.
But I don't want to spend time doing this
I want to address something here that may get into the realm of philosophy, and even worse, politics and economy.
A lot of people detest this stuff. They hate the formality. They hate having to "justify their existence". Look, boss, this job is my livelihood and I need a paycheck -- I do the work, you pay me for the work. Reminding you about what I did and how I did it, receiving a grade and insight into my "potential" or what I need to "work on" isn't something I care about.
I can be sympathetic to this view. There are many relationships where this makes sense. For example, if I hire an electrician to redo the wiring in my house, I pay them for that job, and they do the work. That is the extent of the arrangement. I can choose to rehire the individual if they do a great job, or if it's shoddy, I don't hire them again. There isn't an expectation of ongoing, "permanent" employment, unless I have them on retainer (and I hope that my house wouldn't require such frequent visits from an electrician!)
Corporate work, with full-time employees who may work on projects and tasks that are shifting and changing as the business needs change, is a different ballgame. It's not uncommon for employees to get hired explicitly to deal with one problem, only for that to be de-emphasized and their focus shifting elsewhere. Corporations wax and wane, and the business needs shift.
Full-time employees are preferred in many cases over contractors because there is a sense of ownership over the general problem space, beyond specific tasks or one-off projects that are completed. We can get into how this gets compensated and rewarded, but the main point I want to drive at here is that full-time employees work on longer term projects with no clear end dates and shifting objectives, so regular check-ins to see how they're doing and what needs to get better as the situation changes and evolves is important to ensure the right people are working on problems they are equipped to tackle.
If the employee is brought in only for very specific, narrow-range of tasks, and is just relied upon to execute against their expertise, then the engagement ends -- performance management outside of direct feedback during the project doesn't really matter. There is no long term.
Full-time employees in a knowledge work setting are different. Performance management is necessary to check in on the situation and continue developing employees to handle changing needs. It is fantasy to think that "the work" in corporations, will stay the same forever.
It's a difficult thing to properly parse out and discuss, since it is so nuanced. Employees at corporations are considered "labor" but also need to operate as though they are "owners" of their space, or the set of tasks they manage. While the core function of other business investments or expenses, like software, furniture, and so forth, often have explicit and unchanging needs, the work that labor needs to do, especially what's traditionally viewed as "white collar" labor, is constantly shifting because the problems of the business continue to evolve.
For example, when I worked at a Panera Bread as an Associate Trainer, my role was well-established and had a clear baseline expectation that didn't change too much. There may be new sandwiches and salads to assemble or new products to speak to, but the core knowledge and skills were essentially the same. The range of tasks I was expected to complete was narrow. There was little need to identify new ways to do things or ambiguous problems to solve. The most ambiguous challenges I dealt with were determining where to focus my time during a rush and making a call if I should leave my station to run dishes or bus tables. But even then, those decisions were often made by a manager who was already floating across the restaurant.
Performance really came down to things like showing up on time and visible displays of effort. I was mostly evaluated for my ability to be reliably executing a set of tasks that I was hired to do. As long as I showed up on time, wasn't rude to guests, washed my hands, and didn't move too slowly, I'd be fine. These didn't change significantly during my time there, and there was little need for formal development conversations. While my boss helped me move into the trainer role and we talked about management potential, we never took this too far because I knew I was going away to school and wouldn't be working there full-time for long.
Fast forward to my years in corporate, things look different. At one company, I was hired to schedule interviews, then quickly took on managing full-cycle recruitment, and then built out a new training program. These jobs all required different skills and were outside of what I was originally evaluated to be able to do. Because of that, it makes sense that the company would want to do regular check-ins to see how I was doing, how I felt I was doing, what I actually was doing, and what help I needed to continue being the right person for the job as things shifted.
The complexity and scale of organizations requires them to build capabilities into their system to cover gaps as they arise and prepare for new people to take over different parts of the system. As organizations scale, it is hard for leaders to know the ins and outs of every aspect of the business, and also to know how to approach new investments -- especially when it comes to hiring, training, and evaluating the talent they already have. Performance management processes are a way to document and scale this knowledge so that it can be acted upon.
Now, of course this process can be corrupted, and executives with limited context can make poor choices because of faulty data or bad assumptions. I don't think this makes the process itself bad or not worth doing, but that the cost of doing it poorly is high.
I'll use sports teams as an example. Baseball teams build huge analytics, player development, and scouting departments because they know rigorously evaluating their own talent and potential draftees is what they need to do to field a winning roster. For baseball players, they don't need to document their performance in the same way because what they do is so heavily documented and filmed (especially now), but they also share their own insights into what's harder to measure -- their psychologically, what they care about, and where they feel like they can make more of an impact. The organization needs to observe and draw these insights out to make informed decisions on who to invest in so that they can win. Complex organizations should not be operating differently.
If I'm a leader at an organization, I want a core capability to be the organization's ability to identify talent. While we'd call evaluating and selecting outside talent "recruiting", the in-house evaluation would be labeled "performance management", while figuring out who future leaders may be is "succession planning". It's this that helps the organization move decisively when needing to expand or contract its workforce and figuring out who internally can handle emerging needs or grow into leadership over time.
So for people who groan at the thought of doing this stuff, I get that it can be an uncomfortable exercise, and in a shitty work environment, it can feel highly performative and useless. Nothing feels worse than trying to justify your existence or explain to your boss why you're great at your job when they are doubting you or flat out poor at evaluation. But when done well, it can set your career and company on a better trajectory. At least, I like to think so.
So let's identify.
In corporate, there are really two categories of things to use to identify performance and potential for future performance: 1) results and 2) behavior.
Results are anything that can be clearly measured or answered in a yes/no. How much revenue did you generate as a salesperson? How many trouble tickets did you close out? Were these results above, at, or below benchmark expectations?
Results are outputs. It's where we should start when evaluating, because if results aren't there, it indicates an underlying problem. If the results are there, then we should seek to learn how they were achieved so that they can be replicated elsewhere. In doing this, we better understand the behaviors that drove those results, and can figure out if there is something unique only this person can achieve or if there is a repeatable set of actions that can be taken to achieve outsized results. In addition, we can see if this is done ethically and without sacrificing long-term success of the business, per our example above.
Behaviors are inputs. This is how we do our work, from the physical processes we follow to get the work done, to the attitude we take when doing the work. While tangible behaviors, like a workflow, are easy to observe and evaluate, social behaviors, are hard. They're context and culturally dependent. There is how the individual behaves and how others react to that behavior that shape the results. There are knock-on effects of social behavior that can shape how the work actually gets done, which can inhibit teams from performing their best, as well as what actually gets measured.
Social behavior in the organization is upstream of almost everything else that happens over time. From the way the organization is designed, creating a more tangible structure that shapes how the work is done, to what is rewarded, social behavior is like the air we breathe: we don't see it, but we know it's there.
Organizations need to be incredibly thoughtful in establishing norms around both kinds of behavior, but in general I'd spend more time on social behavior. While the physical processes we follow may change as the business needs shift or technology evolves, the way we approach that work and engage with each other is more likely to remain timeless. This is why establishing clear values upfront is so important -- it creates blueprint for what good social behavior at organizations can look like.
With values established (assuming you followed or plan to follow what we talked about earlier), we then need to figure out how do we actually identify these values manifesting themselves in practice. How does a value translate to a behavior? From there, we need to ask, how do we measure, reinforce, and scale this?
Mapping values to behavior
There is part of me that hates using the word "behavior" because it feels coded like a word you use to describe a child, often in negative light. "You need to improve your behavior". Maybe this is just my own experience, but I wanted to take a quick pause to apologize to anyone who finds this word infantilizing, but I do think on paper it is probably the best way to describe the way we do what we do.
Now, behaviors are usually labeled and perceived by others pending on their own compass. For example, if I am frugal and live beneath my means, eating rice and beans and eschewing modern comforts, the stoics would probably describe my behavior as "virtuous", while someone fully sympathetic to hedonistic tendencies or consumer culture may think my behavior is both foolish and joyless.
I recall a conversation I had with a friend about a mutual friend who was struggling financially to pay their bills. They were consistently finding themselves overspending on credit cards and carrying a balance, making it hard to save for emergencies. My view was that this friend should try to cut out some of the less essential items until they could get to zero debt and create a margin of safety, like an emergency fund. My friend said that they should just find a rich husband. That divergence in views and value judgment on behaviors shapes our recommendations and how we perceive action.
There are countless examples of this. We can look at religious and cultural beliefs around food and how that shapes societies: like how Jewish people who follow a kosher diet eschew pork, while it is a staple of Chinese cuisine. Hindus venerate cows and refuse to eat beef, while America has a beef hot dog eating contest every fourth of July, the celebration of America's birthday. Culture shapes values which shapes behavior.
While broader religious, cultural, ethnic, and national beliefs are a bit tougher to shape -- these are reinforced over centuries -- at the organizational level, we have an opportunity to craft our own values system, which then cascades into the behaviors we venerate more as they align to those values.
So how do we map values to behaviors? Let's use an example.
Earlier on, we wrote up this sample value:
"Value 2: Take Responsibility We own up to our faults and deliver on what we say we will. We treat customer problems as our own and work relentlessly to solve them together. We aren't afraid to jump in to help our team deliver in areas outside of our core responsibilities. We don't do this for personal glory, we do it because it's the right thing to do."
Let's break this down. Essentially, we need to translate this aspirational statement into tangible, observable behaviors.
Start with the implicit verbs and situations already embedded in your value statement. The text above implicitly shares some key verbs, or actions, that relate to this value.
- "own up to our faults" → When you make a mistake, do you proactively acknowledge it before being asked?
- "deliver on what we say we will" → Do you follow through on commitments, or do deadlines slip without communication?
- "treat customer problems as our own" → When a customer issue arises, do you pass it off or see it through to resolution?
- "jump in to help" → Have you assisted with work outside your job description when needed to support the overall business?
The mapping process is essentially extracting the scenarios and converting statements into questions that reveal presence or absence of the behavior.
Your value statement describes three domains where responsibility shows up: personal accountability (owning faults), customer orientation (solving their problems), and team support (helping beyond your role).
Now, to make it mappable, consider the below:
- Identify the domains where the value should manifest (individual work, customer interactions, team dynamics)
- Find the action verbs that signal the value in practice (own up, deliver, treat as, jump in)
- Convert to observable moments by asking "When would someone have the opportunity to demonstrate this?" and "What would we see them do differently than someone who doesn't hold this value?"
The goal isn't to reduce values to a checklist or to capture every possible manifestation of responsibility in your organization. Rather, it's to provide enough concrete examples that people can pattern-match their own situations to the underlying principle.
When employees can see what responsibility looks like in practice, they can begin to recognize it in themselves and others. When leaders can point to specific behaviors, they can reinforce the values they want to see and address gaps with precision rather than vague feedback about "not being a team player." This is how values move from inspirational language to operational reality. Many organizations fail to do this adequately, or don't truly live their values -- especially when it is inconvenient.
I know this type of stuff can feel unlike many peoples' lived experiences -- I'm empathetic to that. Throwing up some values on the wall and saying the company is "like a family" is easy, but actually living and demonstrating values, even when inconvenient, is hard. Mapping these values to behaviors makes them easier to identify, helping reinforce what is appropriate behavior in the organization. By identifying, offering coaching, and rewarding this behavior, your organization gets a step closer to achieving this goal.