The paper has a specific weight. It’s not cheap copy paper, but it’s not expensive cardstock either. It’s the 23-pound paper of institutional significance. The words are printed in a placid, sans-serif font designed to convey authority without menace. And there, on page 3, under the heading ‘Areas for Development,’ you see it: ‘Needs to demonstrate more proactive leadership.’ Your eyes scan the phrase. It feels like trying to grab smoke. What action does that sentence ask you to perform tomorrow? What specific moment from the last 363 days prompted its creation? The sentence floats, untethered to reality. You got a 3. A perfectly, numerically, aggressively average 3.

The Fossil of Feedback

The document in your hands isn’t a tool for your growth. It’s a fossil. It’s the mineralized remains of a conversation that happened between your boss and their boss months ago, a conversation where a budget was set and a spreadsheet of names was assigned numbers that would fit neatly into a predetermined compensation curve. The meeting you’re in right now, the one with the lukewarm coffee and the feigned sincerity, is the awkward ceremony where they present you with the fossil and pretend it’s a living thing. It’s the corporate equivalent of someone finally leaning over at 3 PM to whisper, ‘Your fly has been open all morning.’ The event has passed. The exposure already happened. This is just the delayed, clumsy notification.

I used to think this process was just a flawed attempt at something noble. A clumsy, corporate way of trying to help people get better. I’ve come to believe that’s wrong. The system isn’t broken; it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: mitigate legal risk and justify a compensation plan. Your development is a distant, secondary concern, if it’s a concern at all.

Feedback from Another Planet

My friend Cameron A.-M. is a building code inspector. Their job is feedback. But it’s a form of feedback so alien to the corporate world that it might as well come from another planet. Cameron doesn’t walk onto a construction site and tell a foreman to ‘increase visibility on rebar compliance.’ They point to a specific section of steel grid and say, ‘Section 233 of the municipal code requires 13-millimeter rebar tied at 33-centimeter intervals. This is 18-millimeter rebar at 43-centimeter intervals. It’s wrong. Fix it, or I’m shutting this site down.’

The feedback is immediate. It is specific. It is binary-not a 3 on a scale of 5, but a simple pass or fail. And most importantly, it is tied to a tangible, catastrophic outcome. A poorly rated memo might hurt your feelings; a poorly inspected foundation gets people killed. Cameron’s feedback loop is tight, honest, and has no room for ambiguity. There is no recency bias. The inspector doesn’t ignore a flawed foundation laid in January because the crew did a great paint job in November. The standard is the standard.

The Performance of Work

I often find myself thinking about the sheer uselessness of most of the artifacts we produce in office life. We generate reports that go unread, attend meetings that could have been emails, and craft five-year plans that are obsolete in six months. It’s all part of the performance of work, a grand play we all tacitly agree to participate in. Have you seen those ergonomic chairs that cost $1,373? They’re designed with dozens of adjustments to perfectly fit the human spine, yet most people sit in them for 8 hours a day in a way that slowly ruins their posture. We have the sophisticated tool, but we use it in a way that defeats its purpose. The performance review is that ergonomic chair. It’s a complex tool designed for a specific purpose-growth-that we’ve repurposed for a performance of managerial theater.

And I’ll admit, I’ve been a part of the problem. I was a manager once, years ago, at a company that worshiped the annual review. I had a direct report who was brilliant but quiet. A classic engineer. He did fantastic work on a critical project in February. For the next nine months, he did solid, if less spectacular, maintenance work. When review season came in December, my mind, like a poorly coded search algorithm, kept returning his more recent, less impressive work. The February triumph was a distant memory. My boss had already told me I had a budget for a 3% average raise pool. So, this brilliant engineer got a 3/5 and a 3% raise. I wrote some garbage on his form about ‘enhancing cross-functional communication.’ It was a lie.

The Farmer’s Wisdom

Growth is a process of continuous, small adjustments. It’s not a single judgment, but a thousand tiny corrections. Think of a farmer. A farmer doesn’t plant a seed and come back a year later to write a performance review of the crop. ‘Subject: Corn Stalk #43. Rating: 2/5. Fails to meet kernel production targets. Recommendations: Increase height in next growth cycle.’ The idea is absurd. A good grower provides feedback daily. They check the soil moisture. They see the slight yellowing of a leaf and know it needs nitrogen. They monitor, they adjust, they nurture. The feedback is constant, organic, and aimed at a singular goal: a healthy, thriving plant. This is the only model that works for cultivating anything complex, from a field of crops to a collection of high-quality feminized cannabis seeds. It’s about responsiveness, not reports.

The corporate world has this backward. We’ve chosen the annual autopsy over the daily check-up. We trade the thousand timely, helpful whispers for one loud, formal, and mostly useless shout. We do this because it’s easier for the organization. It’s clean. It fits into a fiscal calendar. It produces a tidy, defensible number.

It’s also why so many workplaces feel like places where people come to stagnate, not to grow. The system selects for it. It rewards steady, predictable, 3/5 performance and is suspicious of the messy, non-linear path of actual development, with its breakthroughs and its fallbacks.