Performance Management · Performance Review
Performance Management & Appraisal
What is performance management?
- The annual cycle: goal setting → check-ins → evaluation → pay and development
- Performance appraisal is just one step in performance management
- Shifting from annual ratings to continuous feedback
Running performance management well isn’t about rewriting policy documents; it’s about changing how leaders spend their time. A team lead who used to fill in rating boxes over a few days at year-end needs to sit down with each team member for 30 minutes every quarter and record what progressed and where things got stuck. Once the process shifts from trying to remember at review time to pulling out a full year of records, much of the draining wrangling over ratings disappears.
Appraisals usually split into performance reviews and competency reviews. A performance review looks at what you delivered this year and ties to bonuses; a competency review looks at what you can be trusted with next and is the basis for promotion and placement. Many Korean companies still use a five-grade S·A·B·C·D scale with forced distribution, such as capping the top grade at 10–20%, and here the distribution itself breaks down when a team has five or fewer people. Carrying OKRs, a goal-setting framework, straight into the appraisal form is also risky. Score stretch goals by attainment rate and everyone writes easy goals.
Moving to continuous performance management comes with conditions. Once one team lead oversees more than 15 people, even quarterly check-ins become a formality. And if evaluator training ends with a once-a-year online course, the quality of review meetings is left to each team lead's personal skill. Whether check-in completion rates and record counts are part of the team lead's own evaluation decides whether the system survives. Fixing the appeals channel and response deadline in writing, such as 'written reply within 10 business days of receipt,' is also the minimum safeguard that keeps the system running.
The most common misconception in the field is that removing ratings makes evaluation fair. Where ratings are removed, ongoing conversations, manager training, and accountability for pay decisions must take their place. Erase the ratings without that support and the distrust that 'it all comes down to the team lead's whim' only grows. When reviews are crammed into year-end with no documented evidence, only the last two or three months are remembered and become the rating, and the review meeting ends in 10 minutes with 'You got a B this year. Good work.' People who are told only their rating look for the reason on job sites, not at their company.
Inwoo LeeExpert in leadership, communication, and performance management
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”It began with Drucker’s MBO, passed through the heyday of GE-style forced ranking, and evolved into continuous performance management after appraisal overhauls at Adobe, Microsoft, and others in the 2010s.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, an industrial valve manufacturer with 480 employees and annual revenue of roughly KRW 90 billion (≈ US$67,335,000). After the year-end forced-ranking review, 37 appeals reached HR, and two design engineers rated A resigned that same month. Before touching the rating system, management decided to change the review meetings first and set an eight-month schedule.
- When the head of HR went through two years of appraisal data, 7 of 12 team leads had given most of their team members a B, and 29 of 37 appeals said 'I was never told why I got that grade'.
- The CEO set the direction: 'keep the ratings, but change the conversations.' A 30-minute check-in once a quarter, plus record-keeping, was added to team leads’ evaluation criteria. Yet the Q1 completion rate came to only 54%.
- The head of production called in the five team leads who hadn't kept records and made it clear: 'Evaluations without evidence won't get my sign-off next year.' The Q2 completion rate rose to 91%.
- HR wrote a review-meeting script, and every team lead took part in a two-hour practice session. Phrases like 'you worked hard' were banned, leaders were required to cite at least three quarterly records as evidence, and appeals were set to receive a written reply within 10 business days.
- Eight months later, appeals fell from 37 to 9, agreement with 'I understand my evaluation result' in the organizational survey rose from 41% to 68%, and voluntary exits in key roles dropped from 11 to 4.