If you still run annual performance reviews, you already know the problem. The conversation happens once a year, it covers twelve months of work nobody can remember clearly, and both people walk out feeling like something important didn’t get said. The review gets done because it’s supposed to get done, not because either of you got much out of it.
A once-a-year conversation was never going to carry the weight of an entire working relationship, and most businesses have quietly known that for years while still running the process anyway.
The real problem isn’t feedback. It’s frequency.
Annual reviews try to solve a frequency problem with a single event. You save up a year’s worth of observations, good and bad, and unload them in one sitting. By the time you get there, the specific moment that mattered has faded, the feedback lands as a surprise instead of a course correction, and the whole thing feels more like a verdict than a conversation.
The fix isn’t a better review. It’s replacing the single event with an ongoing rhythm, so nothing has to wait twelve months to be said.
What to do instead
Over the past couple of years working directly with leaders on this, we’ve built a structure we call Connect, Support, Grow. It’s not a replacement review. It’s a set of four connected conversations that do the job an annual review was always meant to do, just properly and consistently.
Start with a foundation conversation. Before you get into goals or performance at all, sit down for 60 to 90 minutes and work out how you and your team member actually work best together. How do they like to receive feedback? What does support look like for them under pressure? What frustrates them, and what has a past manager done that didn’t land well? This isn’t an interview where they answer and you note it down. You share too. It’s the conversation that should have happened when they started, and if it didn’t, it’s worth having now.
Follow it with a goals and development conversation. A few weeks later, get specific about what they’re working towards, in the role they’re in now and in their career more broadly. Agree on three to five goals, not fifteen. Name one or two skills worth developing and what support will actually help build them, whether that’s on-the-job exposure, working alongside someone, or something more formal. This becomes the shared reference point for everything that follows.
Keep it alive through ongoing 1-1s. This is where the real work happens. Regular, protected time, weekly or fortnightly for someone newer or working through something hard, monthly for someone settled and experienced. Some sessions will be ten minutes. Others will run longer. Start with a genuine check-in, then move into whatever’s actually relevant that week, whether that’s a roadblock, a goal update, workload, or something they want to raise. You don’t need to cover everything every time. You need to show up consistently.
Revisit it all with a periodic reset. Every six to twelve months, go back to the foundation conversation and check it still holds. Has anything shifted in what they need from you? What are they proud of since you last properly checked in? Review the goals you set together, not to score them, but to see what’s been achieved, what’s changed, and what comes next. There are no ratings here. No competency grids. Just two people making sure they’re still working well together.
Why this works better than a review ever did
Nothing here waits for an annual date on the calendar. Feedback happens close to the moment it’s needed, not months after it stopped being useful. Goals get checked and adjusted along the way instead of being written once and forgotten. And because the ongoing 1-1s carry most of the weight, the periodic reset stops feeling like a performance appraisal in disguise and starts feeling like what it actually is: a check-in between two people who’ve been paying attention to each other all along.
Used properly, this takes less time across the year than a single dreaded review cycle, and it delivers a great deal more. Your team member ends up clearer on where they stand and where they’re headed. You end up with fewer surprises, because you’ve been having the real conversations all along instead of saving them up.
If you’re ready to move your business away from the annual review and want help building this into how your leaders actually operate, that’s exactly the kind of leadership mentoring work we do with clients. Get in touch and we can talk through what it would look like for your team.