Medicalizing Our Work

This process medicalizes our work. It transforms skilled professionals into patients with a list of diagnosed deficiencies. ‘Lacks assertiveness in meetings.’ ‘Struggles with time management on cross-functional initiatives.’ These are not observations; they are diagnoses. You are no longer a coder, a designer, or a strategist. You are a collection of symptoms to be managed. The entire conversation is framed around your shortcomings, your gaps, your failures to perfectly align with a list of competencies written by a consultant who has never done your job. It’s a deficit model, and it is fundamentally demoralizing. It’s designed to make you feel slightly inadequate, just grateful enough to have a job for another year.

The Manager’s Cowardice

I’m not immune. I’ve been on the other side of the desk, wielding the weapon. I once gave a review to a talented young analyst. I used all the sanctioned corporate phrases. I told him he needed to ‘take more ownership’ and ‘improve his executive presence.’ I thought I was doing my duty, being a ‘manager.’ I can still see the light go out of his eyes as I explained his 31-out-of-41 rating. The numbers felt so objective, so official. They were, of course, complete fiction. I was a coward, hiding behind a process because it was easier than having a real, human conversation about his goals and the team’s actual needs. I was perpetuating the very system that had made me clench my jaw in frustration just one year prior. People will tell you to fight the system, to give honest feedback on the process. Don’t. You can’t use logic to reason with a ritual. It’s like trying to argue with the tide.

From Judgment to Cultivation

It’s not about finding a superior way to judge people. It’s about changing the entire philosophy from judgment to cultivation. I learned this from a woman named Rio E.S., a wilderness survival instructor I met years ago. My friends and I had gotten ourselves into a pretty serious situation on a backpacking trip that went wrong. Rio didn’t sit us down in a tent to review our performance. Feedback wasn’t an event; it was a constant, life-sustaining flow of information. ‘Your pace is too quick,’ she’d say, not breaking stride. ‘You’re burning too many calories. You’ll have nothing left by sunset.’ ‘That knot will fail under tension. Tie it like this, or the tarp will be on our heads by midnight.’ Her feedback was never about my identity or my potential. It was immediate, specific, and tied directly to our survival. It wasn’t a judgment on my character; it was an adjustment to reality. There was no HR form, no rating scale. The goal wasn’t to document failure but to ensure success.

The Grower’s Mindset

This is the grower’s mindset. A gardener doesn’t give a tomato plant a 3 out of 5 for ‘failing to demonstrate sufficient fruit production.’ They don’t write ‘needs to be more proactive in photosynthesis’ in a little file. They look at the plant and ask: What does it need? Is the soil depleted? Is it getting enough sun? Is there a pest I can’t see? They test, they observe, they adjust the conditions. They understand that the plant is programmed for success, and their job is to remove the obstacles preventing it from expressing its full potential. The whole endeavor is a partnership, a constant dialogue. It’s a process that begins with creating the absolute best conditions for growth, right from the very start. It’s like selecting premium feminized cannabis seeds because you know that a strong genetic foundation is the first and most critical step. You don’t blame the seed for the soil; you fix the soil. Our corporate environments do the opposite. They put a prize-winning seed in toxic soil with no sunlight and then blame it for not growing.

The Damage and the Design

The damage of this annual ritual is immense. It’s not just the wasted hours and the administrative overhead. It’s the profound cynicism it creates. It teaches every employee that the system is a game and that the official story is a lie. That your raise has nothing to do with your incredible work on the new platform but everything to do with which ‘calibration’ session your manager attended and how much political capital they had that day. Your compensation was decided 41 weeks ago when a spreadsheet was passed around the finance department. The review is just the elaborate, soul-crushing theater used to deliver the news.

I started writing an angry email after my last review. A point-by-point deconstruction of every vague platitude, every unsubstantiated claim. A manifesto against the whole rotten process. I had 1,741 words of pure, distilled rage. Then I selected all and hit delete. Because the system isn’t broken. It’s working perfectly. It is achieving its real goals: managing budgets, mitigating legal risk, and enforcing conformity. It was never, ever meant for you.