After my last post on HR policies, I want to dig deeper into another HR cornerstone that’s long overdue for disruption—Performance Management. Let’s face it, the way we’ve been doing things is broken.

Traditionally, performance management is a top-down process, dominated by annual reviews, ratings, talent pipelines, and rigid career ladders. Sound familiar? At LEMAN, we used to follow the same formula—even the infamous 9-box grid—before we scrapped the whole system two years ago. Why? Because it wasn’t working.

🚨 The Trade-Off We Don’t Talk About: Our obsession with measuring performance does more harm than good. When we rely on these old-school practices, we:

👎 Reinforce manager bias and end up promoting people who look and think like those already at the top.

👎 Ignore the invisible work that makes teams thrive—like supporting colleagues, onboarding newcomers, or coordinating efforts. The stuff that’s hard to measure but vital to culture.

👎 Enforce an individualistic view of success, ignoring the fact that no one excels in isolation. Success is a team sport, yet our systems reward solo players who might not contribute to the collective good.

By clinging to outdated models, we trade away diversity, inclusion, and the real essence of teamwork. We create environments where getting ahead is more about “managing up” than building strong, supportive ecosystems.

🌟 So, what’s the alternative?
At LEMAN, we didn’t just patch up the broken system—we decided to ditch it altogether. For now, there’s no formalized replacement. Instead, we’ve put trust in our managers and teams to define success together, to break out of the box (literally) and shape their own performance approaches. Is it perfect? - far from. But it's good enough.... for now!

What we’re experimenting with this year is a new pilot we call “New Ways of Working”. We’re partnering with different teams to test new approaches to success and performance. Most importantly, we’re redefining what “good” looks like—not just from an individualistic lens, but based on team success.

It’s not about ticking boxes anymore—it’s about creating environments where people can thrive together.

💡 HR/People professionals, if we’re truly going to build diverse, inclusive, and people-first organizations, we need to stop defaulting to these tired, one-size-fits-all systems. It’s time to lean into experimentation and trust our people to find their own way forward.

What will you choose: more boxes to check, or more space to grow? 🚀
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Originally posted on LinkedIn