"If you're going to do them, performance reviews should be about identifying the areas where people are great, and working out how to extract more of that..."
I disagree. Performance reviews should be about performance. They should examine what one excels at and what one does poorly. They should then use those results to improve individuals, teams, and the company. Person alpha is great at TDD? Person bravo sucks at it? Pair 'em up.
Similarly the results should influence compensation in a meaningful manner? You blew your results out of the water and only get a 1% raise? That's crap. Management's performance sucks in this case (that's why upward reviews are also key).
Why do you think pairing person alpha and person bravo will magically result in person bravo acquiring the skills of person alpha? Among all the possibilites, you might just bring person alpha down without improving person bravo at all. Then, you've made everyone more inefficient.
I didn't state it would magically result in that...i'm sorry if that's what you inferred; however, i've found in the past that good people teaching about some subject tend to learn more about the subject in the teaching of said subject. Like anything else, teaching / mentoring / pairing are skills...those could be horrible as well.
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"If you're going to do them, performance reviews should be about identifying the areas where people are great, and working out how to extract more of that..." I disagree. Performance reviews should be about performance. They should examine what one excels at and what one does poorly. They should then use those results to improve individuals, teams, and the company. Person alpha is great at TDD? Person bravo sucks at it? Pair 'em up.
Similarly the results should influence compensation in a meaningful manner? You blew your results out of the water and only get a 1% raise? That's crap. Management's performance sucks in this case (that's why upward reviews are also key).
Why do you think pairing person alpha and person bravo will magically result in person bravo acquiring the skills of person alpha? Among all the possibilites, you might just bring person alpha down without improving person bravo at all. Then, you've made everyone more inefficient.
I didn't state it would magically result in that...i'm sorry if that's what you inferred; however, i've found in the past that good people teaching about some subject tend to learn more about the subject in the teaching of said subject. Like anything else, teaching / mentoring / pairing are skills...those could be horrible as well.