How to get problem employees to change their ways when performance reviews simply won’t work

A too-brilliant-to-fire health-tech engineer kept blowing deadlines and ignoring scathing performance reviews. These executive coaches reveal a different management strategy that finally got him to shape up.

Managers often use performance reviews to mold and shape employee behaviors and results. They trust that formally telling high performers what they’re doing wrong one to two times a year will lead to them immediately doing it right. There’s an operating assumption that formal feedback provides employees with enough information to improve performance moving forward. Our executive coaching experience confirms that this assumption is misguided, given what’s truly needed for behavior change in humans.