Create a New Story of Performance for Your People

By Dr. Dave Kasch

Performance review season is upon us, bringing the familiar swirl of tasks, deadlines, and anxieties it can stir up. 

Ideally, you’ve been giving your team feedback throughout the year, and this is just a formalized way to document those conversations and capture their wins, growth, and development plans. 

But for many companies, performance reviews have become an exercise in misplaced accountability, ratings quotas, and uncommunicated expectations—an annual ritual disguised as employee development. When performance reviews simply check a box rather than provide true guidance, teams and individuals fail to meet their potential (Gallup, SHRM), and managers miss a key opportunity to develop themselves.  

So, what’s a manager to do? Two small steps in how you approach reviews will allow you to deliver more valuable, actionable, and meaningful performance reviews that help your team (and you) grow:  

Step 1: Kill the character narrative  

Step 2: Look inward 

Kill the Character Narrative  

Dr. Sam Crowe wrote about Karpman’s drama triangle in depth in a previous blog post, which I highly recommend you read for additional depth and clarity. The basic concept is this:  

People tend to be categorized into three roles, or characters: 

• The Victim: lacks agency and suffers at the hands of the villain 

• The Villain: a person (or situation) who harms others with outsized agency  

• The Hero: the person who saves the day or rescues victims from villains 

It’s a powerful lens for reconsidering how we cast these characters and their successes, under-performance, or disruption. Our brains are wired for stories, and these three roles help us make quick work of thinking through what happened, especially when we think of people’s impact on the organization or the team. 

Consider the people on your team and their work from this year. Would you cast any of them in these roles? 

• The Victim who always seems to find a reason beyond their control why they didn’t perform  

• The Villain who blames and shames, or creates more work for others 

• The Hero who saved the team, a project, or a colleague by going above and beyond 

It’s a natural way to think about people’s roles and performance, but . your team members aren’t heroes or victims or villains. They are just people doing the best they can with what they have. Sometimes they succeed (wildly). Sometimes they struggle (wildly). And sometimes we don’t have enough context to understand how they were trying to contribute. If you see your team members through the lens of these three roles, then you're not ready to give good feedback. 

You can adapt the set of questions above to test how you’re thinking about or documenting employee performance. 

Am I telling the story of someone who: 

• Underperformed and made excuses for why or how they couldn’t perform better 

• Escalated conflict or created more work (literal or emotional) for others 

• Rescued a team, project, or colleague? 

Hero narratives are relatively straightforward to ask and shift. You’re taking good work and focusing on its value. 

The reframe: Praise their excellent work,without focusing on saving a victim from a threat or vanquishing a villain, and consider the skills and behaviors they demonstrated rather than the context. 

Victim narratives are tricky because you may also be holding feelings of disappointment, resentment, or anger toward the villain in their story.  

The reframe: Recognize the underdeveloped skill or unmet need that prevented them from being able to perform as expected, and gently push them to find ways to reclaim agency. 

Villain narratives are also complex and often bring up anger, resentment, or judgment because they are perceived as negatively impacting your and/or the team.  

The reframe: Recognize the unwanted behavior and identify the skills that will help them better manage situations that drive those reactions.(My experience is that most “villians” really care about great outcomes but have an unmet need or skill gap creating conflict.) 

To be clear, I don’t expect you to document character casting in your team members’ performance reviews. Instead, this perspective is an opportunity to get curious about how and where you might use those narratives to reframe your own thinking and provide better, more growth-focused feedback.  

Look Inward 

Once you’ve reframed how you think about the character narrative, the second step is to reflect on your role in the performance of your team members. 

As you notice that you’re starting to cast people’s performance as fundamentally victims, villains, or heroes, ask yourself:   

• What was my part in this?  

• How did I contribute or enable a situation where my employee had to save the day, was unable to do something, or felt the need to force an outcome? 

This second step is not about blame or assigning responsibility for outcomes. It’s something more nuanced. It's about developing your awareness as a leader, for what you did and did not do, and the results your leadership created. 

Put another way, your employees or team members didn’t just behave in those ways, they didn’t just create (or not create) those outcomes. They had you as their leader, to set boundaries and expectations, to help guide them, and to create opportunities for them to experiment, struggle, and learn that aren’t held against them later. 

You might feel tempted to deflect or defend yourself: “This is about them, not me. I did everything I could to support or empower them.” That is a totally understandable and natural response. Taking ownership and responsibility challenges us to be radically honest and brave, with ourselves and others, about how we contributed to the situations, behaviors, or outcomes we don’t want. 

If you’re feeling defensive or like your role is separate from their behaviors, look back to the drama triangle and ask, “What is it about my behavior that creates the environment where my employees perform this way?”  

Now don’t get me wrong, your employees are 100% responsible for their part in their behaviors and outcomes, just as you are 100% responsible for your contribution to those behaviors and outcomes. Paraphrasing Gay Hendricks’s work in The Big Leap, ask yourself: “Based on the results my employee or team is creating that I don’t want, what am I unconsciously committed to?” 

The key to this question is to be kind and curious with yourself and allow the answer to emerge, whatever it may be. No matter how difficult it is to sit with, the person who benefits most from it is you.

Not asking these questions carries its own risk – you and your team members are bound to reproduce and replicate the same results (or lack thereof). But if you're willing to ask and answer these questions for yourself, you're going to unlock your ability to help your people really grow and develop in the ways that they need most – for themselves, for you, and for the organization. 

At SZH Consulting, we believe performance reviews should be more than a compliance exercise. They should be a catalyst for meaningful culture change.

When approached thoughtfully, review season becomes an opportunity to strengthen leadership, deepen accountability, and create clarity about what growth truly looks like. It becomes a moment to build trust, expand capability, and unlock the potential already present within your people.

We partner with organizations to redesign performance conversations so they drive real development, not just documentation. If you are ready to transform review season into a genuine season of growth, we would be honored to work alongside you.

Primary Sources: 

• Emerald, David. The Power of TED (The Empowerment Dynamic). Polaris Publishing, 2009.  

• Hendricks, Gay. The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level. HarperOne, 2010. 

• Wigert, Ben and Harter, Jim. Re-Engineering Performance Management. Gallup, 2017 

• Sutton, Robert and Wigert, Ben. More Harm Than Good: The Truth About Performance Reviews. Gallup, 2019. 

• Agovino, Theresa. The Performance Review Problem. SHRM, 2013.