In our most recent interview with Ellum Leadership Advisors CEO Tem Lawal, Ph.D, he told us that “rapid changes in technology, slowed job growth, and increased competition are putting pressure on organizations to do more with less. Companies are going to have to shift how they operate to meet this demand, and the key to this shift is developing a strong performance culture.”

What is a performance culture? It is one that encourages consistent and meaningful team-based feedback conversations to help drive the company’s overall performance. The focus is on how individuals can understand their roles and progress in a way that contributes to overall team growth. A performance culture can help build a resilient, resilient organization that can survive and compete even in the most difficult circumstances. 

However, Dr. Lawal tells us that the performance evaluation systems in most companies are incompatible with a productive performance culture because of three main issues: 

1. Ambiguous Performance Expectations

Unclear and undercommunicated employee expectations can stifle their ability to perform productively. When team members are unsure of their position within the organization, they can not establish themselves in the workplace and foster overall growth. 

Dr. Lawal says “When an employee doesn’t have clarity on their role or what they should be driving towards, how can they know what to focus on? When there is ambiguity, businesses cycle in place because there is no shared vision to move them forward.”

2. Complacent Evaluation Strategies

“As soon as you start becoming complacent, you are moving towards going out of business”, warns Dr. Lawal. If a company is no longer asking itself how to adapt to assure continued success, it will not be able to serve its team or customer base in a tumultuous business environment.

This also applies to performance evaluation. If HR leaders stop iterating on the evaluation process, it can quickly become a hindrance to the team, and actively damage workplace culture. Outdated performance management strategies lead to disenfranchised employees and frustrated managers.

3. Performance Systems Built for Ratings, Not Actual Performance

When the performance review becomes about giving the employee a yearly rating, it is no longer a productive space to discuss performance. Any conversation about growth is overshadowed by discussions about compensations and promotions.

Here, Dr. Lawal poses an important question: “What if your performance rating had nothing to do with your performance?” 

Employee ratings can be dependent on company budget, or even the employee’s specific managerial tree within the company. Dr. Lawal provides an example from his own career:

“One year, I received a “meets expectations” rating, which was the first in my career.  I had gotten very positive feedback throughout the year, so I asked my manager, ‘What in my performance led to this rating for me?’My manager said ‘I miscalculated, I thought that all the great work you were doing was getting up to the people who make these decisions, but it looks like they weren’t completely aware. We need to give you more visibility to the leadership this year.’ So I spent the next year trying to manage my rating instead of performing.”

The standard performance review incentivizes workers to focus on achieving a score rather than improving their execution and contributing to team success. 

These three factors come together to prevent communication and goal alignment in the workplace. When employees aren’t given clear expectations, aren’t being served by obsolete performance feedback processes, and are made to focus on ratings rather than performance, organizations will lack the workforce alignment to effectively achieve their goals. 

To Dr. Lawal, the key to overcoming these obstacles lies in humanizing the performance review process. 

The Narrative-Based Performance Review

Early in his career as a leadership coach, Dr. Lawal relied heavily on data and metrics to guide performance feedback discussions:

“A lot of the commercial assessment tools are built around fitting people into specific boxes. This way, you can easily bucket people based on their behavioral tendencies. I used to overwhelm them with metrics, graphs, and numbers to explain their behavior to themselves, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It was insightful, but it didn’t quite tell the full story. 

So, I shifted focus. I asked myself, what if I centered all of my feedback around telling the story of a client’s year instead of overwhelming them with quantitative data? It was amazing how different the feedback experience was after I made this change. Suddenly, my clients were reading my report and saying ‘yes, that is me, that is how I show up, I’m getting clarity now.’ The story resonated and spoke for itself.”

Dr. Lawal found that this new, story-based approach really helped his clients understand their performance. He says “The metrics are phenomenal, but it's really important for people to understand the full story about how they show up, where they are, where they're heading.”

Dr. Lawal’s ultimate goal is to take the benefits of story-based reporting and scaling it across to feedback and performance management programs at large. Through he has this,  developed a new approach to the performance review, one that could revolutionize communication in the workplace, that he calls the narrative-based performance review.

“The narrative performance review is about giving feedback that captures the full story of someone’s performance and communicates it in a narrative format."

We have an opportunity to make performance meaningful. These evaluations will incorporate nuanced stories explaining where the employee’s been, where they are, and where they can go in the organization to truly improve the quality of feedback”, says Dr. Lawal.

Improving Clarity

When done correctly the narrative-based performance review should reinforce the most important employee expectations. By centering the narrative on how the employee met expectations over a period of time, you’ll naturally revisit the most important goals, and paint a clear picture of what the employee should be prioritizing to meet them. By allowing the space for clear communication, you reduce ambiguity, and give clear direction of how the employee should move forward.

Reducing Complacency

By embracing narrative, performance evaluations become more specific; tailored not only to the employee, but to a specific time period. Year-by-year, quarter-by-quarter, the employee stories and feedback will build on top of each other, allowing the leadership to be flexible and adjust the process to meet the employee and company needs more effectively. This leads to the kind of constant, custom-made improvements that fight off complacency, and push the entire organization toward progress. 

Redefining the Manager-Employee Relationship through Feedback

When performance reviews are solely focused on ratings, the conversation drifts away from performance itself toward compensation, promotion, and visibility politics. The narrative-based review reorients the conversation back to what matters: the actual work, growth, and the path forward for the company and employees’ shared success.

By grounding feedback in the employee's real story, both manager and employee can focus on where the employee has been, where they are, and where they can go. This also transforms their dynamic. Rather than positioning the manager as a judge handing down a verdict, narrative feedback creates a true partnership where the employee takes ownership of their growth and the manager becomes a mentor to guide them there.

Unlocking Business Success Through Narrative

Beyond the more apparent advantages of the performance review, like facilitating productive conversations and improving team performance, a narrative-based performance system can actually act as a tool to guide leadership toward overall success. Patterns of failure and growth often emerge when individual stories are read together.

Each individual’s story is a unique, invaluable brushstroke in the portrait of the company’s overall story. Not only does the narrative-based performance review show those experiences the care and importance that they deserve, but it also gives leadership a clear pathway towards a performance culture, one that captures overall success.