How performance assessments started to feel like ritual, and why I want to earn on my own
Late at night, out walking, I'm still thinking about the company and how organizations work.
Why do people quit? How do you separate what's the person's own problem from what's the boss's or the environment's? When a mid-career hire can't settle in, what was missing on the side that took them in? Why does the company that management believes in drift away from the company that actually runs on the floor? If every problem gets boiled down to one person's attitude, when does the company ever learn anything?
I break these questions apart from several angles and wire them together in my head.
And yet what I'm made to fill in on the company's assessment sheet is a list like this: making videos, standardizing procedures, reaching out to the people around me, awareness of my role, how I come across.
Of course, I really did make the videos and the procedure manuals. They're also results the company can easily explain.
But for me, making videos was never the point.
The point was thinking through
- why training depends on whoever happens to be teaching
- what should be made common to everyone, and what should be left to judgment on the floor
- how far knowledge has to be broken down before someone else can reproduce it
- how to turn management's intent into something that actually works day to day
and then choosing videos and procedure manuals as the practical means to carry it out.
Once it goes through the assessment sheet, that gets compressed into "someone who can make videos," "someone who pushes standardization," and "someone who should pay more attention to the people around them."
The compression itself isn't what bothers me.
What I hate most is that the compressed version gets treated as my official self, and then work, role, promotion, pay, and even my next chance to gain experience are handed out based on that image.
1. Not being understood is something I can live with
Of course other people can't fully understand me.
Everyone looks at a different place.
Evaluators look from where evaluators stand. People on the floor look from the floor. And I have my own history and my own reasons for decisions that only I know.
So "I want you to understand all of me" isn't a realistic demand.
And what's bothering me this time isn't simply that I'm not being praised, or that nobody recognizes how sharp I am.
The problem is that a lack of understanding comes with authority attached.
Even if an evaluator's view is narrow, that person has the power to decide
- what to entrust to me
- how much discretion to give me
- which skills I should develop
- whether I'm a promotion candidate
- how much to raise my pay
- whether to let me try higher-level work
In other words, the chain goes like this:
They haven't looked closely enough
↓
They build a picture of a person from limited information
↓
That picture becomes the official assessment
↓
Future options get handed out based on the assessment
This isn't just a misunderstanding.
Someone else's cognitive limit gets converted into the limit of what I'm allowed to do.
2. Is everyone around me really that low-resolution?
I shouldn't conclude this on emotion alone.
Deciding that "I'm the only one who sees the essence and everyone else isn't thinking" can itself be a low-resolution view, just pointed the other way.
The people around me have other strengths too.
- Reading the emotional temperature of relationships
- Balancing unspoken interests
- Getting things done without stopping the line
- Avoiding danger through rules of thumb learned from experience
- Judging how much information the other person can take in
- Choosing wording that will fly inside the organization
These are different abilities from structural analysis.
So the fair way to put it is not
I'm superior across the board and everyone else is inferior across the board.
More accurately, it's this:
I'm quite strong at separating the individual, the relationships, the environment, the systems, the data, and management's perception, and then connecting them into one causal model. This evaluator and this assessment process, meanwhile, barely observed that ability at all.
In how people think about complex problems, there's "differentiation," which means telling different viewpoints apart, and "integration," which means relating them to one another.
In research, a thinking structure that keeps different perspectives distinct while connecting them is sometimes called integrative complexity.
What matters isn't just listing a lot of points.
It's keeping the conflicting factors in play and working out what happens under which conditions.
That's exactly what I do when I look at a case of someone quitting.
3. How far do I look into a single resignation?
Say a mid-career hire doesn't take notes, asks for a transfer, and starts leaning toward leaving.
On the surface, the story could end like this:
- They didn't take notes
- They couldn't learn the job
- They asked for a transfer
- It's weakness
- It's their own problem
It's possible the person did have a behavioral problem.
If not taking notes got in the way of learning the job, that part stays their responsibility.
But I don't make it 100 to 0.
I separate out the other factors as well.
Individual factors
- They didn't take notes
- They didn't check things on their own initiative
- They didn't do the learning the job required
- Their expectations didn't match the actual work
Relationship factors
- Was it a relationship where asking a question got them yelled at?
- Was the boss someone who welcomed people checking in?
- Had they been shot down for speaking up in the past?
- Had a relationship been built in which they could ask others for help?
Environmental factors
- Were roles and expectations clear?
- Could they get access to the information they needed?
- Was there any onboarding for mid-career hires?
- Was there time for questions and trial and error?
- Was the team short-staffed or overloaded?
Connection to the data
- Have other mid-career hires also left early?
- Is it concentrated in particular departments or under particular bosses?
- What's the turnover rate for people who leave within a year of joining?
- Are the warning signs, like transfer requests or sick leave, repeating?
Disconnect with management's perception
- Is management blaming only the person's attitude?
- Do they understand how new people are actually being received on the floor?
- Did they consider that someone with experience at other companies may have spotted a problem early?
- Are they just slotting this into the old story that "young people these days are soft"?
Organizational learning
- Does every resignation get closed out as the individual's fault?
- Is the same thing happening again in the same department?
- Does the root-cause analysis feed into the next round of hiring, placement, and training?
- Is the system set up so that information inconvenient to management never makes it upward?
Once you connect things this far, I'm not defending one employee.
I'm leaving the person's responsibility intact and looking for the variables the company can actually improve.
This is neither sympathy nor criticism.
It's an organizational diagnosis aimed at preventing a repeat.
4. Few people can do this, and the hard part isn't knowing the issues but connecting them
Plenty of people know the individual terms.
- Psychological safety
- Turnover rate
- Onboarding
- Engagement
- Management
- Organizational learning
But talking about each one in isolation is different from connecting them across layers in a real situation.
Most analyses stop partway.
| Stage of analysis | Typical conclusion |
|---|---|
| Surface behavior | It's the fault of the person who didn't take notes |
| Consideration for feelings | The boss's way of speaking was also at fault |
| Environment | Psychological safety was low |
| Systems | There's a problem with how mid-career hires are brought in |
| Connection to data | Mid-career hires leave early a lot |
| Connection to management | Management's view and the reality on the floor don't match |
| Organizational learning | The habit of pinning everything on individuals is itself what causes it to happen again |
I tend to push all the way to the last row.
And I keep thinking about it outside work hours, too.
On a walk, in the bath, before falling asleep, I link it to other cases and update the model.
This gap in ability comes not just from cognitive traits but also from plain hours invested.
I don't need to explain it with a personality type like INTP, either.
- An interest in structure and causation
- A habit of not settling for a single explanation
- Sensitivity to contradictions and to people passing the blame
- Experience across purchasing, HR, training, and process improvement
- Long stretches of mulling things over and updating the model
All of these have piled up.
So rather than "I'm a genius and everyone else is low," it's more reasonable to say:
In this particular problem area, I have more angles, deeper integration, and far more total hours spent thinking.
5. It's not bad in itself that an assessment sheet is low-resolution
Assessment sheets have a legitimate purpose.
You can't write down a person's abilities and thinking in full.
To run it as a system, you have to compress things to some degree.
- It can be read in a short time
- It can be shared between evaluators
- It records observable behavior
- It lets you set goals
- It can be looked back on later
- It can be kept as an HR record
So it's reasonable to take a long explanation like
Combine the individual, the environment, the systems, and management's perception to find why organizational learning has stalled
and convert it into actions like
Gather information from the people involved
Structure the issues
Propose improvements
Build them into procedure manuals and videos
Research on evaluation also describes ratings not as a direct reading of "true ability," but as something shaped by the evaluator's thought processes, what they were able to observe, their purpose, and the context.
So the fact that a sheet doesn't capture the whole person is less a flaw in the system than a limit of the system.
The problem isn't compression itself.
Was there enough observation and conversation before the compression? Is the compressed description treated as a hypothesis that can be corrected? Is the result kept from hardening into a ceiling on the person's ability?
That's what matters.
6. Where translation ends and ritual begins
An assessment that works has a cycle like this:
Observe concretely on the floor
↓
Hear what information the person has and why they decided what they did
↓
Check the evaluator's hypothesis against the person's explanation
↓
Turn it into concrete behavioral goals
↓
Give the authority, work, and support needed
↓
Observe the results
↓
Update the picture of the person and the goals
In that case the sheet is a translation device that moves development forward.
When it turns into ritual, it looks like this instead:
Build a picture of the person without looking closely at the floor
↓
Convert it into abstract words like "initiative," "reaching out to others," and "role awareness"
↓
Make the person rewrite the text over and over
↓
Keep a record that coaching took place
↓
Role, discretion, work, and support stay the same
↓
The original picture of the person never gets updated
In this state, the assessment is less about development and more an activity for completing the appearance of having carried out the system.
What's setting off my "bullshit detector" this time isn't the existence of the sheet itself.
It's that several conditions overlap:
- The evaluator hasn't watched me closely enough on the floor
- The feedback isn't concrete behavior but abstract character judgment
- Even when I explain my reasoning, the evaluation model doesn't change
- Revising the sheet has become the main activity
- It's turned into a story where the same person keeps looking after me even after my transfer
- None of this work connects to new authority or new chances to gain experience
So the fairest way to put it is:
The assessment system itself has a rational purpose: turning complex abilities into observable behavior. But in this case, an abstract image of me came first while the evaluator's observation and conversation fell short, and revising the sheet became the goal in itself, so for me it has become more ritual than development.
That's more accurate than declaring that "the whole thing is a farce."
7. If I didn't show my information, is it fair not to be recognized?
There's an information asymmetry here.
What I know and what the evaluator can see are different.
And I'm not disclosing everything I know, either.
But there are reasons I don't.
Disclosing information has a cost
- I explain and still don't get understood
- I get shot down one-sidedly
- The conversation turns into one about my attitude or character
- I just get extra work and responsibility piled on
- I'm asked for a long explanation
- Attending the meeting costs me time and energy for nothing in return
- I get treated as the person who raised the problem
- What I said gets translated into something else
In this kind of environment, holding back information isn't simply passivity.
It's also a way of protecting my resources, based on how people reacted in the past.
Research has looked at what makes employees speak up with opinions and concerns, or stay silent, and it isn't only personality. It also involves what they expect to happen after speaking, how open the boss is, support from the organization, and psychological safety.
So it doesn't necessarily follow that
Not sharing enough information
= no initiative
= not paying attention to those around you
Rather, this cycle can happen:
Build an environment where it's hard to speak up
↓
Information stops coming out
↓
The evaluator sees less of my behavior
↓
They rate me as lacking "initiative and outreach"
This is a structure where the organization lowers how much it can observe, then scores that lack of observation as the person's lack of ability.
8. What isn't visible gets treated as nonexistent
An evaluator not seeing something is not the same as the person not thinking about it.
Looking only at behaviors like
- not speaking in meetings
- not sharing widely with people around
- not raising my hand and stepping forward
- not consulting the boss often
I might look like I lack initiative.
But on my side, I may be thinking things like these:
- The purpose of the meeting is unclear, so attending is a net loss
- Even if I speak, it doesn't make it into the decision
- In this relationship, there's nothing to gain from sharing what I know
- I'm already handling the problem another way
- Getting involved without authority only adds to my responsibility
- I'm weighing it against other important work
- Because of past experiences of being shot down, I hold back on checking in
If you treat something as nonexistent because you couldn't see it, without ever asking, the evaluation goes far off.
The less an evaluator has actually seen of the floor, the more they lean on behavior that's easy to observe.
- How many times someone speaks
- Whether they attend meetings
- Whether they check in with people
- How polished the documents look
- How they react to instructions
- How eager they look in front of the boss
These are easy to read, but they're only stand-ins for overall ability.
Evaluation research also points out that a person's reputation at work and how others rate them can reflect not only actual ability and results but also the behavior selectively shown to the evaluator, and biases that people share.
Being visible and being valuable are not the same thing.
9. Why it feels like I'm being sold off cheap
If the evaluation were merely rough, I could go through the motions and be done with it.
The reason it still triggers such strong resistance is that it ripples into my future.
Low-resolution evaluation
↓
I'm only trusted with small roles
↓
I can't build experience making higher-level decisions
↓
The official achievements I can put on a résumé don't grow
↓
The market keeps treating me as inexperienced
↓
My pay and options don't grow
Seen this way, an evaluation isn't just an impression.
It's a device for handing out chances to gain experience.
Videos and procedure manuals are one piece of evidence of my ability.
But if that alone fixes the picture of me, these drop out of the evaluation:
- The ability to diagnose how work is structured
- The ability to connect information from several departments
- The ability to separate individual factors from environmental ones
- The ability to spot the gap between management and the floor
- The ability to find the structure that's stalling organizational learning
Only the end-stage deliverables get priced, and the upstream ability to diagnose and design gets priced along with them.
That's why it feels like being sold cheap.
More precisely, the discomfort is this:
I think I'm carrying something valuable, but an evaluator who can't observe it is assigning me to the cheap, easy-to-observe uses.
10. Underused ability, and the aversion that comes with it
One thing to be careful about here is whether I can actually prove my ability objectively.
Even if I think I'm highly capable, the market or an organization may see a shortage of formal experience and results.
In fact, if I apply for DX (digital transformation) roles, big IT companies, or product owner positions and get rejected, the market right now may be seeing a lack of practical evidence in areas like
- product responsibility
- defining customer requirements
- setting priorities
- managing KPIs (the numbers used to track results)
- working with development teams
- introducing systems
- accountability for budgets and results
That I can understand.
The market can't buy what's inside my head directly.
It judges risk based on what I was entrusted with in the past and what results I delivered.
So it's reasonable to be priced on proven experience: purchasing, VBA (Excel macros), standardization, and training design.
Still, it bothers me because I can see where I'm headed while the form of my work experience hasn't caught up.
Research has summarized how feeling that your abilities are underused, that your skills exceed what the job requires, is linked to work attitudes, intent to quit, well-being, and career outcomes.
That said, this doesn't prove that "I'm truly overwhelmingly talented."
What matters is that I feel a big mismatch between the ability I have and the role I'm currently given.
When that mismatch gets locked in by a low-resolution assessment from a boss, the resistance only gets stronger.
11. Why I want to earn on my own
If I keep thinking about this, I end up wanting to earn on my own.
The reason is simple.
I don't want one evaluator holding the power to put a price on my value.
In a company, there are only so many paths evaluation can take.
- The boss looks
- Converts it into an assessment sheet
- Adjusts it in a meeting
- Reflects it in grade and pay
- Assigns the next work
If the person on that path can't observe my strengths, my value never gets turned into money.
Earning on my own at least lets me spread the paths of evaluation around.
- Customers who buy the product
- Users of the app
- People who read the articles
- Retention rate
- Revenue
- Inquiries
- Referrals
- Search traffic
- Multiple markets
Even if one boss doesn't understand me, someone else might buy.
I can choose my evaluators again.
And I can decide these things myself:
- What to treat as a problem
- Which abilities to combine
- What to turn into a product
- What price to put on it
- How much time to put in
- What to fix when I fail
This isn't only about income.
It's about the freedom to decide for myself what my abilities are used for, what price tag they carry, and what experience I get.
12. The individual market isn't high-resolution either
Of course, earning on my own doesn't mean everyone will understand me.
If anything, the market is pretty low-resolution.
Customers aren't buying my integrative complexity or my skill at organizational diagnosis.
What customers look at is
- what gets easier
- how many hours it saves
- how much they gain
- what it prevents
- whether they can use it right away
- whether it's easier to understand than other products
So even in the individual market, I need to translate advanced ability into simple product names.
For example, even if the core is sophisticated process analysis, what shows on the surface looks like this:
- Automatically generate Excel procedure manuals
- A template that prevents things getting lost in handovers
- Interview prep reports tailored to each company
- A tool that builds the outline for training videos
- Diagnosis of bottlenecks in internal operations
- An app for assessing hiring documents
Compression happens in the market too.
The difference from a company is that the compressed version doesn't get locked in as the ceiling on my ability.
In a company, it tends to go like this:
Made a video
= the person in charge of video-making and standardization
In a one-person business, I can make it:
Selling video-production support as a product
= I just used that as the entry point this time
The product may be simple, but behind it I can freely put in multiple abilities.
Compression becomes a sales interface, not an evaluation.
13. Earning on my own isn't about finding people who understand me
I shouldn't over-idealize the idea of earning on my own.
Customers judge faster than a boss does.
They glance at a product page for a few seconds and leave. Sophisticated explanations don't get read. Something useful can still fail to sell. The problem I love and the problem customers will pay for don't always match.
So earning on my own is not
finding people who understand my depth.
It's
converting my deep processing ability into a form that others can easily receive value from, and choosing for myself how to do that conversion and which market evaluates it.
Translation is necessary in companies and in markets alike.
What I hate isn't translation.
It's having the translated version treated as the original, and having the value and future of the original limited by it.
When I earn on my own, I can keep the original myself and try multiple translations.
That's a big deal.
14. A realistic way to deal with the assessment
I don't need to fix the entire system over this assessment.
If my transfer is already decided and my job search is underway, I need to think about how much time to invest and what I'll get back.
Separate the text written for the company from my own definition of my abilities
On the sheet, I write in words the company can read.
- Facts
- Numbers
- Actions taken
- Reproducible procedures
- Concrete next actions
But I don't take that to be the whole picture of who I am.
Make abstract feedback concrete
Instead of "look around you more," I bring it back to
- In which situations
- Toward whom
- Doing what
- By when
- How much
- What counts as improvement
Don't fight to make them correct their picture of me
Explaining all my complex thinking to an evaluator who hasn't seen the floor is expensive.
If getting them to understand becomes the goal in itself, the deficit only grows.
I get the required submissions through, and I keep my official results saved separately on my own.
Keep my own original
Apart from the company sheet, I record:
- The problem structures I found
- The information I used in the analysis
- The options I weighed
- The means I implemented
- Results in numbers
- Abilities others can reproduce
- Elements I can carry over to my next kind of work
These become material for a job change, personal development projects, articles, and product design.
15. The fairest conclusion
If I had to express this discomfort as evenly as possible, it would be this:
I have a strong ability and habit of thinking about organizational problems by separating the individual, relationships, environment, systems, data, and management's perception, and then connecting them. The people around me aren't necessarily low-ability across the board; they have other practical skills. This assessment, however, doesn't look closely enough at my strongest function, and compresses me into items the evaluator can easily understand, such as videos, standardization, and reaching out to others. Compression itself is necessary for a system, but because observation and dialogue are lacking and revising the sheet doesn't lead to role, discretion, or chances to gain experience, it looks to me more like ritual than development.
And the core of the discomfort is this:
I hate that a low-resolution evaluator converts my ability into low-resolution metrics, and then uses the result to hand out work, role, promotion, pay, and even my next chance to gain experience.
Add the information problem, and it becomes:
I don't want the limit on how much information I showed an evaluator to be treated as the limit of my ability, my motivation, or my potential.
This isn't "I want more praise."
It's a demand not to have my future freedom narrowed by a picture of me built from limited observation.
That's why the assessment looks like a ritual.
That's why I'd rather spend my time on a job search than invest more in getting the company to understand me.
And in the end, that's why I want to earn on my own: to decide for myself what my abilities are used for, what price they carry, and what experience I get.
Earning on my own doesn't mean freedom from being judged by anyone.
The market judges harshly.
But one boss doesn't monopolize the path of evaluation.
I can put out multiple products. I can test them on multiple customers. I can change the price. I can learn from my own failures. I can choose my next experience.
What I'm after isn't freedom from evaluation.
It's the freedom to choose the market that evaluates me.
Key points
- It's not that everyone around me is low-resolution; this assessment just doesn't pick up my multi-layered structural analysis.
- It's reasonable for an assessment sheet to compress abilities.
- The problem is that, without enough observation and dialogue, the compressed picture is treated as a ceiling on ability.
- When someone doesn't share information, there are environmental reasons: relationships, psychological safety, the net cost of meetings, extra responsibility.
- If you treat unseen behavior as nonexistent ability, the evaluator's limit of observation becomes the person's career ceiling.
- Videos and procedure manuals aren't my core ability; they're one means of putting organizational and work design into practice.
- If an assessment doesn't connect to role, discretion, support, and chances to gain experience, it easily becomes ritual rather than development.
- I want to earn on my own because I don't want one evaluator to monopolize the pricing of my value.
- Translation is needed in the individual market too, but I don't have to let the translated version become the ceiling on my ability.
- What I'm after isn't to go unevaluated but to be able to choose my evaluation market.
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