Team Goals Produce The Collaboration That Individual Rankings Undermine
The science behind performance management has basically been proven untrue. You do not have to hold money over somebody's head to make them perform well.
Edie Goldberg
Founder and President
E. L. Goldberg & Associates
The traditional performance review system sets goals in January, ignores them until December, ranks employees against each other, and calls the resulting number a measure of contribution. Modern work doesn’t operate that way. It’s collaborative, fast-moving, and dependent on people having context, resources, and support far more than it is on the threat of a withheld raise. The organizations getting more out of their people are the ones flipping the model from measuring performance to enabling it.
Edie Goldberg, Ph.D., is the Founder and President of E. L. Goldberg & Associates and a nationally recognized expert in the future of work. She recently co-authored the book Performance Enablement, which outlines a transition from traditional evaluations to team-based models. As an industrial-organizational psychologist advising Fortune 10 companies, Goldberg sees a glaring disconnect: the traditional pay-for-performance model simply isn’t the most effective way to get the best out of modern teams.
“The science behind performance management has basically been proven untrue. You do not have to hold money over somebody’s head to make them perform well. We need to flip the paradigm from a coercive control strategy to an enablement model where we are trying to set performance on fire,” she says. The gap between what the science says and what companies actually do is where most performance systems break down.
We’re getting goals all wrong
Goldberg is emphatic that it’s implementation, not goal setting itself, that’s the problem. “Goal setting works, but it doesn’t work how we’ve implemented it in companies because we set goals at the beginning of the year and then we forget them until the end of the year. Goals need constant feedback,” she points out. “We need to know that we’re making progress against our goals. It turns out progress is a key performance accelerator.”
That insight reframes the purpose of the whole system. If progress fuels performance, then the job of a manager is not to evaluate at year-end, but to keep progress visible and unblocked throughout. Most companies know this and still run the annual review process as though the science says otherwise.
Better conversations, not more of them
The most common misread of continuous performance Goldberg sees is that the fix is simply more check-ins. She’s quick to dismiss that theory. “Having more ineffective conversations doesn’t help anybody.”
The data backs her up. Only 16% of employees say the last conversation they had with their manager was extremely meaningful. Volume without substance moves nothing. “Yes, we need continuous conversations. One-on-ones are critical in the performance enablement process. But it’s more about how am I coaching you? How am I supporting you? Do I truly understand what barriers are getting in your way of success, and what am I doing as a manager to remove those barriers? Am I getting you the resources you need?”
The nature of the conversation is what separates feedback that works from a recurring calendar invite.
Diagnose the problem before prescribing training
When performance slips, managers reach reflexively for a training solution. Goldberg wants them asking a more fundamental question first: is this will or skill? “What’s the motivational difference here? Is it, I want to do this but I just don’t have the skills or capability? Or am I just not motivated? Do I have the context? Do I understand why I’m working on this or why it’s important?”
The diagnosis matters because the interventions are completely different. Someone who lacks capability needs development. Someone who lacks purpose needs context. Someone who lacks connections inside the organization, or who is not collaborating well with their team, has an organizational barrier no training course will fix.
Goldberg’s example is a salesperson resisting a call quota. Rather than more coaching on dialing, the solution is helping them see that persistence through rejection produces a predictable outcome, and that the activity connects to something larger than the number itself.
Individual rankings create the behavior they punish
The structural flaw in traditional performance management is that it optimizes for individual competition in a world where almost no meaningful work is individual. “We have a very individualistic society, so everything has been about individual accountability. But your success is not all dependent on just you. It takes a village. It’s a team sport, and we don’t treat performance like a team sport, which it really is today,” Goldberg says.
Her central cautionary example is Microsoft’s stack-ranking era, where managers held a fixed pool of money and a forced distribution of ratings. “If I can only give a certain amount of fours and fives, I’m going to hoard information and focus on my own success rather than the team’s. There was a lot of what’s-in-it-for-me behavior, and it’s really what led to the downfall.” She notes that a leadership change-up eventually helped the company correct course. “A new CEO came in with a growth mindset, wanted people to collaborate, and refocused how they manage performance. Performance in the organization grew substantially.”
The alternative is not to erase individual accountability. One case study in Goldberg’s book keeps individual expertise explicit while measuring collective outcomes. “You can still talk about individual capability and accountability within those team goals, but the metric focuses on team performance,” she explains.
The common objection to this approach is that team rewards let people coast, but Goldberg says the research doesn’t support it. “That doesn’t actually happen. Peer pressure is a real thing. One of the things that motivates people is a sense of belonging. If somebody is slacking off, those teammates are going to say something, because it affects everybody’s performance. The team takes care of itself.”
Conversely, when a teammate is genuinely struggling through something, like a death in the family or the birth of a child, the team absorbs it, which builds the reciprocity that sustains performance.
AI is an enabler, but doesn’t substitute the manager
Goldberg is optimistic about AI’s role, with a firm boundary. It can’t own the relationship. “If a manager just passes off an AI-written performance review as their own, that decreases trust within the organization. First draft, yes, but then the manager has to seed it with real, specific examples.”
The risk of outsourcing the review itself is exactly why she’s more interested in AI as a data and coaching layer than as a writing tool. Whether the technology improves reviews or degrades them comes down to how it’s deployed. “Systems can provide a broader point of view on performance. I can scrape data from Slack or customer feedback channels, so it’s not just a manager’s opinion but a multitude of points of information. The analysis lets me identify problems I can coach on and opportunities within the team I can bring forward.”
It can also coach the manager, which matters given how rapidly these tools have entered daily work. “Managers are really bad at giving specific and timely feedback. AI can nudge them to provide feedback more in the moment. It can coach the manager on how to phrase feedback so it’s not perceived as a threat,” Goldberg suggests. “Managers think they’re doing a better job when they’re being critical, but it turns out positivity fuels performance, motivation, self-confidence, and emotional well-being.”
Managers have to actually manage
The most practical shift Goldberg advises is also the hardest. Managers spend roughly 90% of their time doing the work and 10% managing it. Improving performance management requires inverting that ratio. “If managers focus more of their time on actually managing the performance of the team, using AI to get more collective information, and focus on facilitating the team’s performance, productivity will go up. It’s not just me doing the work. How am I helping this collective group achieve these common goals?”
The three moves she recommends starting now: give people context for why their work matters, meet regularly with the conversation focused on progress and support rather than evaluation, and take responsibility for removing whatever is in the way.
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TL;DR
need to include this link to her book — https://www.performance-enablement.com/
Edie Goldberg
E. L. Goldberg & Associates
Founder and President
Founder and President
The traditional performance review system sets goals in January, ignores them until December, ranks employees against each other, and calls the resulting number a measure of contribution. Modern work doesn’t operate that way. It’s collaborative, fast-moving, and dependent on people having context, resources, and support far more than it is on the threat of a withheld raise. The organizations getting more out of their people are the ones flipping the model from measuring performance to enabling it.
Edie Goldberg, Ph.D., is the Founder and President of E. L. Goldberg & Associates and a nationally recognized expert in the future of work. She recently co-authored the book Performance Enablement, which outlines a transition from traditional evaluations to team-based models. As an industrial-organizational psychologist advising Fortune 10 companies, Goldberg sees a glaring disconnect: the traditional pay-for-performance model simply isn’t the most effective way to get the best out of modern teams.
“The science behind performance management has basically been proven untrue. You do not have to hold money over somebody’s head to make them perform well. We need to flip the paradigm from a coercive control strategy to an enablement model where we are trying to set performance on fire,” she says. The gap between what the science says and what companies actually do is where most performance systems break down.
We’re getting goals all wrong
Goldberg is emphatic that it’s implementation, not goal setting itself, that’s the problem. “Goal setting works, but it doesn’t work how we’ve implemented it in companies because we set goals at the beginning of the year and then we forget them until the end of the year. Goals need constant feedback,” she points out. “We need to know that we’re making progress against our goals. It turns out progress is a key performance accelerator.”
That insight reframes the purpose of the whole system. If progress fuels performance, then the job of a manager is not to evaluate at year-end, but to keep progress visible and unblocked throughout. Most companies know this and still run the annual review process as though the science says otherwise.
Better conversations, not more of them
The most common misread of continuous performance Goldberg sees is that the fix is simply more check-ins. She’s quick to dismiss that theory. “Having more ineffective conversations doesn’t help anybody.”
The data backs her up. Only 16% of employees say the last conversation they had with their manager was extremely meaningful. Volume without substance moves nothing. “Yes, we need continuous conversations. One-on-ones are critical in the performance enablement process. But it’s more about how am I coaching you? How am I supporting you? Do I truly understand what barriers are getting in your way of success, and what am I doing as a manager to remove those barriers? Am I getting you the resources you need?”
The nature of the conversation is what separates feedback that works from a recurring calendar invite.
Diagnose the problem before prescribing training
When performance slips, managers reach reflexively for a training solution. Goldberg wants them asking a more fundamental question first: is this will or skill? “What’s the motivational difference here? Is it, I want to do this but I just don’t have the skills or capability? Or am I just not motivated? Do I have the context? Do I understand why I’m working on this or why it’s important?”
The diagnosis matters because the interventions are completely different. Someone who lacks capability needs development. Someone who lacks purpose needs context. Someone who lacks connections inside the organization, or who is not collaborating well with their team, has an organizational barrier no training course will fix.
Goldberg’s example is a salesperson resisting a call quota. Rather than more coaching on dialing, the solution is helping them see that persistence through rejection produces a predictable outcome, and that the activity connects to something larger than the number itself.
Individual rankings create the behavior they punish
The structural flaw in traditional performance management is that it optimizes for individual competition in a world where almost no meaningful work is individual. “We have a very individualistic society, so everything has been about individual accountability. But your success is not all dependent on just you. It takes a village. It’s a team sport, and we don’t treat performance like a team sport, which it really is today,” Goldberg says.
Her central cautionary example is Microsoft’s stack-ranking era, where managers held a fixed pool of money and a forced distribution of ratings. “If I can only give a certain amount of fours and fives, I’m going to hoard information and focus on my own success rather than the team’s. There was a lot of what’s-in-it-for-me behavior, and it’s really what led to the downfall.” She notes that a leadership change-up eventually helped the company correct course. “A new CEO came in with a growth mindset, wanted people to collaborate, and refocused how they manage performance. Performance in the organization grew substantially.”
The alternative is not to erase individual accountability. One case study in Goldberg’s book keeps individual expertise explicit while measuring collective outcomes. “You can still talk about individual capability and accountability within those team goals, but the metric focuses on team performance,” she explains.
The common objection to this approach is that team rewards let people coast, but Goldberg says the research doesn’t support it. “That doesn’t actually happen. Peer pressure is a real thing. One of the things that motivates people is a sense of belonging. If somebody is slacking off, those teammates are going to say something, because it affects everybody’s performance. The team takes care of itself.”
Conversely, when a teammate is genuinely struggling through something, like a death in the family or the birth of a child, the team absorbs it, which builds the reciprocity that sustains performance.
AI is an enabler, but doesn’t substitute the manager
Goldberg is optimistic about AI’s role, with a firm boundary. It can’t own the relationship. “If a manager just passes off an AI-written performance review as their own, that decreases trust within the organization. First draft, yes, but then the manager has to seed it with real, specific examples.”
The risk of outsourcing the review itself is exactly why she’s more interested in AI as a data and coaching layer than as a writing tool. Whether the technology improves reviews or degrades them comes down to how it’s deployed. “Systems can provide a broader point of view on performance. I can scrape data from Slack or customer feedback channels, so it’s not just a manager’s opinion but a multitude of points of information. The analysis lets me identify problems I can coach on and opportunities within the team I can bring forward.”
It can also coach the manager, which matters given how rapidly these tools have entered daily work. “Managers are really bad at giving specific and timely feedback. AI can nudge them to provide feedback more in the moment. It can coach the manager on how to phrase feedback so it’s not perceived as a threat,” Goldberg suggests. “Managers think they’re doing a better job when they’re being critical, but it turns out positivity fuels performance, motivation, self-confidence, and emotional well-being.”
Managers have to actually manage
The most practical shift Goldberg advises is also the hardest. Managers spend roughly 90% of their time doing the work and 10% managing it. Improving performance management requires inverting that ratio. “If managers focus more of their time on actually managing the performance of the team, using AI to get more collective information, and focus on facilitating the team’s performance, productivity will go up. It’s not just me doing the work. How am I helping this collective group achieve these common goals?”
The three moves she recommends starting now: give people context for why their work matters, meet regularly with the conversation focused on progress and support rather than evaluation, and take responsibility for removing whatever is in the way.