How to Make Your Employees Cry during an Annual Performance Review

Not as fun as firing them, but still fun

Don’t forget to pretend to be compassionate when they cry — Pexels

Being a bad manager is easy. It’s also fairly intuitive. To summarize in a few words, you should privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

In other words, take credit for your team’s successes and make them responsible for any problems.

Being a terrible manager, on the other hand, is an art. It’s as difficult, if not more, as being a true leader. To be a terrible manager, you need to truly understand your people and identify their weaknesses because that’s where you’ll want to focus your perversity.

But the benefits are worth the late nights and weekends spent devising strategies to make your employees’ lives hell.

So much worth it.

Taking credit for someone’s job and getting a raise from it has a clear monetary value, but having someone remember you as their work nightmare on their deathbed?

That’s priceless.

I could write a book about being a terrible manager (I’m writing one, in fact — some chapters are available for free here), but today I will focus on the Annual Performance Review. It’s the perfect opportunity to have fun and make your employees cry.

Step 1 — Organize a pre-annual performance review

The mid-year check’s goal is to ensure your employee is on track to a bad year. If they’re doing something wrong, don’t tell them. It’s much better to wait for the annual review and surprise them with a healthy dose of negative feedback.

Humans love surprises.

On the other hand, if they’re doing well, the mid-year review is your opportunity to undermine their confidence and/or (I recommend and) staff them on interdepartmental projects that will take an awful lot of their time without having any positive impact whatsoever on their goals for the year.

If it sounds like a win/win, it’s because it is.

Pro-tip: don’t forget to take the credit if, by some miracle, they did something useful for the company with their colleagues from other departments. I wouldn’t count on it, though. As a seasoned sponsor of such projects, there’s nothing easier to nudge to failure.

Step 2 — Make Them Cry

In this article, I assume you don’t know your employees well enough to trigger them with a simple sentence about their ex-wife or other personal information. If you have access to such details because you were wise enough to record all the drunk conversations during previous team-building events, put them to use. There’s nothing more efficient than using the failures of the personal life in a working environment. It’s unsettling in an evil way.

Example: “I’m not sure your father would have been proud of your work this year.”

Without access to these weapons of emotional destruction, I recommend injustice

The first thing to do is judge your employee’s performance based on goals you never discussed. It should trigger strong reactions.

Attributing their hard work to other members of the team known to be slackers is also a good one.

Speaking of which, you should always have a slacker in your team, who you will treat very well — as if they were a top performer. It will make everybody upset and emotional, particularly during the performance reviews, when you compare their work (unfavorably) to the slacker’s achievements (of which there are none).

If your employee wants to talk about their salary or bonus during the annual performance review, tell them there will be a separate meeting to discuss these administrative points. You can also remind them the goal of the review is to share hindsight in a safe environment without the pressure of talking about money. After all, they work here because of the family atmosphere. Don’t they? It can’t be because of the money?!

Finally, I recommend making your employees feel unimportant with the usual tricks. Interrupt the meeting for a quick phone call or reply to a few emails in the middle. It’s nicely destabilizing.

If nothing else works, use the most vicious tool in the box: The Calibration Meeting

It’s the meeting where unfortunately — it’s not your fault — other (uncharitable) people decided your employee couldn’t get the “exceeds expectation” grade they were expecting (and the bonus that goes with it). Due to circumstances out of your control, the committee downgraded to “meets most.” Insist on the out-of-your-control part.

And now for the best part. Once you have played the calibration committee card, you can introduce your employee to the joy of interdepartmental projects. Indeed, what better way is there to make themselves known to other managers and increase their political capital so that all this drama won’t repeat itself at the calibration committee next year?

It’s perfect.

And yes, I just shared a way to prepare for the mid-year review. That’s my tip #13 (for bad luck, but not for you) to make your employees cry. Always plan.

Takeaway: the interdepartmental project

If the employee fails, it’s not your fault, and they get a bad review because they spent too much time working for other departments instead of focusing on their targets.
If they succeed, you take the credit AND can still talk behind their backs during the committee and give them a bad grade.

If it sounds too good to be true, it’s because you’re not a manager yet.

For additional tips on becoming a terrible manager, read all the stories listed here or follow me on Substack. For better tips, check out Mark Suroviec, M.Ed.’s new publication, Work City, and read all the stories in Career Paths.