A surprising number of firms still don’t run any kind of structured employee review process—not annually, not quarterly, not ever. And when you dig into why, the answer is usually some version of this: “Our technical leads are slammed. They don’t have time to review their people.”
Fair point. In many organizations, the production leads carry the heaviest load. They sit at the critical point in the workflow. They’re managing deadlines, client expectations, QA/QC, and usually mentoring on the fly. Handing them a stack of performance reviews on top of all that? It’s not going to happen. Not because they don’t care, but because the system is designed for failure.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: skipping reviews leaves employees guessing, leaders blind, and the organization stagnant. If people don’t get feedback, they don’t grow. If expectations aren’t clarified, they drift. If high performers never hear it from leadership, they feel invisible. And if struggling employees aren’t coached early, problems become cultural.
You can’t build a healthy company without this feedback loop.
The answer isn’t to force reviews onto already overloaded production leaders. The answer is to redesign the process.
One alternative approach I’ve seen is to separate the reviewing from the producing. Instead of expecting every technical lead to carry the full burden, identify people in the organization—people with strong communication skills, empathy, and objectivity—to serve as dedicated reviewers. Train them. Equip them. And make performance reviews part of the operating rhythm rather than something squeezed in when the workload allows.
This doesn’t remove the technical lead from the picture. It simply changes their role. They provide input: strengths, gaps, performance insights, project feedback. But someone else—someone with the bandwidth and the aptitude—owns the actual conversation.
This solves several problems in one stroke:
- Consistency: Reviews get done on time and with quality.
- Fairness: Employees all receive objective attention, not whatever their lead can squeeze in at 10 p.m.
- Clarity: Expectations, goals, and behaviors get reinforced uniformly across the company.
- Leadership development: The designated reviewers gain meaningful experience as coaches and communicators.
- Culture strengthening: People feel seen. They feel supported. They feel invested in.
Most importantly, it stops the organization from holding its own growth hostage to the bandwidth of a few overburdened technical leaders.
Regular reviews are not a bureaucratic exercise. They are one of the clearest, simplest levers a company has to improve performance, retain great people, and build the culture it claims to want. If your current structure can’t support them, change the structure—not the expectation.
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