What to take away
- 1.30-minute quarterly conversation, not annual review.
- 2.Three questions: going well, in your way, want in 12 months.
- 3.Track the pattern across 3–4 quarters — it beats any rating.
The fix is a 30-minute quarterly conversation that sits in between. Three questions: what is going well, what is in your way, and what do you want to be doing 12 months from now.
Write the answers down. Bring them to the next quarterly. The pattern over three or four quarters tells you more than any annual review ever will.
“Most performance reviews fail because they happen once a year. Most 1:1s fail because they never look up.”
Crucially, this is not a rating exercise. No scores, no calibration. The goal is signal, not judgment.
Try this Monday
- Block 30 minutes per direct report this quarter for the three questions.
- Write the answers in a shared doc — one per person, across quarters.
- Before the next quarter, re-read last quarter's answers first.
When you're ready to stop doing this manually, this is what Aire does — for the first 50 hires and the next 500.
Get early access