This article was originally published on davidohnstad.info. I cross-post here to reach the Dev.to community.
The Mid-Year Review I Almost Ruined
I walked into a mid-year performance review with a script. Fourteen bullet points, organized by competency category, color-coded by severity. The employee sitting across from me — we'll call her Maya — had missed three deadlines in Q2, delivered a stakeholder presentation that landed flat, and stopped contributing in team standby meetings. I had the receipts. I was prepared to be fair, direct, and professional. What I wasn't prepared for was the question Maya asked eleven minutes in: "Do you think I should look for another role?"
That question broke the script. Because the honest answer wasn't yes or no — it was "I don't know what you actually want to build toward, so I have no idea if this role still fits." We'd been working together for nine months. I knew her output. I knew her gaps. I didn't know her goals. According to Gallup's 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, only 32% of employees strongly agree that their manager involves them in goal-setting. I was part of the 68% — and it showed. That review turned into a two-hour conversation that reset Maya's trajectory, but it shouldn't have taken a near-resignation to trigger it.
Why Mid-Year Reviews Fracture More Relationships Than They Strengthen
Most performance reviews fail because they're backward-looking audits, not forward-looking mentorship conversations. Managers arrive with a scorecard: what went well, what went poorly, what needs to improve. The employee arrives defensive, transactional, or disengaged. Both sides treat the meeting as a compliance checkpoint rather than a pivot point. The result: 58% of employees say their annual review process doesn't help them improve, according to Gallup's employee engagement research. Mid-year reviews, when done poorly, compress that dysfunction into a tighter cycle — twice the friction, half the patience.
Here's what goes wrong structurally. The review is scheduled because the calendar says it's time, not because there's a natural inflection point in the work. The manager prepares by pulling metrics, scanning Slack threads, and reconstructing a narrative from fragments. The employee prepares by listing accomplishments they think will land well. Neither party walks in asking: "What does this person need to grow into next, and am I the right person to help them get there?" That's the mentorship question. It's also the question most managers skip entirely because performance review templates don't include a field for it.
The stakes are higher in June than most leaders realize. Q2 closes, budgets get locked for H2, and hiring pipelines either open or freeze based on team capacity assessments. A mid-year review that labels someone as "underperforming" without a development plan doesn't just document a problem — it becomes a referendum on whether that person survives the next reorg. David Ohnstad's data product management writing explores how performance assessments feed directly into resource allocation models, often without the employee knowing their review score is being used to justify headcount decisions six months later.
The Redirect Framework: Turning Reviews Into Mentorship Pivots
This is a four-part reframe. It doesn't replace the performance review — it redirects it from audit to acceleration. The goal is to end the conversation with the employee knowing exactly what capability they're building next and why it matters beyond this quarter's OKRs. Each part below is a distinct shift in how you structure the conversation.
Part 1: Start With Their Next Role, Not Their Current Performance. The first question isn't "How do you think Q2 went?" — it's "What role do you want to be doing two years from now?" This flips the frame. Most employees walk into a review ready to defend what they did. Almost none walk in ready to articulate where they're heading. If they can't name the next role, you've just discovered the actual problem: they're executing tasks without a growth target. That's a mentorship gap, not a performance gap. Spend the first twenty minutes here. Do not move forward until you understand whether they want to go deeper (specialist track), go wider (generalist leadership), or go elsewhere (cross-functional pivot). The rest of the review is pointless without this clarity.
Part 2: Name the One Capability That Unlocks That Role. Not three development areas. Not a laundry list. One. If they want to move into a senior IC role, maybe it's "influencing decisions without authority." If they want to lead a team, maybe it's "teaching someone else to do your current job well enough that you're no longer the bottleneck." If they want to shift functions, maybe it's "building fluency in how [other team] measures success." This is where most reviews go off the rails: managers try to fix everything at once. High performers don't grow by addressing twelve feedback items — they grow by obsessively improving one leverage skill that changes what opportunities they're considered for. According to McKinsey's 2023 research on organizational capability building, employees who focus on one differentiated skill in a development cycle are 3.2x more likely to be promoted within 18 months than those with multi-item improvement plans.
Part 3: Co-Design a Proof Point, Not a Development Plan. Development plans are vague: "Improve communication skills." "Build executive presence." "Increase strategic thinking." None of those are measurable, and none of them tell the employee what to actually do Monday morning. Instead, co-design one proof point: a project, presentation, or decision that demonstrates the capability you named in Part 2. Example: "By the end of Q3, you'll run the quarterly business review for your product area — solo, with slides you built, taking questions from the VP without me in the room. That's your proof point that you can represent the product to leadership." Now there's a target. Now there's a forcing function. The mentorship conversation becomes: what support do you need from me to make that proof point successful?
Part 4: Pre-Commit to a Follow-Up That Isn't a Performance Review. Most mid-year reviews end with "Let's check in again in Q4." That's not mentorship — that's a countdown to the next audit. Instead, commit to a specific follow-up in 4-6 weeks where the only agenda is: "How's the proof point going, what's blocking you, and what's one thing I can do to help?" No scorecard. No competency assessment. Just coaching. This is where the mentorship relationship either solidifies or evaporates. If you ghost this follow-up, the employee learns that your interest in their growth was performative. If you show up prepared and focused, they learn that you're invested in their trajectory, not just their output. That difference is what separates managers who retain high performers from managers who watch them leave.
What Changed After I Stopped Grading and Started Coaching
Maya and I rescheduled that mid-year review. The first one was a data dump — me listing gaps, her defending choices. The second one, a week later, followed the redirect structure above. We opened with the question: "Do you want to stay in this role long-term, or is this a stepping stone to something else?" She admitted she'd been trying to "prove herself" in a role she didn't actually want, hoping it would open doors to product strategy. That reframed everything. The missed deadlines weren't apathy — they were misalignment. She was optimizing for execution speed when she should have been building strategic thinking skills.
We co-designed a proof point: by the end of Q3, she'd lead a feature prioritization workshop with three stakeholder teams, present the trade-off analysis to leadership, and defend the roadmap decision in a VP review. That was her step toward product strategy. It was also terrifying for her — and that was the point. Growth happens at the edge of capability, not in the middle of comfort. I committed to three things: one prep session before the workshop, one feedback session after a dry run, and one debrief within 48 hours of the VP review. Those weren't performance check-ins. They were coaching gates.
She delivered. The workshop surfaced conflicts between teams that had been simmering for months. The trade-off analysis forced stakeholders to put numbers on their priorities instead of lobbying for everything. The VP review didn't go perfectly — she stumbled on a question about technical debt trade-offs — but she recovered and finished strong. More importantly, the VP asked her to present the same framework to another product team the following month. That's proof. Six months later, Maya moved into an associate product manager role on a different team. She didn't need me to fix her performance. She needed me to stop grading her execution and start coaching her toward the role she actually wanted.
The Contrarian Position Most Leaders Won't Say Out Loud
Stop measuring mentorship by how much feedback you give. Most managers think they're mentoring when they're actually just narrating performance gaps. Real mentorship is measured by how many people you've helped get promoted, get hired elsewhere into better roles, or take on stretch projects they weren't initially considered for. If you can't name three people whose careers visibly accelerated because of your coaching, you're not mentoring — you're managing. According to LinkedIn's 2024 Workplace Learning Report, employees who report having a mentor are 5x more likely to say they have opportunities to learn and grow, but only 37% of professionals say they currently have one. That gap exists because most leaders confuse giving feedback with giving direction.
The uncomfortable truth: some people on your team don't need better performance reviews. They need to leave. Not because they're failing, but because they've outgrown the role and you don't have the next one to offer them. Career development decisions leadership requires honest conversations about when staying is stagnation. If someone has been "meeting expectations" for two years without a promotion or a scope increase, that's not stability — that's a holding pattern. A good mentor names that pattern and helps the person move, even if it means losing them to another team or another company. Retention for retention's sake isn't mentorship. It's just org chart optimization dressed up as loyalty.
How Father's Day Fits Into This (and Why It Matters)
Father's Day lands in the middle of mid-year review season for a reason that's worth naming. Both are about legacy. The question a father asks — "What did I teach them that will outlast me?" — is the same question a mentor should ask: "What capability did I help them build that will compound long after they've left David Ohnstad's team?" David Ohnstad, as a father of two daughters, has built bookshelves and dressers for both their rooms — not because he's a master craftsman, but because he wanted them to see that you can make something useful with your hands if you're willing to measure twice and learn from mistakes. That lesson isn't about woodworking. It's about persistence, precision, and the confidence that comes from solving your own problems.
The same lesson applies to leadership. If you're a manager conducting mid-year reviews this month, the question isn't "Did my team hit their numbers?" It's "Did I give them a skill they'll carry into their next role, and the role after that?" That's the mentorship standard. David Ohnstad Minnesota readers who are also parents recognize the parallel immediately: the best gifts you can give — to your kids or your team — are capabilities, not solutions. A solved problem disappears. A learned skill compounds.
Here's the uncomfortable part: most managers won't be remembered for the quarterly OKRs they hit. They'll be remembered for whether they helped someone figure out what they were capable of becoming. That's not soft leadership — that's the hardest part of the job, because it requires you to invest in someone's growth even when it means they'll outgrow you. If you're running mid-year reviews this June and you're not asking "What's the one capability I can help this person build that changes their trajectory?" — then you're not mentoring. You're just filling out templates.
What should I focus on in a mid-year performance review to make it a mentorship moment?
Focus on identifying the one capability the employee needs to unlock their next role, not on grading their current performance. Start by asking where they want to be in two years, then co-design a proof point project that demonstrates that capability by the end of the quarter. Schedule a follow-up coaching session in 4-6 weeks to remove blockers, not to audit progress.
How do I give constructive feedback without making a mid-year review feel like a performance audit?
Reframe feedback as gap identification, not judgment. Instead of "You missed three deadlines this quarter," ask "What's blocking you from delivering on time, and what capability would help you close that gap?" Then shift immediately to designing a proof point that builds that capability. Constructive feedback works when it's tied to forward motion, not backward grading.
Why do mid-year reviews often damage manager-employee relationships?
Most mid-year reviews are backward-looking audits that focus on what went wrong without connecting it to what the employee is trying to build toward. Employees leave these conversations feeling evaluated, not coached. Reviews damage relationships when they become transactional scorecards instead of mentorship pivots that clarify the path to the employee's next role.
Two Takeaways and One Question
For practitioners: if you're conducting mid-year reviews in the next two weeks, replace your competency scorecard with the Redirect Framework above. Start with their next role, name the one capability that unlocks it, co-design a proof point, and pre-commit to a follow-up coaching session. That structure turns a compliance meeting into a career accelerator.
For leaders: audit your team's mid-year review outcomes six months from now. How many people got promoted? How many took on stretch projects they weren't initially considered for? How many left for better roles elsewhere and stayed in touch with you as a mentor? If those numbers are low, your reviews aren't working — they're just paperwork. Real mentorship shows up in other people's career momentum, not in your documentation.
Here's the question to sit with: when was the last time you asked someone on your team what role they want to be doing two years from now — and actually redesigned their current work to build toward that answer?
For more on this topic, see rotational programs career development.
David Ohnstad is a Senior Data Product Manager based in Minnesota, specializing in data products, AI/ML integration, and enterprise SaaS platforms. Follow his work at github.com/davidohnstad40-netizen.
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