The Performance Review

Mireille had rehearsed the conversation so many times over the weekend that, by Monday afternoon in the last week of June, she could have delivered it in her sleep. Oskar had been her closest friend at the company for six years; they had survived two restructurings and one disastrous office party together. He was also the member of her team whose results she could least defend. There had been two missed deadlines, a client report sent out with errors that the client had noticed before anyone else, and a general sense, which everyone shared but nobody voiced, that he was only half there.

He sat down and smiled at her with such ordinary warmth that she almost abandoned her notes altogether. "Before you start," he said, "I've got something for you." He slid a printed document across the desk. It was his self-assessment, which every employee was expected to submit before their review, and which Mireille had assumed he had forgotten, since it had not arrived by the deadline.

She read it twice. In plain, unforgiving language, he had listed every missed deadline, apologized for the report, and acknowledged that he had been difficult to reach for most of the spring. Under overall performance, where most people chose "meets expectations" almost by reflex, he had written "below expectations" and underlined it. It was, she realized with some discomfort, considerably harsher than the version she had prepared.

"This isn't a self-assessment, Oskar," she said at last. "It's a confession." He shrugged and told her that he would rather she heard it from him first, because he had no intention of making excuses. Then, after a pause long enough to make her look up, he explained what he had not told anyone at work. His father had had a stroke in February. Since then, Oskar had been driving two hours each way on weekends and most Wednesday evenings to help his mother, who could no longer manage on her own.

Mireille put her notes face down on the desk. The review she had rehearsed was no longer the conversation they needed to have. "Why on earth didn't you tell me?" she asked, and he admitted that he had been afraid it would sound like an excuse, and that he had assumed he could manage until things got better. "Things don't always get better on schedule," she said. "If I were you, I'd stop trying to do everything at once. You should talk to HR about carer's leave this week, not next month. And I think we ought to move the Hartley account to Lorna until September, which isn't a punishment, so please don't take it as one."

They spent the next forty minutes not on what had gone wrong but on what might make the coming months bearable. They agreed on a compressed week, a colleague to cover his client calls on Wednesdays, and a promise that he would tell her when he was struggling, not afterwards. As he stood up to leave, he asked whether his self-assessment would be going into his file. Mireille picked up a pen, crossed out "below expectations," and wrote in the margin that the assessment would be reviewed again in December, under rather different circumstances.