--- title: After the Performance Review, People Leave (2) — The Leader's Job Is to Set the Stage url: https://oosioo.com/en/p/%EC%9D%B8%EC%82%AC%ED%8F%89%EA%B0%80%EA%B0%80-%EB%81%9D%EB%82%98%EB%A9%B4-%EC%82%AC%EB%9E%8C%EC%9D%B4-%EB%82%98%EA%B0%84%EB%8B%A4-2-%EB%A6%AC%EB%8D%94%EA%B0%80-%ED%95%A0-%EC%9D%BC%EC%9D%80-%ED%8C%90%EC%9D%84-%EA%B9%8C%EB%8A%94-%EA%B2%83 date: 2026-09-15T13:07:34+00:00 author: SYSOP summary: Four questions a leader should ask in August, and two preconditions for becoming someone who sets the stage. Delegation can start today, but consistency only proves itself over time. --- # After the Performance Review, People Leave (2) — The Leader's Job Is to Set the Stage In the previous piece, I talked about the distrust surrounding performance reviews. I ended it by saying that, ultimately, management and leaders need to change — so this time I want to write about what leaders should actually do. As you know, management doesn't change as easily as you'd like. ## Four Things to Ask in August ![Two people sitting across from each other at a round table by a window](/uploads/e63878d154f7b5fa.jpg) The video was posted around August, and it suggests a few things leaders should check in with their people about around this time of year. 1. Are the goals set at the start of the year still valid? 2. Roughly what percentage of progress has been made? 3. Among the things that are stuck or difficult, is there anything the leader can help resolve? 4. What do they want to work on for the rest of the year? I think this checklist covers more ground than it seems to at first glance. ## Annual Plans Rarely Hold Up Especially at startups, where a team's goals and direction tend to shift fairly often, annual plans frequently stop matching reality. In that situation, leaders need to check in on their team's goals and direction regularly, and align and adjust them together with the team. I used to check in on individual work weekly to keep everyone's direction aligned, and it helped quite a bit. I recorded the results of these weekly conversations and rolled them up into a monthly evaluation. Once you have a trackable record like that, comparative evaluation becomes much easier too. ## The Person Who Sets the Stage ![A photo of a hand writing something down in a notebook](/uploads/2d57966912ecdc7d.jpg) What struck me most on that checklist were items 3 and 4. If a leader is someone who sets the stage so their team can do better work, the team tends to run well. There are roughly two preconditions and principles behind this. ### First, Proper Delegation and Motivation Good leaders need to spend most of their time on important decisions, and should delegate hands-on work to their team as much as possible. Busy managers, more often than not, either don't fully trust their team or haven't developed their capabilities enough — so they end up running every meeting and doing every task themselves, exhausted and overworked. When I first became a manager, I was genuinely busy and worn out. But at some point, I started delegating most of the work and instead focused on making bigger decisions from a broader view, setting direction, and solving the problems my team members ran into. The goal is to create an environment where team members grow their own capabilities while wanting to take on work that's aligned with the organization's direction — work that benefits not just them but the company too. That's a bigger long-term win than just clearing your own plate of tasks right now. Of course, getting there takes effort on everyone's part, but nothing worthwhile happens without effort. ### Second, Sticking to the Standards You Set The second is consistency. It sounds obvious once you write it down: whatever standard you set at the start of the year needs to still be standing at the end of it. Thinking back on why that spreadsheet from my previous piece was so problematic, it wasn't just that the scoring was off. The bigger issue was that team leads entered evaluations every month, only for a handful of executives to overturn them at the end. Once a standard gets overturned once, nobody treats it as a standard anymore. The same goes for team leads — if you know the score you gave is just going to get erased anyway, what grounds do you have left to talk to your team about it? Item 3 on the checklist runs into this same issue. Telling someone to speak up when they're stuck or struggling only gets a real answer if the person who said it has actually cleared obstacles before. Ignore it once or twice, and from then on everyone just says they're fine. Setting the stage, in the end, comes down to actually doing what you said you'd do, over and over, until it accumulates — it's not about building one more system. I think this is harder than delegation. Delegation is something you can start today if you decide to, but consistency can only be proven over time. ## Closing Thoughts In the end, what a leader can actually do isn't anything grand. Ask the four questions above at the right time, write down the answers, and follow through on what you said. It looks less impressive than building some new system, but it's harder and takes longer. There's not much you can do if someone doesn't get a good review because they lack the skills. But you can reduce the number of people who leave because, despite having the skills, no one properly explained things to them. No matter how well-designed a system is, in the end an organization's performance and direction come down to how the leader holds the wheel and steers. Good luck to everyone, wherever you are.