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Here’s an excerpt from an article on Yahoo! HotJobs, discussing how to deal with negative performance reviews:

Almost every performance review includes some criticism. But what happens when you feel like your boss has almost nothing good to say in the review? Does it mean not just that your work could be improved, but that your boss wants you gone?

The problem with the article is it never tells the base truth of what a job performance review is, so I’ll spill the beans

Your job performance is reviewed in writing because the company needs a written record of mistakes you’ve made in order to fire you. Therefore, you will always do poorly at something, and no amount of effort on your part will ever be enough to get you to be good at everything.

I know that’s shocking, so I’ll let it sink in. Click the more link when you’re ready.

The Ruse: It’s Not Honesty, It’s A Laundry List

One of the things I remember very clearly from working at the newspapers — and one of the reasons I’m glad I don’t work in a corporate environment — is the amount of stress that performance review time caused among the other employees.

They, like most people, considered the reviews honest assessments. Even the middle managers who were told to create the reviews stressed over them, because they, too, considered them to be honest assessments.

Which leads me to a quick aside on the worst job in the service economy, which is most consistently staffed by the least capable people: Middle manager.

There are millions of middle managers — shift leaders, department heads, etc. — in the workforce. Exactly two of them are good, and exactly five are competent. All the others are awful.

How do I know this? Because there’s a wildly successful comic strip called “Dilbert,” two wildly successful TV shows named “The Office” (one BBC, one NBC) and a wildly successful movie called “Office Space,” all of which center around how incompetent middle management takes the inherent absurdities of corporate America and make them insufferable. You can’t have an end product which is that commercially viable unless there’s a lot of sympathy and knowing winks from a large audience.

By and large, the people who become middle managers are people who were promoted from the ranks of employees, or people with limited experience fresh from business school. Which means they either have no training or no experience (or, possibly, neither). No matter how you slice it, they don’t know what they are doing.

Which is how the newspapers were able to con a bunch of otherwise smart people — reporters and editors, on the whole, are fairly smart people, if not wise — into taking performance reviews seriously, even though they also clearly told the middle managers that no one does everything right and it was important to include negatives along with positives.

You see, if you don’t know what you are doing — if you don’t understand corporate speak, or if you simply deal with facts all day and assess statements based on what was said, instead of what was meant — you probably take a statement such as “no one is good at everything; make sure to include points that need improvement” as just that.

What you are really being told, of course, is, “Don’t throw the guy under the bus, but make sure you say some bad things about him.” In other words, you won’t be utterly failing, but you simply will not quite measure up at something in your job.

The truth may be that you do as well as someone who does measure up, according to the reviews; the truth may be that you actually excel at it.

Or, maybe, you actually do even worse at the thing than they say you do. But you’ll never be an utter failure at any task listed in your job description, when your job performance review comes in. (Not until your final assessment, anyway. More on that shortly.)

The second part of that is, no assessment of you will ever be glowing — at least, nothing of substance. You might be noted as a “positive, can-do” person, or “friendly,” or the like, but you’ll never be at the top of anything in your job.

You may be considered to be very good at some task, and that praise is probably warranted. You may be worse at it and the assessment may be generous, or you may be better at it and the assessment may be an understatement. Whatever; you’re being acknowledged as good at a core job component, and that means your job is safe.

The Reason: Firing People Is Hard Without A Paper Trail

Why do companies want to write down bad things about you? And why do they want to write down good things about you?

Because firing people today isn’t as simple as handing them a severance check and guiding them to the door. Firing people is a trail fraught with liability, from being sued to being gunned down, and a paper trail is essential for covering the corporate ass.

Even in places where there’s no union representation, firing people is difficult. Although most states consider non-contractual employment to be “at will” — meaning the employer can release you at any time for any, or no, reason — there are so many federal, state (and, in large cities, local) laws affecting labor, that nothing short of total incompetence can ensure a company doesn’t lose a lawsuit for wrongful termination.

In order to prove total incompetence, the company needs to be able to display, in writing, that it advised you of performance problems you were having and that you acknowledged the assessments, even if you don’t agree with them.

(Which is why you are asked to sign your performance evaluation, and why you should never, ever comment on your job performance reviews: The same way it doesn’t do you any good to talk to the cops after being arrested, it doesn’t do you any good to disagree with your boss in writing. It’s just evidence they’ll use against you later.)

If they can produce a list of things you did wrong, and they can point out how you were consistently told those things were areas of concern but they never got better, you’re an incompetent. That means you can be fired and they have proof.

Of course, these assessments need to fall within the realm of reason. That’s why you’ll never totally stink at any job task, until the performance review before they decide they want you fired. If you ever utterly fail a job performance factor that is part of your job description, you’d best start looking for new work, because you’re sure to be fired at any time.

And that’s why you’ll always be good at something. No one gets hired for a job and immediately turns it into a Keystone Kops short. You lasted at your job because you did some things right and there was hope you’d fix the wrong stuff. Unfortunately, you never did, and the cons outweighed the pros; so, you were let go. That’s your company’s story, they’re sticking to it, and they even have the manuscripts.

Now, it may seem very calculating, and especially cynical of me, that companies use job performance reviews as the bait in a trap that gets you fired, especially when, in theory, if you don’t have an employment contract, they can fire you at any time for any, or no, reason.

But believe me, it is calculating and you should be cynical about it. The company’s best interests state that all employment contracts should contain a clause that gets you out the door today for a specific price, and that procedures be in place so that when non-contract employees are fired, the percentage of them who are likely to file lawsuit, and the costs of defending those suits, be predictable.

Oh, and if there’s an iron-clad way to guarantee you won’t win the suit, if you do file — say, a written history of mistakes you’ve made that you know about, and that maybe you were even dumb enough to argue about in writing, proving you did not actually care about improving your performance — that would be great, too.

Again, job performance reviews aren’t about telling you the truth, and if they come close to fair, it’s largely by chance. Job performance reviews are all about having ammunition against you should you ever need to be fired. The sooner you realize that and adapt to it, the happier you’ll be at work and the less you’ll need to worry about being fired.