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Miss Conduct

‘Mad Men’: Should feedback be about the past or the present?

Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson in “Mad Men.”

“I’d like to have my performance reviewed. I’ve had quite a year.” – Peggy

“What do you see for the future?” – Don

“Well, um … is that on there?” — Peggy

The existential theme of “The Forecast,” Sunday’s episode of “Mad Men,” was all about the future, but the business theme was all about feedback — from bosses, clients, agents, romantic partners, colleagues, and children.

What is the relationship between the two? Should feedback be about the past or the present? Is a performance review about the kind of year you’ve had, or the one you want to have?

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When Don reviews Peggy’s performance (at her insistence) he focuses more on the latter. He doesn’t talk about the year she’s had, he asks her what she hopes to accomplish in the future. Naturally, because he’s Don Draper, he makes it all about his own life crisis, mocks Peggy’s succinct and measurable goals, and the meeting ends in frustration for both of them.

His initial impulse, however, may have been sound. Performance feedback comes in two varieties, evaluative (focused on past performance) and developmental (focused on future goals). The phrase “performance review” is somewhat misleading, because in a business context, the point of analyzing the past is to prepare for the future. Don doesn’t bother to review Mathis’s unacceptable performance with the Peter Pan clients, he simply fires him for it. You only need to review employees’ performance if they’re going to continue to perform for you.

Peggy intends to perform for Don until she gets his job: “I’d like to be the first woman creative director at this agency.” Peggy is both motivated and competent, which is all the more reason why Don was right to focus her feedback session on the future rather than the past. Employees who are highly motivated — especially those who are motivated by the intellectual challenge or personal meaning of their jobs, and not just the paycheck — strongly prefer feedback that focuses on future goals and what they need to do to achieve them. If Don were a good manager, he would structure Peggy’s performance review in accordance with her goals. What stands between today’s copy chief Peggy Olson and tomorrow’s creative director Peggy Olson (besides Don finally falling off that balcony once and for all, which might be the kindest fate for all concerned at this point)? What strengths has she already exhibited that would make her right for the role, and what skills does she still need to develop?

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Peggy not only wants to do her job well, she is capable of it, which makes Don’s job a thousand percent easier. If she weren’t, he’d be coming up against the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is neatly summarized in the title of their groundbreaking paper “Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” If you’re not smart enough to do the work, chances are excellent that you’re not smart enough to recognize that fact, either. Highly competent people, on the other hand, often underestimate their performance both because they have high standards and because they — being merely competent, not omniscient — wrongly assume that most other people are pretty good at things, too.

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In other words, if you’d made them fill out their own performance reviews, Don’s dingbat secretary Meredith would have given herself much higher ratings than Peggy would. (To be fair, Meredith does seem to be more on the ball this season, but this may be because Don has gotten so predictable even Meredith can tell what he’s going to do three moves out. Are we not all a bit tired of Don by now?)

This causes some obvious problems for performance reviews. The people who need the feedback most are the least capable of taking it in.

A classic technique for delivering feedback or conducting performance reviews is what I, as Miss Conduct, can only call a “slop” sandwich: Begin and end with praise, and put the nasty bits in the middle. Consultant Dick Grote, however, author of “How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals,” argues against the slop sandwich in part because of the Dunning-Kruger problem.

He suggests, instead, beginning a performance review by letting the person know up front if they are doing well, overall, or if they need to improve their performance in a hurry. The Peggys of the world want reassurance and then further direction — if her performance review had been a real one, and not a disguised therapy session for her boss, she probably would have been picking her own performance apart before long, and naming a whole list of things she needed to improve on. The beauty part of managing a Peggy is that she has higher standards for herself than even her boss does. All she needs is fine-tuning and resources.

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Bad performers, however, need to be brought up sharply. The slop sandwich is a bad approach with these folks, because beginning with praise lulls them into a false sense of security. Also, the primacy effect biases people — everyone, not just the Dunning-Kruger kids — toward giving the most weight to the first item in a series. Hence, the first thing said in a performance review should be the lens through which all the subsequent feedback should be interpreted: “You’re doing great and this is how you can get to the next level,” or “You’re doing badly and this is what you need to do if you want to stick around.” A performance review by definition evaluates behaviors of the past, but for the purpose of creating a better future.

“The Forecast” features multiple scenes of people evaluating each other, not only in the workplace, and plays with people’s responses to feedback and how those responses will affect their futures. Don refuses to hear what his real-estate agent has to say about the need to refurbish his condo before selling it — and sells it anyway, because Don Draper can ignore good advice and get away with it. Glen responds to the negative feedback of failing grades by enlisting in the Army and creating an alternate vision of himself as a man of action — a response which may well keep him from having a future, given that the Vietnam war is still in progress. Joan’s new love interest takes her criticisms to heart and revises his priorities accordingly, which gives him the chance of a future with her.

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More on ‘Mad Men’ from Miss Conduct:

‘Mad Men’ at work: Who is more creative, Megan or Stan?

‘Mad Men’ analyzed: Looking the part