Barry-Wehmiller lets employees nominate peers who embody company values, with essays read aloud at ceremonies where winners' families attend. This collective recognition often goes to people who aren't top individual performers but builds stronger, higher-performing teams than traditional top-down reviews.
Chapters
I love peer reviews. The way we do reviews and we define who the meritocracy is, it's either the metrics or some sort of like annual review process, which is one person deciding how good you are for the past 3 months. And that's how we're determining someone's value to the company. The best example I've ever seen of it is a company called Barry-Wehmiller. They ask each group to nominate their own peers who best exemplifies our values. Who do you want to be more like? There's a nomination process. They have to write essays as to what makes this person the best example of who we are. The way they give them their award is they read some of the nominations so this person can hear how other people talk about them. They secretly fly in their family so when their name is called out, the family is brought out because they want the parents to see the kind of child they have raised. Nobody's ever angry when somebody wins this award, ever. In fact, if anything, we're inspired to be more like them. 'Cause there's something even more powerful than the approval of one person, which is the approval of the whole tribe. And invariably, this person is rarely the, the highest individual performer. Right. But their existence on the team makes for a higher-performing team.
