🧭 What Game Are You Playing? Why Performance Reviews Fall Flat Without This One Conversation

Most performance reviews feel like a chore because they’re trying to measure everyone with the same ruler—without asking what each person is actually building.

You’ll hear words like impact, ownership, collaboration, strategic thinking. But here’s the problem: those words mean radically different things depending on what game you’re playing.

One engineer might be optimizing for deep domain expertise—mastering one critical system over years.

Another might be the team’s utility knife—jumping into fires, filling gaps, solving whatever’s most urgent.

A third might quietly ship what’s needed, clock out, and keep their weekends sacred—respectfully, intentionally.

They’re all valuable. But when you run them through the same review framework, someone’s always going to look misaligned—because you never aligned on the archetype to begin with.

The Hard Truth:

Most orgs reward alignment more than clarity.

They assume everyone’s climbing the same ladder, chasing the same outcomes, thriving under the same conditions.

They’re not.

And pretending they are leads to confusion, frustration, and ultimately attrition—not because people underperform, but because the system doesn’t know how to read them.

A Sharper Approach:

Start by naming the archetype. Before you talk about goals or ratings, get clear on what mode someone is in—by choice or by circumstance.

You don’t need a Buzzword quiz. Just a handful of grounded archetypes goes a long way:

• The Deep Expert: Goes narrow, masters a domain, makes long-term bets.

• The Versatile Operator: Thrives on context-switching, fills whitespace, makes systems cohere.

• The Strategic Planner: Maps dependencies, plans for next quarter and next year.

• The First Responder: Drops into chaos, restores order, stabilizes under pressure.

• The Reliable Executor: Gets things done consistently, quietly, without drama.

• The Pragmatic Contributor: Doesn’t over-identify with the job, but respects the role, delivers with integrity.

None of these are “better” or “worse”.

Performance reviews should start here.

How This Changes the Game:

When you anchor on archetype:

• You make the implicit explicit. People feel seen. They know what they’re being measured against—and why.

• You tailor feedback and expectations. A Strategist isn’t punished for not shipping five PRs a day. A First Responder isn’t expected to write the next three-year roadmap.

• You unlock better career conversations. “You’ve nailed this mode. Do you want to stretch into another? Or double down and go deeper?”

You also stop glorifying only one type. Not everyone needs to be “a 10x visionary who scales culture while writing code.” Other times you just need someone who reliably does the job and keeps the lights on.

This Isn’t a Hot Take. It’s a Systems Fix.

The real win? You stop forcing every person into the same growth mold.

You stop rewarding projection over clarity.

You start building teams like portfolios—with different strengths, timelines, and bets.

So before the next review cycle, ask:

“What game are you playing—and are you playing it well?”

That one question cuts through more noise than any competency matrix ever could.

Challenge for you:

In one sentence, how would you describe the game you’re playing at work right now?

And does your manager even know?