Showbiz and Pro sports: The ultimate showcase of performance

‘Tis the season. The performance review season. My company does its performance review in January. Starting mid-December till the first week of January, people scramble to write their self-review to reflect on what they did well for the past year. I always had doubts about the effectiveness of it and how the process can be improved, but that’s another story for another time.

This time when I started collecting ideas for writing, I came to notice the word used for evaluation — performance. Performance, like actors on the stage or in front of the camera? Performance, like athletes in fields and stadiums?

Epiphany struck. We, people work in our workplaces (especially Corporate America type of companies), are basically performing like actors or athletes. It’s just that their stakes are usually much higher (a whole lot of $$$ involved, millions people watching how they do in real time, their performance “set in stone” in media format for the posterity).

This made me think about the nature and constituents of performance.

• Role: Like actors or athletes, we’re given roles in our workplace. Any given role has a list of job description and career expectations. As long as we’re playing the role given to us, we can’t just show up as our true selves at work. It’s like we’re wearing an invisible mask (like the concept of “persona” and the mask people used to wear in the ancient theatrical plays). When others see us, they see us as co-workers and expect us to act certain way prescribed in our job description and produce certain amount of work and quality of results.
• Story or rule: Like actors or athletes, we follow certain plot lines (Strategy, roadmap, project plan) and interact with each other under certain protocols (Report to managers, collaborate with peers, pass along information, create artifacts that brings results and share them out to the leadership and organization). Quite a lot of people seem to have cracked the rule of the game and be able to game the system (ie. doing the minumum amount of work and still achieve good rating, or worse, play the politics to their advantage and to disadvantage of their competitors). In sports, referees or umpires enforce the fair play between the players so when some players don’t play nice, they get kicked out of the game. Also since the viewers have the full visibility into what’s going on, there’s no room for gaming the system. I wish this is also true for the Corporate America but sadly that’s not the case.
• Results: Actors prove their impact with the box office revenue, critics and audience responses and the recongnition from prestigeous awards. Athletes prove their impact with scores, stats, championship titles etc. I guess this is quite similar for the Corporate America workplaces (ie. Positive metrics change that the worker has contributed, recognition from managers or co-workers, number of features shipped etc). Unlike actors or athletes, however, the impact created by any given Corporate America worker are likely to be judged by more subjective standards, again due to the lack of clear rules and transparency.

Then there are stars, heroes, GOATs. Those who inspire the audience with their pure love of the game they play, the movies they act for, and shine so brightly with their peformance. They achieve amazing results in their performance against all odds — Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Muhammad Ali, Lionel Messi, Meryl Streep, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. Charlize Theron, so many more to name. All of these stars overcame serious personal and professional challenges and became who they are that we all know and admire.

What about in Corporate America? Who would embody the pure passion and love of the game, stick to fair play, and create massive impact that benefits people and the society? Maybe those well-known tycoons like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the likes?

Aspiring actors or budding athletes have their favorite actors or athletes as their role models. Who, as a Corporate America worker, can I choose as my role model and emulate? Good thing there’s ChatGPT for this.