Ask managers how they assess the people on their teams, and you will usually hear confident answers: delivery, ownership, collaboration, communication, and growth.
Ask where that picture comes from, and the answer becomes less straightforward.
For many managers, performance assessments are built from an uneven collection of personal observations: the meetings they attended, the messages they read, the projects they followed closely, and the problems that happened to reach them. Those observations are valuable, but they still represent only one perspective.
Even a thoughtful manager with strong relationships and excellent 1-1s cannot observe every important interaction. They do not see every code review, design discussion, moment of support between colleagues, or instance of quiet friction within a team.
That is the one voice problem.
When one person becomes the primary source of truth about someone’s performance, an incomplete perspective can easily become a definitive judgment.
1-1 meetings are still the foundation
The answer is not to reduce the importance of the manager or replace managerial judgment with a popularity vote, a feedback form, or an average score from colleagues.
Managers are still responsible for understanding the individual, recognising patterns, providing context, and supporting development. Regular 1-1 meetings remain one of the most important tools for doing that well.
A 1-1 should not be a status meeting. It is not the place to ask how a ticket is progressing when a project board, standup, or team channel already provides that information. A good 1-1 creates space for the conversations that rarely happen elsewhere:
- What is giving someone energy or draining it?
- Where do they feel stuck?
- What are they not saying in group meetings?
- What responsibility do they want next?
- What support do they need from their manager?
Skilled professionals rarely need their manager to solve every technical or operational problem for them. They need context, trust, honest feedback, and someone who notices what they are carrying.
When managers repeatedly cancel 1-1s, shorten them, or turn them into project-reporting sessions, they weaken the main relationship through which coaching and development happen. Consistency matters more than occasional brilliance: one excellent conversation every three months is less valuable than a focused and honest discussion every week or two.
Trust develops through repeated evidence that the conversation matters and that commitments made during it will be remembered.
A strong 1-1 practice gives managers depth. It helps them understand how someone thinks, what they want, and how they experience their work.
But depth is not the same as breadth.
Radical Candor depends on consistency
Many managers are familiar with Kim Scott’s idea of Radical Candor: care personally while challenging directly.
The principle is easy to understand. When managers care without challenging, difficult feedback is delayed, softened beyond recognition, or avoided altogether. When they challenge without demonstrating care, the feedback can feel harsh or detached.
Managers often agree with the framework in theory. Then, in practice, feedback becomes:
“Overall, things are going well. Just keep an eye on communication.”
The problem is rarely that managers believe direct feedback is a bad idea. The problem is that direct feedback is uncomfortable.
It takes deliberate effort to say:
“This piece of work was not at the level I know you are capable of. Let’s understand what happened and what needs to change.”
It takes even more discipline to have conversations like that regularly, before frustration accumulates or a formal performance review forces the issue.
This is another reason consistent 1-1s matter. Direct feedback is easier to receive when it exists inside a trusted relationship and an established rhythm. Candor without trust can feel abrupt; candor after months of silence can feel like an ambush.
A manager who wants to challenge directly must first build a relationship in which honesty is expected, specific, and connected to growth.
Even excellent managers have limited visibility
Suppose you do all of this well. You protect your 1-1s, prepare for them, follow up on commitments, and give direct feedback instead of saving it for review season. You understand your team members’ goals and the context surrounding their work.
You still have a structural limitation.
You are one observer.
You see how someone behaves with you, within the specific dynamic of speaking to the person who influences their opportunities, compensation, and performance assessment. That relationship matters, but it is not the only relationship through which someone contributes.
You may not see:
- The senior engineer who patiently helps a struggling colleague without making them feel inadequate
- The teammate who consistently improves other people’s proposals before meetings
- The person whose code reviews are technically correct but repeatedly dismissive
- The colleague who takes ownership during incidents without seeking recognition
- The engineer who communicates clearly upward but creates confusion for peers
- The quiet contributor who reduces conflict and helps the team make better decisions
- The high performer whose results depend on invisible cleanup work being done by others
These behaviours often shape team performance more than anything discussed in a status update. They influence trust, collaboration, psychological safety, decision quality, and the ability of other people to succeed.
Yet many of them happen outside the manager’s direct line of sight.
This does not mean the manager is careless. It means no single vantage point can reveal the whole person.
What peers can add to the picture
Peers work together in the ordinary moments where culture is actually formed.
They see how someone responds when their idea is challenged. They know who makes difficult work easier for others and who creates unnecessary complexity. They experience whether collaboration is genuine or mainly visible when a manager is present.
A manager may primarily see outcomes, while peers understand how those outcomes were achieved. A manager may see a polished presentation, while teammates experienced the weeks of collaboration behind it. A manager may interpret directness as confidence, while peers experience it as a pattern that discourages participation.
None of these perspectives should automatically become the truth. But without them, important evidence may never enter the performance conversation at all.
That is why peer feedback is not merely an optional supplement to the manager’s view. It is a way to broaden the evidence available to the person who must eventually make sense of it.
Peer feedback is evidence, not objective truth
Peer feedback does not remove bias. It introduces more perspectives, and those perspectives have limitations of their own.
A reviewer may be influenced by friendship, conflict, visibility, similarity, seniority, communication style, or a recent event. One colleague may value speed, while another prioritises thoroughness. A highly visible contribution may receive more attention than months of quiet, reliable work.
Peers can also misunderstand the constraints someone was operating under.
For that reason, peer feedback should not be treated as a vote, a scorecard, or a collection of raw comments that are automatically forwarded to the person being reviewed. Its purpose is not to replace managerial judgment.
Its purpose is to improve it.
The manager remains responsible for:
- Looking for recurring themes rather than isolated comments
- Separating observable behaviour from personality judgments
- Considering the reviewer’s working relationship and context
- Comparing peer input with outcomes and direct observations
- Turning the evidence into a useful development conversation
A single peer comment should rarely determine a performance conclusion. Several independent observations pointing to the same behavioural pattern deserve attention.
The goal is not to eliminate subjectivity completely. That is unrealistic in any process involving human judgment. The goal is to prevent one person’s subjectivity from dominating the entire assessment.
What structured peer feedback should look like
Peer feedback becomes useful when it is collected deliberately.
Sending a message that says, “Can you share some feedback about Alex?” may produce vague praise, personality judgments, or comments based on whichever event the reviewer remembers first.
A structured process creates better evidence.
Choose reviewers based on real working relationships
Reviewers should have enough direct experience to comment meaningfully. That may include close teammates, cross-functional partners, technical collaborators, project leads, or people directly affected by the individual’s work.
A senior title alone does not make someone a useful reviewer. The most valuable reviewer is often the person who has repeatedly worked with the individual in situations relevant to the assessment.
The person being reviewed can also suggest reviewers. They may identify important working relationships that the manager does not see clearly. The manager should make the final selection while ensuring the group includes different perspectives rather than only close allies or highly visible stakeholders.
Ask about observable behaviour
Questions should encourage evidence rather than labels.
Instead of asking:
“Is this person a good collaborator?”
Ask:
“Can you describe a recent situation in which this person helped or hindered collaboration?”
Instead of asking for a general communication score, ask what the person does that makes communication clearer and where their approach could improve.
Behaviour-based questions make feedback more specific, fair, and useful.
Ask for strengths as well as improvements
A good feedback process is not a search for problems. Managers need to understand what should be preserved and expanded, not only what should be corrected.
Peers may recognise strengths that the manager has underestimated:
- Mentoring and support for colleagues
- Reliability during difficult situations
- Ability to simplify complex topics
- Willingness to challenge weak assumptions
- Positive influence on team decisions
These strengths are often central to someone’s impact, even when they do not appear directly in delivery metrics.
Look for patterns, not averages
Feedback should be synthesised, not mechanically averaged.
One reviewer may appreciate someone’s direct communication, while another experiences it as too abrupt. The manager’s task is not simply to decide which reviewer is correct.
The more useful question is:
In which situations is this person’s directness effective, and in which situations does it reduce their impact?
Conflicting feedback can reveal context. It may show that a strength is being overused, that behaviour changes across groups, or that expectations are unclear.
Be transparent about confidentiality
Reviewers should understand who can see their responses and how the feedback will be used.
If the manager can identify reviewers, that should be stated clearly. If comments may be shared directly with the person being reviewed, reviewers should know whether they can give permission for that sharing or whether the manager will summarise the feedback instead.
Ambiguity creates distrust. A transparent process helps reviewers provide honest input while understanding the boundaries around it.
How peer feedback and 1-1s work together
Peer feedback does not reduce the importance of 1-1s. It makes them better.
A manager can use peer input to test assumptions, identify blind spots, and bring specific patterns into development conversations.
For example:
“Several people value how quickly you step in when delivery is at risk. I have also heard that you sometimes take over before others have had a chance to solve the problem. I think both observations may come from the same strength. How do you see it?”
That is more useful than forwarding a raw comment. It connects evidence to context, invites reflection, and recognises a strength while examining its possible cost.
The strongest performance conversations combine five sources:
- The individual’s self-reflection
- The manager’s direct observations
- Results and examples from the review period
- Peer and stakeholder feedback
- Expectations for the person’s role and level
The manager then synthesises those inputs into a coherent view.
Peer feedback provides breadth. The 1-1 provides depth, interpretation, and the relationship needed to turn insight into growth.
Neither should stand alone.
Better performance reviews require more than one voice
Managers should continue protecting their 1-1s. They should prepare for them, follow up on them, and practise the candor they claim to value.
But good management also requires humility about the limits of personal observation.
You cannot see every interaction. You cannot personally experience how someone affects every colleague. You cannot build a complete performance assessment from the situations that happened to reach you.
Peer feedback does not provide perfect objectivity. No feedback process can.
What it provides is a broader evidence base and a better chance of noticing the contributions, behaviours, and patterns that one manager might otherwise miss.
The biggest risk in assessing people is not always being too harsh or too generous.
Sometimes, it is being alone in the judgment.
A simpler way to collect structured peer feedback
Kandorly helps engineering managers collect and organise peer feedback without turning the process into a spreadsheet-and-email project. Reviewers understand how their feedback will be used, managers retain the context needed to interpret it, and recurring review cycles stay organised in one place.
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