Once I started working with founders of growing startups, I began hearing about two things constantly. How to hire the right people, and how to build high performance and accountability once they are in. This article is about the second one. Founders want accountable teams. They just don't want performance reviews. On purpose.
What's interesting is why. It's usually because the only version they've seen is a corporate ritual nobody enjoyed, including them. Annual cycles built around a calendar, not a person. Rating scales that feel like marks at school. A form filled out because it was due, not because anyone learned something from it. Founders who lived through that as employees are not eager to hand it to their own team.
So they skip it. And something else fills the gap, usually nothing, or an instinct check in whenever something already looks wrong. That is its own problem, because the founder still wants people to know where they stand, still wants to catch drift before it becomes a resignation, still needs a way to have the hard conversation before it turns into an emergency one.
So how do you stay accountable and keep an eye on performance, without running a heavyweight review process on top of managing everyone's time, including your own?
At the core, any accountability system or performance review is three things. Clear goals and expectations. Feedback. Support for development and progress. None of that requires a manager, a rating scale, or an annual calendar. It requires a founder willing to be specific about what she needs from someone, and honest with them about how it is going.
Clear goals and expectations mean writing down, in one paragraph, what this person needs to be doing well over the next few months, not a job description built to attract candidates. Feedback means saying the small thing when it happens, not saving it for the next scheduled conversation. Support for development and progress means asking, out loud, whether someone is closer to that paragraph than they were last time, and what actually helped or got in the way.
The pace is faster at growing startups. Roles here don't hold still, someone hired to run outbound in January is doing half of customer success by June, so a review built around a fixed job description goes stale fast. The cycle should move at the same speed the role does, shorter and more frequent, and lighter. Run it as one on ones, fortnightly or monthly, not a single high stakes conversation once a year.
The caveat here, and what is genuinely worth borrowing from performance reviews in corporations, is the discipline around it. Take notes. Follow up on them, and on any agreements that were made. It is easy for a fortnightly check in to turn into a nice chat that goes nowhere, and the only thing standing between that and something useful is whether anyone remembers what was said last time.
Consistency wins here as well as in many other aspects of our lives. Not a bigger system. Not one copied from a company that has a manager for every eight people and an HR platform to run it. Just the same three things, run at the pace this company actually moves at, with someone keeping track of what was said.
That is a performance system a founder can run herself. It doesn't require much, just a real conversation and following up on agreements.