Performance Reviews are broken. They're too infrequent to be relevant, too top-down to be democratic, and too formulaic to fit today's protean workforce. Nevertheless, they continue to be administered in offices across the land, vested with the power to variously propel a career or kill it.

Some would argue that the Performance Review generates invaluable feedback for companies and employees alike. Dead wrong, according to Samuel A. Culbert --professor at The Anderson School of Management, UCLA. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Culbert opines that Performance Reviews "...are an intimidating tool that makes employees too scared to speak their minds, lest their criticism come back to haunt them in their annual evaluations." In other words, they have a silencing effect on genuine feedback.

The challenge is to create a company culture that invites the intended benefits of the Performance Review by eliminating the fear factor.