For a long time, I was urged to improve without ever being asked where I was going. Years of performance appraisals focused on correcting habits, adjusting behavior, and refining execution, yet none of them addressed the question that gives improvement meaning in the first place. The gap was frustrating, but at the time I could not name it.
That changed in my mid-forties, during a quiet conversation with Robert H. Schaffer, an American industrial psychologist, when he asked me a question no appraisal had ever forced me to confront: What kind of man do you want to be? Only then did I start to understand what had been missing all along.
Meaning begins only when one decides who they intend to become. What follows is the path that led me there, through years of asking the wrong questions before finally confronting the right one.
Improvement without direction
Now that 2026 is here, the familiar ritual resurfaces once again: New Year’s resolutions. What will I change? What should I improve? Frankly, I never felt any particular urge to reinvent myself on January 1. Not even when, as a young manager, I was hounded year after year during performance appraisals to “do better” and correct a long list of supposedly objectionable habits attributed to me.
At the time, I assumed my resistance came from skepticism or fatigue. It took years to understand that something more fundamental was missing. I was being asked to improve without ever being asked where I was going. The question that mattered most was never raised
My unease with annual performance appraisals comes from first-hand experience on both sides of the process, first as the one being judged, and later as the one doing the judging. Even after years as an HR manager, I never saw them genuinely help people improve, not even when the process worked exactly as designed. The flaw was never the structure, but the supervisor behind it.
Decades spent advising executives and teaching managers only confirmed what appraisals overlook, what supervisors misunderstand, and why the process collapses under power dynamics, personal insecurity, and organizational habit.
The only clear exception involved people who displayed antisocial behavior, ranging from open disrespect toward colleagues to outright aggression or violence. In those cases, the appraisal served to draw limits and clarify what would not be tolerated.
What I came to realize is that the willingness to improve was usually there. What was missing was direction. Even when self-assessment was built into the process, it seldom forced employees to dig deeply into what truly counted or to define where they were actually going. Without a personal destination five or ten years ahead, improvement remained accidental and unfocused. Effort filled time, not a future. And improvement without a destination sharpened nothing that mattered or prepared anything that would endure.
When performance appraisals pretend to drive productivity
If I’m being honest with myself, I never truly believed anything my boss told me about my performance at work, even when I received glowing performance appraisals he was clearly proud to deliver. I would ask him directly why I had earned such a positive evaluation that year. What, precisely, had I done to justify his satisfaction?
The answers were usually vague and superficial, rarely anchored in specific accomplishments or measurable results. It took me years to understand the real reason behind those good evaluations. I was rewarded not only for excellence, but also for discretion. I did not put my boss in a bad light when he was confronted with his own team’s results. In short, I did not make him look incompetent. And to be clear, helping a boss look good is not a fault. He or she often needs that support to achieve their own goals.
But what makes this conclusion particularly troubling is that it comes from someone whose role was to design and defend these systems. If someone in that position does not believe in performance assessment, that is not a personal bias. It is a condemnation of the process.
What performance appraisal systems consistently fail to do is engage with what actually drives human growth. They measure compliance, not direction. They reward short-term adaptation, not long-term becoming. In doing so, they reduce the most consequential question of all to a bureaucratic formality.
Most performance appraisals include a section asking who you want to become in five years, often reframed more safely as which position you see yourself occupying within the organization. The responses are rarely frivolous or insincere. Yet they almost always left me with a distinct sense that something essential was missing, without my being able, at the time, to put my finger on why. The question was asked, but not in a way that compelled anyone to go far enough to uncover what truly mattered.
A genuine five-year vision should also allow for the possibility that your future lies elsewhere, outside the organization entirely. Yet that possibility is implicitly excluded. Organizations need to retain their high-potential employees, not encourage them to imagine themselves beyond their ranks. As a result, the question is neutralized. It can be asked, and even answered with a real desire to improve, but without a clearly defined future, it cannot fulfill its purpose. Which is precisely why this question must be asked, and answered, by you: where will you be in five years? What will you be doing? More importantly, what kind of person do you intend to become?
The cost of never deciding who you want to be
What we become is the result of a decision, whether conscious or not, about who we want to be. So, what happens when that question is never truly asked, or never honestly answered?
I have no illusion that revealing one’s true goals, doubts, and desires will magically resolve anyone’s inner struggles. At best, it serves a different purpose: prompting a person to name, first to themselves and only then to others, what could truly give their life meaning.
Without a clear, forward-looking sense of direction, the years ahead tend to blur into something bleak, frustrating, and confusing. Bleak, because nothing on the horizon speaks to what the heart genuinely longs for. Frustrating, because effort, no matter how intense, fails to bring the satisfaction that comes from working toward the right end. And confusing, because it becomes tempting to conclude that the world is hostile, or that fate is fixed, when in fact the absence of direction is quietly doing the damage.
When the question remains unanswered, confusion becomes a way of operating. It spreads through behavior, damages trust, cancels performance, and contaminates the outlook of others. You do not end up where you intended, because there was never a destination. And in the end, that failure is assigned to everyone but yourself.
It is a self-generated cul-de-sac: the end of the road, with no obvious way forward. Not a collapse, but a slow forfeiture of growth. A failure, not of talent or opportunity, but of becoming what one had the capacity, and perhaps the quiet hope, to be.
Essential questions
- Is it normal to hesitate when asked who you want to become? Yes. Hesitation is not a defect. It appears when the question matters. If the answer were easy, there would be no hesitation.
- Does that mean it’s acceptable to postpone the answer indefinitely? No. Reflection does not excuse delay. Write an answer now, however imperfect. Set a return date. Revisit it regularly. Refine it. Remove what does not belong. Direction is not discovered through waiting. It is shaped through repeated commitment.
- How can I tell the difference between reflection and avoidance? By results. Reflection leaves marks. The answer changes. Language tightens. Priorities shift. Avoidance leaves nothing behind except time passing. If weeks go by and nothing evolves, you are not reflecting. You are postponing.
- Don’t we instinctively know whether our answer is true? No. That belief is convenient but unreliable. At best, we sense fragments of it. Clarity is earned, not felt. It demands effort, confrontation with contradictions, and often the discomfort of testing the answer with someone capable of listening without rescuing or judging.
- Is it ever too late to change direction, or to expand the horizon again? No. But it is never free. Every change carries constraints. Wanting to become an engineer means returning to school. Expanding the horizon requires accepting limits, not denying them. Freedom is choosing knowingly and paying the cost without complaint.
- So how long does it take to arrive at the right answer? Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a lifetime. Not because the answer is inaccessible, but because life keeps changing and demands revision. You may stay the course, adjust it, or abandon it altogether. Change is not failure. Refusing to change is.
I am 77 years old and still refining my answers. Not long ago, I realized I had been planning my life around the assumption that my time was running out. That belief quietly narrowed my thinking and closed doors without my noticing. Recognizing it made correction unavoidable.
Asking the right questions helped me see what I had overlooked: I was still fully capable of participating in the world as it now exists, not only in the one I had known. I had forgotten that staying engaged also meant staying attentive to how the universe around me had expanded.
We now live in a world where a single voice can reach, and hear, billions. The universe I grew up in has merged with countless others, transforming how people connect and contribute. Accepting that shift forced me to redraw my horizon. I chose to stop letting fear define my remaining years and to remain useful, generous, and engaged for as long as I am able.
AJH