The Biggest Leadership Mistake in Uncertain Times Completing a project doesn't make it a success. Delivering results does. In this session, Rohit Talwar shares how leaders can make better decisions, adapt to uncertainty, and focus on the initiatives that truly matter. Key Takeaways: • Making decisions with imperfect information • Testing before scaling • Knowing when to stop failing projects • Focusing on the vital few priorities

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(Bottom) [DIGITAL - Happily] Motivate your employees

If you watched the video (<a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/BqRjPID3MmQ?feature=share" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">you can watch the video here</a>), you saw me re-enact one of my earliest performance reviews, back in my GE days, centuries ago. I am sitting across from my manager, who is holding a form thick enough to stun a fish. She asks one simple question."So, tell me what happened in January."And I freeze.It is a re-enactment, but it is not fiction. It really happened to a younger, sweatier version of me, unable to account for the first half of a year I had actually lived. (I updated the props in the video to WhatsApp and the like to keep up with the times. The original involved Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets and very real file folders. If you remember Lotus 1-2-3, we should probably be friends.)I played it for laughs because it is funny. Two grown adults flipping through old calendars and ancient documents, excavating a year of work from memory and digital rubble. Archaeology, basically.But here is the part that stopped being funny for me.I have now sat on both sides of that table. I have been the nervous employee digging through my notes. I have also been the manager holding the giant form, quietly realising I could not honestly remember what this person did in the second quarter. And in all the years since, across companies and countries and a lot of well-intentioned HR systems, this awkward little ritual has barely changed.We are still doing it. Today. In organisations that consider themselves modern.So I want to take the joke seriously for a moment, because underneath it is one of the most expensive, least examined habits in corporate life.<h3>The annual review is not broken because of the form. It is broken because of the frequency.</h3>We keep trying to fix performance reviews by redesigning the template. New rating scales. New competencies. New software with nicer dashboards. We are polishing the form when the real fault line is the calendar.Think about what we are actually asking. We sit a manager down once a year and ask them to fairly assess twelve months of another human being's effort, growth, mistakes and contribution, in a single sitting. And then we are surprised when it feels arbitrary.It feels arbitrary because, neurologically, it is.Our memory does not store a year in even, well-lit shelves. It keeps the recent and the dramatic, and lets the rest quietly fade. The win from last month feels vivid. The conflict from last week feels enormous. The steady, excellent work from February has simply evaporated. Psychologists call this recency bias, and it is one of the most documented errors in performance appraisal precisely because it is so hard for any of us to switch off.And it gets worse than memory. A landmark study by Scullen, Mount and Goff, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, analysed thousands of managers and found that 62% of the variation in performance ratings reflected the idiosyncrasies of the rater, not the actual performance of the person being rated. Real performance explained only about 21%.Read that slowly. Most of your score is not about you. It is about who happened to be holding the pen.No wonder Gallup found that only 14% of employees strongly agree that their performance reviews inspire them to improve. We built an entire annual ceremony around a moment our brains were never designed to handle, and then we act surprised when people walk out of it deflated rather than developed.<h3>Managers are not the villains here. They are human.</h3>It is easy to turn this into a story about lazy or biased managers. I do not buy that. Notice that in my own re-enactment, my manager was digging through her notes and documents just as frantically as I was. She was not careless. She was a competent person being asked to do something the human brain cannot reliably do. I know, because I later became that manager too, and I was not lazy either. I was overloaded, under-prompted, and working against my own memory.Picture the average manager in review season. They have eight, ten, maybe fifteen reviews to write. They have their own deliverables. They are handed a form in November and asked to reconstruct a year they experienced in fragments while doing six other things. Of course recency bias wins. Of course the last big project dominates. The system is asking a human being to perform a feat of memory and objectivity that no human being can reliably perform.So the honest reframe is this: the problem was never the people on either side of the table. It was the design of the conversation. And design is something we can change.<h2>The fix is not a better form. It is a different rhythm.</h2>The most effective shift I have seen, and the one we built into how we work at <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/budaya-app/">Budaya</a>, is almost embarrassingly simple. Stop compressing a year into one heavy ceremony. Break it into twelve light ones.A short monthly review. Ten to fifteen minutes. What went well, what to adjust, recognise the work, and where possible, reward it that same month while the effort and the outcome are still connected in everyone's mind. Twelve honest conversations, captured while the memory is still warm.By the time December arrives, there is nothing left to excavate. The annual review writes itself, because it was lived month by month, not reconstructed in a panic. You are not adding twelve times the bureaucracy. You are replacing one painful archaeological dig with twelve easy check-ins, and the total time is usually less, not more.Feedback, it turns out, is a lot like fresh bread. It is best the day it is made. Leave it twelve months and you are serving something nobody wants to eat.<h3>What a manager can actually do (starting this month)</h3>You do not need to wait for HR to overhaul the system. You can change the rhythm inside your own team tomorrow.First, schedule a recurring fifteen-minute monthly conversation with each direct report and protect it like a client meeting. The discipline of frequency matters more than the elegance of the format.Second, separate recognition from correction in time. Catch good work as it happens and name it specifically, rather than banking it for the annual summary. People cannot grow from feedback they receive eleven months too late, and they cannot repeat strengths they were never told they had.Third, keep a running, one-line note on each person through the year. Not surveillance, just memory support. It is the difference between a fair review and a fictional one.<h3>What an employee can do (without waiting to be reviewed)</h3>If you are early in your career, here is the thing I wish someone had told the sweating young version of me in that chair: you are allowed to ask for feedback. You do not have to wait for the ceremony.Try the monthly one-liner. Once a month, message your manager a single question: "What is one thing I should keep doing, and one thing I should change?" Thirty seconds for them, enormous value for you, and zero surprises in December.Catch the moment while it is hot. Just finished a project or a presentation? Ask right then: "How did that land? Anything you would tweak next time?" Feedback gathered while it is warm is worth ten times the same comment dredged up months later.And keep your own receipts. One honest line a week in your notes about what you worked on and what you learned. So when someone finally does ask you what happened in January, you are not the one staring blankly across the table.Asking for feedback is not being needy. It is how you grow faster than everyone still waiting passively for review season. It is also how you remove the surprises that, left alone, quietly harden into resentment.<h3>The real point</h3>A performance review should be the calm summary of a conversation you have been having all year. Not the first time you finally have it.Thirty years on, I still find that scene funny. But I no longer find it acceptable. The best review is the one nobody has to dig for.So whether you are the manager holding the form or the employee being asked about January, you can start the better habit this month. Memory fades. Momentum doesn't.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Sources</h3><ul><li>Scullen, S., Mount, M., &amp; Goff, M. (2000). Understanding the latent structure of job performance ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology. (The "idiosyncratic rater effect": ~62% of rating variance attributable to the rater.)</li><li>Gallup, More Harm Than Good: The Truth About Performance Reviews (only 14% of employees strongly agree reviews inspire them to improve).</li><li>Recency bias and the forgetting curve (Ebbinghaus): widely established cognitive patterns underpinning appraisal error; cited qualitatively, not with a specific figure.</li></ul>

12 Months Later Is Not Feedback. It's Archaeology.

There is a video of me wrapped head to toe in bright red tape, straining to lift a single cup of coffee to my mouth. I grunt. I strain. The cup spills everywhere. And then I look at the camera and sigh. People laugh at it, because it is absurd. But the reason I made it is not funny at all. That sigh is the sound millions of capable people make every single working day. Not because they are lazy or disengaged, but because the organisation around them has quietly tied their hands. Good idea, three approvals. Simple request, four meetings. A form nobody reads, signed by a manager who is just covering himself. By the time you are finally allowed to move, the energy is gone. The obvious lesson from that video is "kill the bureaucracy." It is also the wrong lesson. Or at least, only half of it.<h3>The lesson I learned standing on an oil platform</h3>Early in my career, before Leaderonomics, before GE, I worked in operations at ExxonMobil. If there is one place on earth that runs on red tape, it is an oil and gas facility. You cannot touch a valve without a permit. You cannot isolate a pipe without a lockout and a second set of eyes. There are checklists for the checklists.&nbsp;To an outsider, it looks like bureaucracy gone mad. It is not. It is the opposite. That "red tape" is the reason people go home alive. Skip the permit to work, skip the lockout-tagout, and someone dies. In that world, friction is not the enemy. Friction is the safeguard.That experience rewired how I think about culture. The problem in most organisations is not that they have too much friction or too little. It is that they have friction in exactly the wrong places. They make it agonisingly slow to do the things that should be fast, and dangerously easy to do the things that should be slow.You need four signatures to buy a fifty ringgit chair, but a junior team can ship a half tested product to thousands of customers with almost no review. You spend a week justifying a training budget, but a toxic manager gets promoted in an afternoon. The tape is everywhere. It is just wrapped around the wrong limbs. So the real question is not "how do we remove red tape." It is "where do we want speed, and where do we want care, and have we designed for both on purpose."<h3>Friction is a design choice, and most of us never make it</h3>Behavioural scientists have a useful pair of words. A nudge is design that makes the right thing easier. Sludge, a term popularised by Cass Sunstein, is design that makes things needlessly harder: the cancellation process buried in seven clicks, the reimbursement form that takes longer than the expense itself. Most corporate red tape is sludge that no one intended and no one owns.But friction also has a noble use. Jeff Bezos built much of Amazon's early speed on a single distinction: one way doors and two way doors. A two way door is a reversible decision. Walk through, and if you do not like it, walk back. Those should be fast, delegated, low friction. A one way door is hard or impossible to reverse. Those deserve to be slow, deliberate, high friction. The mistake great companies avoid is treating every decision like a one way door, which is precisely the disease that produces the man wrapped in tape.Atul Gawande made the same point in medicine and aviation with the humble checklist. A surgical checklist adds friction on purpose, at the exact moment when a tired human is most likely to skip a step that matters. Good friction, placed well, saves lives.Put it together and you get a simple, almost uncomfortable truth. Bureaucracy is not the problem. Unintentional design is the problem. When you do not deliberately decide where friction belongs, you inherit it by default, and default systems almost always pile friction onto everyday work while leaving the genuinely risky decisions wide open.The cost of getting this wrong is not abstract. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, surveying more than 7,000 people, found the average employee loses 28 percent of their time, more than a full day every week, to bureaucratic chores: reports, approvals, sign offs, meetings about meetings. They estimate that excess bureaucracy drains over three trillion dollars a year from the United States economy alone in lost output. That is the price of red tape that no one chose and no one audits.<h3>Culture transformation, the Budaya way</h3>This is the work we do at Budaya, and it begins with a sentence that tends to make leaders sit up: most organisations do not have a culture problem, they have a design problem. Culture is not a poster or a values statement. It is an adaptive system, sustained through reinforcement loops. Experiences shape beliefs, beliefs drive behaviour, repeated behaviour hardens into rituals and systems, and those systems produce your results. Change the experiences and the systems, and behaviour follows. Send another motivational email, and nothing moves.Designing friction well, removing it where it strangles and adding it where it protects, is not a one off purge. It runs through three phases.Phase one is Baseline. You cannot redesign friction you have never honestly measured. So before we touch anything, we find out where the tape actually is and what it is doing. We run Voice of the Employee listening sessions to hear where energy leaks out of the day. We hold a leadership culture debrief to understand where culture is being shaped, and where leaders want it to go. And we run a culture baseline assessment, powered by Happily.ai, that surfaces engagement and sentiment, psychological safety, workload signals, and the team by team hotspots and cold spots. The output is not a glossy report. It is a clear map of which friction is helping performance and which is quietly killing it.Phase two is Design and Implement. This is where insight becomes action, and where the friction gets rebalanced on purpose. In ritual design workshops, leaders and teams co-create the future culture instead of having it dictated to them, taking the specific hotspots from baselining and rebuilding the daily habits around them. We operationalise each value through four deliberate steps: defining the behavioural anchors that say what is acceptable and what is not, building the daily, weekly and monthly rituals that make those behaviours routine, embedding them into the hard systems where culture actually lives (decision frameworks, hiring criteria, performance reviews, meeting structures, recognition), and protecting them under pressure, for the moments when targets tempt people to cut corners.That last point is where intentional friction earns its keep. Removing red tape from everyday work is the easy, popular half. The harder half is adding friction precisely where urgency tempts shortcuts: the safety step, the ethical line, the irreversible decision. We also level up managers to be culture multipliers rather than bottlenecks, and we pilot the redesigned rituals through influential Lighthouse Teams, so success creates the social proof that makes change spread on its own rather than by mandate.Phase three is Sustain. Most culture efforts fade into a campaign. This one becomes an operating system. A recognition and reinforcement loop rewards the right behaviours in real time, so people feel the new norms in everyday work. Culture scorecards and KPIs fold specific behaviours into leadership performance reviews, so the standard has teeth. And Happily.ai acts as a culture acceleration layer, tracking habit adoption, leadership consistency, and the early sentiment shifts that show up before engagement formally drops, so leaders can intervene while it is still cheap to fix.The thread running through all three phases is the same one from the oil platform. You are not chasing a frictionless organisation. You are building a well designed one, fast where speed compounds trust and creativity, deliberately slow where care protects people, money, reputation and lives.<h3>What you can do on Monday</h3>You do not need a transformation programme to start thinking this way. You need a question. Walk through your week and sort your processes into two piles. Where does friction protect something that genuinely matters, and where is it just sludge that survives because no one ever asked why it exists.Then go further. Look at your fastest decisions and your slowest ones, and ask whether they are matched to the right doors. Are your reversible, two way door decisions being treated like irreversible ones, smothered in approvals. Are your genuinely irreversible, one way door decisions slipping through with too little thought. Most leaders discover, uncomfortably, that they have it backwards.That is the heart of culture transformation. Not slogans on a wall. Not another values workshop. The patient, deliberate work of deciding where your organisation should move fast and where it should move with care, and then building the rituals and systems that make both the path of least resistance.Get that right, and your people stop sighing into spilled coffee. They get to do the work they came to do, with the tape only ever where it actually belongs.

The Biggest Leadership Mistake in Uncertain Times

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