Would-You-Want-Them Peer Review
Use repeated teammate choices to expose indispensable and avoided talent
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Ask every employee two things: whom did you work with during the period, and which of those people would you want on your team again? Aggregate the check marks without demanding written justifications. People selected repeatedly emerge as trusted contributors and potential promotion candidates. People who are consistently unselected become candidates for deeper review, coaching, role change, or exit. The method reduces the burden and recency bias of traditional annual reviews by turning distributed firsthand experience into a visible pattern. Because popularity, role visibility, and bias can distort peer choices, the pattern should trigger a fair investigation rather than function as an automatic verdict. Its value is a simple, comparable signal from the people who actually shared the work.
Origin
McNeill says Tesla evolved this method after debating how to make performance reviews useful instead of a chore disliked by employees and managers.
Core principles
- 01Teammates observe contribution that leaders cannot see
- 02A forced team-choice signal is clearer than generic ratings
- 03Repeated selections reveal high-trust contributors
- 04Repeated absence is a prompt for investigation, not automatic proof
How to run it
- 1
List collaborators
Have each person name everyone they worked with during the review period.
Pro tip Define the period consistently for everyone.
- 2
Make the team choice
Ask each person to check the collaborators they would actively choose for a future team.
Pro tip Keep the question simple rather than soliciting vague rating essays.
- 3
Aggregate the patterns
Count repeated selections and identify both frequently chosen and consistently unchosen people.
Pro tip Adjust interpretation for role visibility and number of collaborations.
Watch out Raw counts can punish less-visible or recently hired employees.
- 4
Reward trusted contributors
Examine repeatedly chosen employees for recognition, expanded scope, or promotion.
- 5
Investigate weak signals
Review the work, context, and manager evidence for people whom peers rarely choose before deciding what support or action is appropriate.
Watch out Do not equate an unpopularity signal with proven poor performance.
In the wild
Employees listed everyone they had worked with and checked the people they would want on a team. Names selected again and again became candidates for promotion, while people never selected were reviewed as possible poor team fits.
→ The company obtained a simple recurring signal for recognizing talent and examining the bottom-performing group.
Common mistakes
Turning popularity into proof
Team preference can be biased by visibility, affinity, or conflict. Treat it as a signal that must be investigated.
Ignoring collaboration volume
Someone with fewer projects has fewer chances to be named, so compare patterns in context.
Is it for you?
Best for
Organizations with cross-functional work where many peers directly observe one another's contribution.
Not ideal for
Small, siloed, or biased environments where employees have few shared collaborators or unequal visibility.
From the transcript
“First question, who have you worked with this year? Write it out. And then just put a check mark next to the people that you…”
“Those are the people that are up for promotion.”
From the episode
Episode 541: Jon McNeill: Why "Less" and "Simple" are the Smartest Growth Strategies
Jon McNeill