Most people know from experience how excruciating performance reviews can be. For anyone still in doubt, Maartje Bakers’ documentary De Manager, now in cinemas, offers ample evidence. It presents close-ups of people engaged in precisely those conversations, producing, almost without exception, vicarious embarrassment and severely curled toes.
To me, performance reviews are a pointless ritual dance, and the documentary does little to change my mind. Of course, managers need to stay in touch with what moves their people and explore what they can do to help them perform at their best. That should stem from genuine interest—good managers are people people—and from the willingness to have the difficult conversations, as Harvard terminology has it, when things are not going well. Not through questions such as: “What do you yourself think about the fact that you are always late?”
Not every conversation in the film is bad. Some managers handle the situation reasonably well and appear to have genuine intentions. But the camera, positioned directly in front of them, is merciless. It exposes the awkwardness, the artificiality and, at times, the sheer absurdity of these encounters.
What makes the film particularly interesting is that it invites us to question not just how managers conduct performance reviews, but why we continue to organize managerial relationships around such rituals in the first place. Are these conversations genuinely helping people grow and do better work, or are they primarily serving the organization’s need to formalize and document performance?
Finally, I am puzzled by the title De Manager. It suggests that the filmmaker considers these conversations to be at the heart of a manager’s work. I sincerely hope that is not the case in any organization. Management should be about mobilizing people to achieve meaningful results, building relationships, exercising judgment and creating the conditions in which people can thrive. A performance review is, at most, a small part of that responsibility, not its defining expression.
Maartje Bakers. De Manager. 2026.