An update from Anna Rasmussen, OpenBlend's CEO & Founder.
Twelve years ago I built OpenBlend on a fairly simple belief: if you gave managers and their people a proper structure for the 1:1, performance management could stop being an annual fire drill and become something that happened, week in and week out. I still believe that, but after twelve years of watching how organisations manage performance under the surface, I've come to believe there is another problem sitting underneath it and it's one I don't think we talk about enough.
There is a disconnect in almost every organisation between the performance management process they've designed and the performance management their people experience. I call it the performance execution gap and I think it's bigger and probably more expensive, than most leadership teams realise.
The performance execution gap
The Talent Strategy Group's 2026 Performance Management Report, based on more than 250 organisations, found that while organisations increasingly encourage frequent feedback, the conversations that take place often fall short of what the organisation says it wants. Their conclusion is fairly simple: execution matters. What organisations say should happen and what actually happens are often two different things and more structured, consistently executed processes are associated with stronger perceived outcomes.
What interested me more was what sits underneath that execution problem. There is a material underinvestment in capability building. In other words, we spend a lot of time designing the process, but considerably less time making sure the people who have to run it know how to do it.
That shouldn't really surprise us. The CMI found that 82% of people entering management positions had received no formal management or leadership training, while 52% held no management or leadership qualification at all.
So you've got one side of the organisation designing goals, reviews, 1:1s, feedback cycles and development plans, and the other side asking managers who were promoted because they were good at their previous job to make all of those things work through conversations they may never have been taught how to have.
That's the execution gap: the process is designed, but the people responsible for making it work aren't always equipped to execute it.
And it isn't just about whether the process gets completed. Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends research found that 61% of managers and 72% of workers couldn't say they trust their organisation's performance management process. When that many people don't believe in the system, I think it's worth asking whether we've spent too much time trying to improve the process and not enough time thinking about the people expected to make it work.
Why another performance management redesign won’t fix it
The natural reaction when performance management isn't working is to redesign it. I understand that instinct because I spent years building technology to support exactly that: better structure, better visibility, better cadence, better ways of making sure the conversation actually happened. And all of those things matter. But they can't compensate for a manager who doesn't know how to give difficult feedback, challenge poor behaviour, coach someone who has plateaued or recognise when a conversation needs to go somewhere different.
You can redesign the process as many times as you like, but if the person sitting opposite the employee still doesn't have the confidence, judgement or capability to make the conversation count, the problem hasn't really gone anywhere.
I think that's one of the reasons performance management can feel so frustrating inside organisations. Everything can look fine from the outside. The meetings are happening, the forms are completed, the objectives are recorded and the technology is being used, but the experience underneath can be completely different. The difficult conversation gets avoided, the feedback gets softened until it means very little, the development plan gets written and then forgotten, or the manager simply goes through the motions because they're not really sure what else to do.
The process is happening, but the thing it was supposed to achieve isn't.
That's a distinction I've ended up building a lot of my working life around. OpenBlend was always about the conversation: giving managers and their people the structure and consistency to make 1:1s happen properly, so the process side of performance management had somewhere to live. But structure alone doesn't build management capability.
That gap is what led us to build something new
Vokser is the always-on coaching companion for busy managers, created by the team behind OpenBlend. Managers bring the situations they’re dealing with, get personalised coaching in the moment and build their capability while working through what’s in front of them.
A manager can have a perfectly structured 1:1 every week and still struggle with the human situation sitting across the table. Now that managers are using Vokser, we can see much more clearly where those struggles sit. Every manager who starts a Challenge describes, in their own words, what they're dealing with and when you look across those situations the pattern is remarkably consistent.
The biggest theme by some distance is difficult or redirecting conversations with a direct report: feedback that hasn't been grasped, dismissive or interrupting behaviour from someone who is otherwise a strong performer, someone who is coasting, or a team member who is delivering the parts of the job they enjoy while avoiding the priorities that are expected of them. These aren't unusual management problems. They're the everyday situations that determine whether someone is actually able to manage and develop their people, and yet they're exactly the situations that a process or template can't teach you how to handle.
The same is true when managers step into bigger or newer responsibilities. They're managing people who were their peers a month earlier, taking over teams when the role itself is still evolving, or trying to help someone who has moved from technical delivery into broader ownership. Nobody really gives you a manual for those moments. You're just expected to work it out, usually while still doing the job you were doing before.
Then there's everything else that fills a manager's week: trying to balance their own workload with the needs of their team, setting boundaries, pushing back on unreasonable requests, having career conversations, deciding whether someone needs more support or more challenge, working out whether to hire or develop, and trying to get help from another part of the organisation when their team needs it.
None of this looks much like traditional "performance management", and that's probably the point.
Closing the gap between process and capability
When you listen to what managers need help with, the problem is rarely that they need another form to complete. They need the judgement, confidence and capability to deal with something that's happening right in front of them. That's why I don't think the answer to the performance execution gap is another redesign of the process. The process matters, and good structure matters enormously, but it has to sit alongside capability. A brilliantly designed performance system run by an underprepared manager will still produce poor conversations, just as a highly capable manager working without any structure will eventually end up relying on memory, instinct and goodwill.
That's the problem we're trying to solve with Vokser. Personalised manager development built around the real situations managers are facing, in the flow of their work. Because ultimately, the test of a performance management system isn't whether the form gets completed or whether the review happened on time. It's whether the conversation underneath it actually helps someone perform, develop or change.
And if we want that to happen consistently, we can't just build better processes.
We have to build better managers.
Find out more at vokser.io.