The performance criteria arrive with a new line in them. Alongside the usual headings there is now something about how you have used the new tools, and whether you can connect that use to a result. Several large employers have added a line of roughly that shape this year.
The stated purpose is not sinister and does not need to be. A company has spent a great deal on these systems, adoption has been uneven, and putting the thing in the review is the most direct instrument any organisation has for changing what people do. Everyone involved is acting reasonably.
Niccolo Machiavelli's contribution to this situation is a single discipline, and it is not cynicism. It is a rule about which question to ask.
Reason from what people will do
His doctrine was that political reasoning must start from how people actually behave rather than from how they ought to behave — that whoever reasons from the imagined republic instead of the real one arrives at ruin. Stated that baldly it sounds obvious. It is not, because organisations reason from the imagined version almost by default: the policy is written in terms of what a conscientious employee would do on reading it.
So run the other question. Given these people, with these appetites, under these constraints, what will actually happen?
They will produce evidence of use. Not because they are dishonest — because the evidence is what is graded, and the work itself is not observable at anything like the same resolution. Your manager cannot see the quality of your thinking in November. They can see a line in a self-assessment describing a workflow you routed through a system, and they will be graded themselves on how many of those lines their team produced.
The shapes this takes are predictable enough to write down in advance. Work routed through a tool so that it leaves a record, when the direct route was quicker. The colleague who was already the fastest on the team spending an hour a week documenting a change in method that made no difference to their output. Adoption figures that rise smoothly and detach entirely from anything a customer would notice.
Who profits and who fears
The second half of his instrument is the map of interests in the room, and it explains why this kind of measure is so hard to retract once introduced.
Someone senior has committed publicly to a number of seats and needs the adoption curve to look a particular way. A middle manager fears being the team at the bottom of the table more than they want any specific improvement. Nobody in that chain has an interest in discovering that the tools help in four workflows and hinder in six. The metric is doing work inside the company's own politics well before it does anything to the output.
That is a diagnosis, not an objection. It also points at the remedy, which is not to abandon measurement.
If adoption genuinely is the goal for a period — because a company cannot learn where a tool helps until enough people have tried it — then say that plainly, put a date on it, and keep it out of the ranking that determines pay. If the goal is better work, measure the work and let people find their own route to it. What produces the behaviour above is the third option: grading a proxy while describing it as performance, which asks people to pretend along with you.
Watch out for
Presuming bad faith is self-fulfilling, and this is the lens most likely to do it. Treat every colleague as someone gaming the measure and you will build the culture that produces them. A great deal of enthusiasm for these tools is completely genuine — people use them because the work is better or the day is less tedious — and conviction is a real force that this way of thinking systematically under-prices.
The other limit is the transfer itself. His counsel was written for princes who could exile a rival and had armies and executioners; the mechanism he described runs on fear of consequences that a modern manager cannot impose. Salaried authority is bounded by employment law, by a labour market, by a reputation that follows you. The reasoning about appetites survives that translation. The assumptions about what power can do to people do not, and his own record hardly recommends him as a practitioner: he was dismissed, tortured and exiled by the regime whose behaviour he had spent his career studying.
Answer this next
Read your own review criteria and find the cheapest way to score well on the new line without doing better work.
If that takes you five minutes, the measure is probably sound. If you found three routes in two, so has everyone reporting to you.
