Free tool · for managers and team leads
Behavior, Not Personality — 10 Review Rewrites
By the time the review form lands you already know the rating — what stops you is the blank box underneath it. So the box gets filled with the words everybody reaches for the night before the deadline: detail-oriented, great attitude, needs to be more proactive, has real potential. Those sentences can’t be checked, can’t be repeated on purpose, and give the employee nothing to do differently on Monday. This free one-pager takes ten of them and shows the version that holds up, with the reason each one works.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Ten before-and-after pairs, including “not a good culture fit”, “should speak up more in meetings” and “has real potential” — the three that carry the most bias and the least information.
- Every rewrite carries [BRACKETED] slots for the fact you have to go and get: a count, a date, a named artifact, or a consequence somebody else felt.
- A short table of the words that mean you have stopped describing work and started rating a temperament — and what each one is really measuring.
- A five-second test you can run on any sentence before it goes on the form.
- One PDF that prints on US Letter or A4. No signup, nothing saved anywhere, nothing to log into.
Own it, don't rent it
Need the whole paragraph, not just the sentence?
This free sheet fixes ten sentences. The full Performance-Review Phrasing & Feedback Wording Bank is the whole vocabulary: 189 phrases across nine competencies at three rating levels — rating-locked, so the language is structurally different at Exceeds, Meets and Needs Improvement — each printed with the specific evidence it obliges you to produce. Plus the other 14 rewrites, a five-slot summary-paragraph builder with 75 slot lines, 54 more phrases for goals, self-review, upward and peer feedback, calibration notes and promotion write-ups, nine print-and-fill phrase-to-evidence worksheets, and a spreadsheet that assembles the paragraph from dropdowns and flags any bracket you left unfilled.
A one-time purchase you keep and reuse every cycle — the owned wording library between a blank box and a per-seat performance platform.
Wording and general management guidance, not legal advice and not HR advice for your organization. What a performance-improvement plan must contain, how much notice a written warning requires, and what documentation supports a dismissal are set locally and vary sharply — take proper advice before writing any review that will support dismissal, demotion, a formal warning or a pay decision, or that touches a protected characteristic, a disability or accommodation request, leave, or a complaint the employee has raised. Free to use; please don’t resell or redistribute.