Cross-team impact in performance reviews: invisible work or wrong lens?

I was recently in a calibration meeting with other engineering managers. At some point each manager was asked the same question: how do some people from other teams influence your team?

For some engineers on my team, the answer from the other managers was the same. They didn’t see their contribution.

Yet one of those managers had asked, more than once, to borrow one of these engineers for their team. And that engineer had worked on many of that team’s tasks.

What the question really measures

That moment stayed with me, and not because I think the other managers were acting in bad faith. I think the question itself is the problem.

“How does this person influence your team?” doesn’t measure what the person does. It measures what the manager sees. And a manager sees a small slice of the work: the meetings they attend, the updates that reach them, the problems that get escalated. The work that gets things done without ever becoming a problem doesn’t reach them.

To be fair, the same applies to me. If someone asked me about individual contributors on other teams, I would probably say I don’t see their influence either. Not because it isn’t there, but because I’m not where it happens.

So if we don’t see other people’s contributions, maybe it isn’t their fault. Maybe we’re looking elsewhere.

Evidence, not impressions

If the goal is to evaluate someone’s impact fairly, impressions are not enough. We need evidence.

A simple way to get it: the person collects, on one page, the concrete cases where they contributed to other teams. What the problem was, what they did, what changed. The manager of the other team reads that page, checks the facts, and only then gives an opinion. The judgment stays with the manager, but it starts from what happened, not from what they happened to notice.

It’s also worth asking the people who are closer to the work. Guilds and communities of practice see this kind of contribution much better than managers do. They are where cross-team work actually happens, so they are where it’s visible.

Camille Fournier makes a related point in The Manager’s Path in the Age of AI: having visibility is not the same as understanding, and decisions like performance reviews should be written down and owned by the manager. Owning the decision means doing the work to understand it, not just reporting what reached you.

The question I’m left with

There is a kind of engineer who is reliable and quiet. They pick up a problem and keep pushing until it’s solved, even when the blockers are outside their team and outside their control. They don’t make noise about it, because for them the point is the problem, not the credit.

These are often the people a team depends on most. And they are exactly the people a process based on “what did you notice?” is most likely to miss.

I don’t have a complete answer yet. What I’m asking myself is: what is missing in our review process that would make this work visible by default, instead of leaving it to whoever happened to be looking in the right place?

Why this matters to me

I’ll admit this one hit me harder than I expected. My why as an engineering manager is to help engineers do their work well. Part of that is making sure good work is recognized, especially when the people doing it are not the ones who talk about it.

In one line

If you don’t see someone’s impact, check where you’re looking before you decide it isn’t there.