Manager roles and visibility in performance review cycles

> Note: Your organization may have renamed this feature. If you don't see Best-Self Review® in your navigation, check with your admin for the name used in your account.

This article orients admins and managers to the two manager roles in performance review cycles, the options available for customizing manager assignments and visibility, and where to go to complete each task.

Feature Structure

Manager Role Definitions

Two distinct manager roles exist in 15Five and in performance review cycles:

Direct manager — Set in employee account settings. Responsible for day-to-day management: reviewing Check-ins, holding 1-on-1s, and viewing feedback.
Manager review author — Oversees a participant's review cycle experience. Writes the manager review, manages peer nominations, shares and finalizes results, and holds the results meeting. Has full visibility into all review results for that participant.

A participant's direct manager is also their manager review author by default. Review admins and Cycle collaborators can change the manager review author without changing the direct manager. If Automatic manager updates in active cycle is enabled, changing a direct manager in 15Five during an active cycle updates the manager review author in that cycle automatically.

Performance review cycles support the following manager-related roles and configurations per participant:

Manager review author — One per participant. Defaults to the direct manager. Configurable in Edit Individual Settings.
Additional managers — Up to 1 default additional manager and up to 5 cycle-specific additional managers per participant. Additional managers can write a manager review, and their feedback counts toward performance ratings and calibration sessions.
Review viewers — Read-only visibility into a participant's results. Any user can be added as a review viewer by an Account admin, Review admin, or Cycle collaborator.

Key Rules

Changing a direct manager in 15Five during an active cycle replaces the manager review author immediately if Automatic manager updates in active cycle is enabled.
The previous manager loses access to the participant's in-progress review unless added as a review viewer.
If the previous manager had a draft manager review in progress, that draft is deleted when the new manager takes over. Drafts must be saved externally before making the change.
Default additional managers can see all past reviews for their assigned participants if that setting is enabled in Best-Self Review® feature settings.
By default, a direct manager does not have visibility into review cycles completed before they became the manager.
An Account admin can grant a manager visibility into all past reviews for their direct reports via Best-Self Review® > Visibility settings.

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What You Can Do

Set Up

Manage

Add or remove a participant from a review cycle

Analyze

Common Questions

What happens when a direct manager changes during an active performance review cycle?

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