It’s performance review time! Welcome to a brief series that will guide you through performance reviews including: writing your own self review, writing a review for your manager, writing reviews for the folks who report to you, and what happens after performance reviews.
Let's start: Writing a good self-review
Performance review time can feel like a useless check-the-box exercise but writing reviews (including our own) provides critical information to a variety of audiences. First, let’s go through the audiences for your self-review, because there are some hidden ones you might not often think about.
- Yourself: Self-reviews can be a nice time to reflect on your accomplishments over the last handful of months. It can be challenging to take time to understand what you’re shipped or accomplished. This is a good way to think about both work that has been accomplished, as well as ways that you have elevated and empowered your team including those who report to you, those who are your peers, and those who you report to.
- Your manager: This one is the most obvious. Your manager should be reading your self review. They’ll use it to understand things you’ve accomplished that maybe they didn’t see as much and understand what you feel are your strongest accomplishments during the review period.
- Your manager’s peer leadership team: Most companies have a calibration process of some sort where peer teams talk about reviews and expectations to ensure alignment and that everyone is evaluating teams and individuals in the same way. Self-review highlights and manager reviews are frequently surfaced as ways to explain an individual’s performance or determine promotion readiness.
- C-suite leadership team or a level or two above your manager’s leadership team: This one depends a little bit on the size of your company. If you’re at a huge company, all performance reviews won’t go all the way to the C-Suite but they will still go a level or two above your manager’s peer leadership team.
The goal of a self-review in a performance review is to easily highlight and tell the story of the impact and behaviors you’ve exhibited during the performance review period. If you have specific career ladders or company values, this information should speak directly to those with honest assessments of what you’ve accomplished and where you’re hoping to grow. Finally, if you are reporting directly to the CEO or a C-Suite individual, your self-review is frequently for yourself. At that level, your role is not one where you get a lot of concrete feedback from someone who deeply knows your field, but writing a self-review can still be helpful in pinpointing what kind of help you need to seek out from your peers or mentors to continually improve.
How should you format your self-review?
Working with leaders and teams, I often see 2 types of self-reviews. One are teams and individuals who put a lot of pressure on themselves to formulate beautiful paragraphs that articulately explain exactly what was done in lengthy paragraphs. From these, it’s challenging to understand the highlights and exactly what happened and what the result was. The other are teams and individuals who simply will drop a ton of links. Your manager likely doesn't have enough time to click on all of these links and put together the story themselves. 2 approaches, same problem… information that does not make it easy for the reader/your manager to get the information they need. There is a balance between overthinking it and not really putting enough time in. Bullet points are ok (actually, for me as a manager, they are great!) as long as they have enough of the critical context i’m looking for.
For self-reviews, make sure to cover the “elevator pitch” of what was done and any necessary context. Was there a metric or measurable impact? Did you get feedback from peers? What results did you see as a result of the work you did? Instead of simply listing the things you did, think critically about why they were done and what your role was in making it successful.
The higher up you are in an organization, the more concise and specific your self-review should be so that your manager can easily consume the information and get a great picture of the fantastic work you’ve been doing. Remember, department leads, VPs, etc. will need to have a good sense of YOUR review, as well as everyone else’s to be able to advocate effectively. Your goal is to make that as easy as possible for them to do.
Feeling stuck? Try these tips:
- Interview a friend. As a friend or colleague about what sticks out to them about the work you’ve done during the review period. They don’t have to write it or make it robust, just whatever is on the top of their mind.
- Start with this template:
- What 3 things am I most proud of?
- What was my previous growth goal and how did I make progress on that?
- What was something really challenging for me that I attempted to get better at?
- I enabled my teammates by…
- Review 1:1 notes. If you take 1:1 notes, look through them to see what was shared, celebrated, or what feedback was given. It’ll give you a good place to start from.
Did this resonate but you're still feeling stuck? Book 1:1 time with me to be your hype woman and help you figure out what to highlight OR use your self-review to work with me to close those gaps that you've identified as areas of growth.
