Many organizations have a yearly performance review process where people are rated by their performance and their compensation may change as a result. For managers, this is weeks of meetings, discussions, setting selections in tooling, waiting, and culminating in a final conversation with each member of their teams about their performance and the rewards that came alongside that.

I wrote in an earlier post about the system a manager must have to manage the performance of their team.

It’s just as important that you manage your manager’s performance and how she manages your performance. In other words, performance management goes both ways–to your team and to your manager. Here’s some advice on how I do that.

Defining and Communicating Performance Challenges

If you want to be an ideal and growing manager and leader of people, you must consistently put yourself in your boss’ shoes or even their boss’s shoes. From this vantage point, you’ll think about why people are doing what they are doing, and you’ll start to understand what you might do differently.

Within this, if you are thinking deeply about it and growing, you’ll start to recognize gaps that your manager does not see that are affecting both her performance and yours. It’s imperative that you share this! But since every boss is different, I highly recommend the book Crucial Conversations to help you map out how you’ll do this.

At the end of the day, in order for you to grow you must be able to have a difficult conversation of some sort about how your boss’ behaviors affect your performance and work together to create a working agreement on how to improve. This can’t be a spur-of-the-moment conversation around performance time, but must be within an atmosphere of trust and therefore focused on the facts and clear communication on both sides.

If you don’t feel safe doing this, especially after reading Crucial Conversations, you might consider whether you will be able to grow in your role. If you think you may need to move jobs, why not try out an honest conversation and see what happens? Not everything has to be a confrontation; you could say something like “When you did X, I worry that it harmed Y and would like to learn more about this, so I can better understand where you’re coming from.” As Covey says, seek first to understand and then to be understood.

Establishing Expectations and Goals

With an honest, bidirectional relationship established, it’s now time to have an honest conversation about the expectations for your role and your goals. Don’t wait for HR to prod the manager to do this. Here’s a secret: you can have this conversation whenever you want!

Getting to Specific Conversation

Don’t allow this conversation to be vague. So many times I hear people ask their manager “How am I doing,” and get a response “You’re doing well, keep doing what you’re doing.” This is not the real conversation you need to be having. While this is quite lazy of the manager, it is also your responsibility to get to a specific conversation about specific feedback.

Instead, to get to that conversation, follow this process:

1. Find the expectations of the role, either via the job description in the post that you applied to (or a similar one), or better yet if it’s available in the career ladder leveling document that you have.
2. Write out your own assessment of your performance based on these documents. Concretely state the expectation and your performance, for example: “This tells me that I need to mentor junior engineers. I have been talking to Julie about some of the projects she has been working on.”
3. Give your boss a week’s advance notice that you want to have this conversation during your 1:1. Send them the document beforehand.
4. When you have your 1:1, start the meeting with this topic. Don’t talk about anything else.

Getting Solid Feedback from Good Questions

This is where you face the critical phase of this.

Don’t ask, “Did I do my job?” or “Does this constitute good performance?” You won’t get valuable feedback with those questions. Instead, ask better questions, like:

• What else could I do that would show the organization that I’m performing at this and the next level?
• Can you give me an example of a high performer that does a good job of this? How is their approach different from mine?
• (About a weakness) How could I have done that differently? What future opportunity can we think about that would show you that I’m growing in that area?

Promotion Discussion

You may be in a situation where you consistently get “good” marks on your current job. If so, it’s time to find the expectations for the next role you should be in and start measuring that. Even here you should have an understanding and plan of specific ways in which you can grow and improve. You never settle for “Keep doing what you’re doing” but instead continue to understand your true performance. This is especially true if you’re a high performer ready for a promotion. When you’ve mastered your own level, it’s never too early to start working on the next one!

Regularly Communicating Results

At this point, it’s important for you to regularly communicate results on your goals with your manager. Again, don’t wait for HR to mandate this! HR establishes the minimal requirements necessary to keep employees engaged and to limit legal liability. They aren’t there to prescribe the best outcome for you. That’s your job!

I recommend once a month having a sync on specific aspects of your performance. Once a quarter, you should have a deep dive into this. A great way to ensure this happens is to call it out beforehand. At the end of a 1:1, I’ll let my boss know that next time I’d like to talk about my performance and will send her any documentation I want to review beforehand.

Conclusion

The key here is to be proactive and manage your own career. No one else will manage it for you. Your manager has a million things to think about and may have to resort to “keep doing what you’re doing.” Don’t fall into that trap!

When you manage your manager’s performance in a constructive and helpful way, regularly establish expectations and goals for your role, and ensure that you have regular conversations on results, you will find that your growth begins to skyrocket. You will grow at a pace that others are not because you’ll uncover the challenges and tackle them head-on.