The next stop on our tour of problematic working assumptions is performance reviews. When review time rolls around, are you the “game on!” type, the one who has all their notes and insights ready and updated and all you have to do is put your outline to prose and submit it? Or do you find yourself waiting until the very last minute, writing out some bullet points that you thought of off the top of your head, then asking ChatGPT to make it more flowery and submitting that? I’ll admit that I have been on both ends of that spectrum before. I have only fallen on the procrastination side of the spectrum a time or two (and not when I was a manager), but when I did, it was likely because I had lost faith in some aspect of the process because of some working assumption that I was holding onto about performance reviews. Let’s take a look from both the direct report and manager perspectives.

Working assumptions held by direct reports

Here are some false working assumptions that we sometimes hold as direct reports when it comes time to do our performance reviews (and maybe even applies to peer reviews, too):

• It’s just a formality. Nothing will really change as a result of this exercise.
• Only my manager’s opinion matters. The review is solely based on the manager’s perspective.
• It’s only for negative feedback. So if I did fine, I can keep it short.
• It’s only for raises and promotions, and I just got one, so I can keep this one short.
• My manager already knows what I did, so I don’t have to go on and on bragging about myself.

Reality

The reality of doing self reviews is that they absolutely matter. When taken seriously, reviews can significantly influence career development, compensation, and growth opportunities. Compensation and advancement decisions, of course, may be influenced by broader organizational factors and not just individual performance, but we need to ensure that we’ve dotted every i and crossed every t when it comes to our self-reviews.

This is our chance to shine and use all the tools at our disposal to do so, like keeping good notes, hype sheets, solid goal tracking, etc. If you’re not proactively communicating your achievements, then who will? This is something, ideally, that you’re doing throughout the year but especially at review time. Review time is also a chance to communicate your next goals, showing that you are always forward looking.

Additionally, a lot of our feedback can come from peers, so nurturing those connections is so important. I worked with someone once who was very intentional about this. She would have an after-project retrospective as a rule of thumb, where she would meet with the other folks on the project individually and ask questions like, ‘what went well’, ‘what didn’t’, ‘what were my strengths in this project’, ‘how could I improve’, etc. She was proactive about learning from projects with her teammates, so when review time rolled around, I knew exactly what her strengths and accomplishments were because I had the retro notes! So smart.

Working assumptions held by managers

Of course, managers can hold all the same faulty working assumptions as direct reports, but when you’re reviewing someone else, even peers, our assumptions may have another layer, such as:

• It’s only for criticism. I should use this to only highlight growth areas.
• It’s only for encouragement. I don’t want to demotivate my team with a bunch of criticism.
• Let’s get this over with. This is the only time of the year I have to deal with this.
• Everyone understands the criteria and how they’re being evaluated. I’ll just take the direct report’s self review and use that.
• Metrics and quantitative data are the only things that matter. It’s just about the numbers.

Reality

The reality of reviewing direct reports or peers is that while all of those assumptions above are absolutely false, we also only have so many hours in the day and things fall through the cracks!

• Yes, reviews should absolutely highlight achievements, recognize strengths, and discuss development opportunities.
• Yes, managers need to ensure that performance criteria and expectations are clear and communicated regularly.
• Yes, constructive feedback, delivered thoughtfully, is crucial for growth and improvement, and qualitative factors, such as teamwork, attitude, and potential, are equally important.

But what a lot of us fail to remember is that effective performance management is ongoing, with regular feedback and check-ins and lots of notes taken at each. If you know me personally, you may have picked up on the fact that I am extremely forgetful. But because of that, I write everything down that is important to remember. The act of writing it down (or typing it) helps to lock it into my memory and obviously gives me a record of it for later. Intentionality is key here.

Bias of the present

Whether you’re a direct report or a manager, it’s important to remember that keeping studious notes on everything prevents us from falling prey to the bias of the present. How many times have we all found ourselves sifting through a year’s worth of user stories, git pull requests, docs, or whatever to try to find what the heck we or our direct report’s worked on in the past year to put it into a review only to give up and put whatever was freshest on our minds?

Does note-taking really work?

“But Annie, you just said to take a ton of notes, and now you’re saying I won’t look at them?” Let’s get real for a sec. Yes, on one hand, note-taking is low-hanging fruit. Doing it will absolutely set you up for success, but it won’t guarantee success. You have to be realistic about this mass of data you’re collecting. How are you going to aggregate it to make it meaningful?

Well, my suggestion is to make it part of your job to go through those notes, summarize and aggregate them into meaningful points every 6-12 weeks or so. Then you’re really ready when review time comes around.

But what if you had an app to help with that!

We’re here to help

We’ve been working hard at creating software to help with exactly this situation. Even when you have great note-taking tools, you probably feel overwhelmed by the sheer mass of notes you’ve taken for yourself and that of your whole team, and by the time you get around to aggregating the successes, you’re exhausted. We want to help you to not let important insights fall through the cracks.

We’re here to do the heavy lifting. We have found the landscape of people management tooling to be abysmal simply because it wasn’t actually built with you in mind. It was more likely written with HR and their goals in mind, which is fine as they have certain criteria they need to track, too. But the distinction of who a tool is built for makes a lot of difference. What if you had tooling written specifically for your use-case and goals?

Conclusion

Our vision is to change the way people look at career management tooling from simply a box to check off assigned by HR to a tool for themselves that empowers them to create more autonomy, safety, and control in their careers. Along with the other things we’ve talked about in this series, 1:1s, 360s, networking, we want to really revolutionize the way we do performance reviews.

And if you are really curious, click the banner below to sign up to be the first to hear about our Beta program!