How I Prepare for my Performance Reviews
Performance/Annual reviews can be dauting. To go into a meeting to talk about your accomplishments and negotiate your salary is not easy. Its very hard especially if you are neither a fan of these nor does it come to you naturally. If you have been nodding, you have come to the right place (or so I hope)!
I want to share how I like to go about preparing for my annual review. This is not meant as do-this-and-you-will-be-successful. It is meant more as this-is-what-I-do-and-so-far-it-hasn’t-let-me-down. A lot of companies have helpful templates that help navigate performance reviews, but I still like to have a list of things I think about and use. So, I hope you also find my list helpful!
So, on that note, here is my list:
Accomplishments
There is no escaping this. We absolutely have to talk about how things have been going since our previous review. What contributions did we make etc. Some of the feedback I received a couple of years ago, was to not think of my accomplishments as “What did you do?”, instead to think of it as “How did you impact your team/company or teammate last year?”. This has been helpful for me because now the focus is off me! I don’t have to think in terms of “I did this and this and this……”. Instead I am thinking about “How did my team meet this goal and what were my contributions towards it?” or “How did I help onboard a new team member?” etc. The advantage of this method is two fold: One you are no more the focus and an even better advantage is you are now tying your contributions directly to impact.
Further this can be broken down by who it impacted:
- Team
- Team member
- Non team collegue
- Company
- Industry
Impact
This might be covered in the previous section. But if not try to create impacts for your contributions. An example of a contribution could be “I mentored 5 people on this topic”. But the people on your review team might wonder that sounds great but what happened after that? So something along the lines of “I mentored 5 people on this topic, so they were able to join this project that used this technology and hit the ground running.” Tying my accomplishments to impact, value to the company/team is one of the best feedbacks I have ever received!
Goals
I don’t think a review is complete without setting goals for the year to come. Don’t make a million goals. Make about 3–5 of them and make sure to have them prioritized! I like to tie these goals to impact. While these goals help with personal growth, its helpful to tie these to impact on the team, colleagues and company at large!
Review prior Goals
If goals were set the previous year, definitely make sure to review them! Again tying your personal/professional growth to impact is very valuable!
Feedback
Make sure to collect feedback from your peers regarding your work the previous year! Here I like to ask targetting questions depending on who I am asking feedback from. For instance if I am asking my developer peers for feedback, then I like to ask them technical questions about my work. If I am asking my project manager, I like to ask about my role on the team and how I can grow my project skills. Of course a lot of these questions overlap but the focus is different depending on who I am asking. This helps ensure overall growth!
Growth
How have you grown in the previous year. Talking about things that helped you grow as a person or professionally, that you did not plan for. Make sure to include progress here and tracking metrics. Some questions to consider:
- Were there things you used to struggle with that you are getting better at?
- How have you tracked that progress?
- Where do you see yourself going as far as that goal/area of improvement is concerned?
- Do you have feedback from your peers to support your observation? If yes include it as additional evidence!
- And finally, at the end of the day how is this helpful?
Non-work related contributions
Not all your contributions need to be strictly work related. We tend to think of everyday and directly impactful work contributions during annual reviews. But it doesn’t have to be just that! Things that are not directly work related but have an impact on your everyday work are very important and should not be ignored. Some items in this list include:
- Open source contributions
- Speaking at local meet ups
- Speaking at conferences
- Community events
- Mentorships
- Writing blogs
This is not an exhaustive list but I hope you get the picture.
As stressful as performance reviews are, they are one heck of an opportunity to look back at the year that went by and enjoy accomplishments and identify areas for growth. Personally, I like this part about performance reviews the best. It gives me a chance to look at the year that went by and think through how far I have come and look ahead at the path ahead.
