Love yourself: love your self-assessment

Hey, it’s performance review time, and your manager has asked you to complete your self-assessment.  Are you filled with dread?  Don’t know where tostart?  Don’t know what to write?  Well, here are my personal tips to help you out.

As HR practitioners, we often assume that employees simply know how to do a performance review and how to go about completing their self-assessment.  But, my informal research tells me that people don’t really know what to do, unless they’ve seen a good model performance review, or, they’ve had the benefit of coaching in the art of performance reviews.

Step 1:  Start the hunt
Review your performance dimensions so you know what you need to hunt for.  What are your job competencies embedded in your performance review?  What were your performance objectives?  Are there any other elements that you would like to highlight?

Step 2:  Hunt for the good, the bad and the ugly
There are three elements that I find personally useful here.

1. Scan your sent email from the last year and see if you can remind yourself of the big projects that you worked on over the past 12 months.  The cognitive bias of recency means that you’ll only remember recent achievements (in the past three to six months) so take some time to remind yourself of the good stuff you did right at the beginning of the performance year.  Pay particular attention to congratulatory emails from others — they have high value in the performance review cycle.
2. Your performance system may have a journal or notes feature, or, you may have been super-organised and collected little nuggets of achievements and accomplishments in a Word document or a paper file.  Open up your performance notes and remind yourself of all the good (and sometimes the stupid or bad) things that you did.
3. Use your workplace systems to get good numeric or quantitative evidence that will support your achievements.  For example, I often teach webcasts, and I send out an online evaluation survey after each event.  So I can easily review all the events that I produced, and work out the average satisfaction score for each event.  Another example:  one of my roles is to answer questions from the HR group about the performance cycle and our performance management system.  I centralised all these questions into an online forum, so I can count how many questions were posted, and how long it took me to reply to questions.

Step 3:  Write up your results
If you managed to find plenty of evidence during your hunt, then you’ll find it easy to write up your comments for each performance dimension.  For your competencies, you’ll need to use evidence to call out the behaviours that demonstrate proficiency in that competency.  For example, for a competency such as Presentation Skills, you may write something like:

I presented twice at our staff meeting on the use of social networking tools for learning within our division.  I also posted several blog posts on this topic on our internal team blog.  Four comments on the blog showed that my peers in China and Hong Kong valued this information.  For the last presentation I did, I scored 86% satisfaction from participants.

For your performance objectives, you need to include a blend of qualitative and quantitative evidence.  For example, for a performance objective around building relationships with customers, you may write something like:

For the Carlton Company, I arranged a visit to the CVC in California.  I clarified the purpose and target outcomes with the customer’s Vice President, and shaped the agenda in California to address this, collaborating with Product Development and Marketing.  Later, I arranged four visits to existing customers in Australia and New Zealand (Westpac, Qantas, Air New Zealand, NBN Company).  As an outcome, Carlton signed a new deal worth $1.2 million.

In essence, you need to be as specific as you can, and give good evidence to support your achievements.  Sometimes employees tell me that they feel that they are running out of achievements, so they end up repeating themselves.  A little bit of repetition is okay, but don’t use the same example for every single competency and performance objective — you’ll end up sounding one-dimensional, and one achievement does not illustrate a trend, which is what we are trying to illustrate in our performance reviews.

So, best wishes for your self-assessment.  Do leave me a comment if you find these tips useful (or, useless!).

Technical Leadership – An Introduction

As Justin points out, it is performance review time. It is time to take stock, and to use this conversation as an opportunity to steer the ship. Unfortunately, often, we don’t know the destinations (what does it mean to be a leader at the next level), and if we know the destination, we don’t know the path (how do I get those opportunities to hone the skills I don’t have, and prove the ones I do). This is particularly difficult for those of us who pursue the technical ladder, since most leadership books, seminars, classes, and other learning opportunities focus on the management-type.

The tricky part of about leadership transitions is that to be a bigger leader, we don’t need to do more and better. We sometimes need to do stop doing what we have been successfully doing, and do different things altogether. This is particularly confusing since:

• No one tells us this.
• Most companies have more salary grades and titles than there are palpable leadership transitions. This leads to confusion as to whether the next promotion requires a real transition or not.
• Most companies, due to a combination of unintended errors, end up with people of all leadership levels at all grades. More confusion ensues, as we compare ourselves to so called leaders at the next level, and wonder why that promotion does not come our way.

Stay tuned for a series of posts about the different transitions in the technical ladder, and some of the challenges involved in each of these transitions.

Postscripts:

• I am a software engineer by training, and have worked in the software industry all this time. As you read on, you may notice this bias. I do, however, believe that what I outline translates well into other highly technical industries – pharmaceutical, semiconductor, automobile engineering, and such. I am very interested in hearing from leaders both in my and other industries on their thoughts.
• My sincere thanks to Charan, Drotter, and Noel. This guide is clearly fashioned after the management leadership transitions, outlined in their book Leadership Pipeline. I am sure I have subconsciously picked ideas from many others. If you notice parallels, please just leave a comment, to draw attention to it.

It’s performance time again!

Folks, we’re in the midst of performance appraisals again. Yes, I used the dreaded ‘appraisal’ word because it heavily embedded in our culture.  But I wish that it wasn’t about appraisal in the sense of judgement.  It makes employees nervous and fretful, and gives managers headaches about what to say, how to say it, and how to deliver bad feedback.  What I really wish for is a world where:

• employees look forward to the performance review cycle as a meaningful way of having a chat about how they are doing in their role
• managers feel comfortable with reviewing an employee’s performance, giving good concrete examples of desirable and undesirable behaviours
• employees have a crystal clear picture of the year ahead, and the expectations that the manager has

Sometimes we focus too much on having a good computer system to help with the performance review.  But in truth, the computer system is just a way of supporting the process.  For employees and managers to derive value from the process, they have to engage with open minds and with a willingness to learn.

Where are you going?

It is performance review time, and you are asked to write a self evaluation. What a complete waste of time, you think. Your manager knows what you have done, or should know, anyway. In any case, nothing you write is going to change the fact that there is probably no bonus this year. You are pretty sure she’s already made up her mind about your rating too – not that it matters, given the bonus situation. You tell yourself that she just wants you to write stuff that she can cut and paste into her evaluation.

I have heard a hundred variations of the above.  There are hints of truth in there, but it entirely misses out the point of a self evaluation. It misses the point that we OWN our career, and our successes. We depend on others in many ways, but ultimately we own it.

Think of how a grade school home work assignment is different from an assignment at work. At work, we own, but we do not control every aspect of our assignment. So, we learn “soft skills” like communication, collaboration, conflict resolution, prioritization, alignment, and such, to navigate the dependencies, and be successful.

Similarly, we own our careers. However, we don’t control opportunities, openings, job markets, etc. Periodic self evaluation, 1:1s, goal setting, are some of the tools that we can use to be successful in charting the course of our careers.

Next time, try approaching your self evaluation, not as a chore, but as a means to measure how far you have come, where you are heading, and where the winds have been taking you. Next time, do your self evaluation, not as a favor to your manager, but as something you would do just for yourself, like a spa treatment.  See  if it makes you feel differently – not about the process of self evaluation – but about where you are going, and where you want to go.

[Photo by: passlotte]

Check out June’s Leadership Development Posts

The June 2011 Leadership Development Carnival is up. This month, it’s hosted by Jennifer Miller, at her blog The People Equation. Jennifer has assembled over 35 posts and has included a brief description of each to help you zero in on the ones that interest you the most.

Some notable posts include:

• Jason Seiden’s 10 Great Ways to Get Focused… Fast!
• Lisa Petrilli’s Four Priorities Keeping CEOs Up at Night.
• Mary Jo Asmus’ Six Tips to Help Your Team Learn.
• Wally Bock’s Bosses Need Training and Lots of Support.
• Andy Klein’s Effective Managers Must overcome the Emotional Need to be Needed.
• Dan McCarthy’s 10 Ways to Get More Candid Feedback (and 5 ways if you really can’t handle the truth).

This Leadership Development Carnival offers a terrific opportunity for you to get a great sample of a variety of perspectives, thinking, and just plain good writing. It can also save you time by bringing them all together into one post. And who knows? Maybe you’ll discover a great blog you never heard of before.

Social Media Policy: Only Just the Start

I wrote a while ago that if you don’t already have a social media policy, then make one. Build it off of existing policies around communication, acceptable behavior, etc. but don’t just rely on those. There are enough issues around social media to warrant having a short and to the point policy.

Necessary but not sufficient condition

But while a social media policy is a necessary condition for minimizing the risks involved, it’s not sufficient for getting the most value out of social media. If policies are the only thing out there, people will either not participate or if they do, constrain themselves to only what’s “permitted.”

You need to move into how to effectively engage social media to improve the business.  That will improve over time, which means you need a way to learn from your social media efforts how to better engage with them. But you first have to start.

Where to begin?

Simply put, it comes down to answering “Why?” To be more precise, “why” in the context of improving the business. Why should employees, customers, and partners participate in your business’ social media? The more it aligns with the participants’ own interests, the better it acts to motivate them, but you really need to get your own objectives straight and communicate those.

To do that, figure out what ways to improve the business you think social media will help. There are a lot of business performance measures, some very specific and some very broad. The more you can determine a specific business performance measure that you can connect to the purported benefits of social media, the better. Remember that since you may need to make adjustments along the way, you need to measure results to get an idea if you are on the right track.

We’ll keep going on this thread in future posts. Stay tuned.

Photo by Magic Madzik