In last month’s blog, here, I explored what kind of preparations a leader may consider in readiness for their team’s performance review meetings. In this month’s blog, I wanted to take a different view and explore how an employee might prepare for these conversations. By using some key areas of focus, we can plan and prepare for the review so that we enter it feeling clear, ready and prepared as well as ensuring our own agenda is met.

Carve out reflection time

The first step is to make time to prepare for our performance review conversations. Often when we are busy doing the day job, we often put our own development to the bottom of the “to do” list and see it as something that can wait. However, taking time out to reflect is extremely valuable, as we slow down review the year that’s just gone, what has been achieved, how we feel and what we want to get out of the performance review meeting. Without the reflection time, the meeting itself can feel like it is “done to us” rather than creating a partnership with our line manager where we have an equal voice.

You will also want to not only look at the last year but think about the longer-term picture of you, the organisation and your career. As you reflect, I encourage you to consider, “Where do I want to be in a year, 3yrs or 5yrs?”. How does that impact what I want to talk about or get support with in my review.

Deepen and broaden your self-awareness

I think of the performance review meeting as an opportunity to look inwards and learn more about how we have shown up this year as well as what we have achieved. Instead of waiting for the line manager to share their feedback I encourage you to do your own self-assessment and ask your colleagues and team for their perspective. Firstly, you can highlight for yourself the key areas of skills and behaviours, or the what and the how, that are going to be important in the discussion. You can then pick some key people, perhaps stakeholders, direct reports and peers who you can ask for feedback – example questions might include:

• “What did I do well at in our interactions this year”
• “What particularly stood out as my key strength?”
• “What could I have done differently?”

You can also ask yourself the same questions and note down what the key themes are. This way, you are you going into your performance review meeting with a stronger level of self-awareness. In addition, making it okay for people to give you developmental feedback takes some effort as most of us prefer to just what we saw that was good. By role modelling being vulnerable and even sharing a couple of areas of development that you see, perhaps this can help others either agree or add some other insight that you haven’t seen.

I like the Johari window model (Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham), where we look to increase the known areas of ourselves by decreasing the hidden spots that others know about us but we don’t know yet. The simplest way to know how we come across is to ask for feedback and make it okay for others to provide this, the sparkle and the stretch, as I call it.

Factual Information (The What)

As part of your performance review preparation, I encourage you to review your written performance documents, for example, if your organisation uses objectives, i.e. the what – prepare your examples about what you did and the results against the objectives that were achieved.

Behavioural Information (The How)

In addition to the objectives achieved, consider how you went about achieving them. These would be called the values you led by. Examples might include: the way you influenced or handled somebody else, how you developed the team, the resilience you demonstrated, or the level of engagement you sought out in the organisation. By identifying these specific items, you can build the picture not only of what was achieved but also the way you did it and the positive outcomes you had on others.

The conversation itself

Consider in advance how your manager likes to engage in a conversation and how you create a partnership with them so that the conversation is productive. I like to think of it as having a start, middle and end as follows:

• Settling and agenda – the beginning – how are we both, what do we both want from today’s session and how will we do that? This also covers the length of the meeting and any required follow-up, it may be more than one meeting.
• Curiosity and information – the middle – this is about both staying curious whilst you exchange information about you and your performance. You are most likely going to receive feedback and as such, staying in a place of curiosity (rather than defensiveness) can be useful to deploy at this stage.
• What now? – the ending – this is about capturing the essence of the conversation, what are the learnings and insights as well as the next steps and any follow up.

Sharing feedback

Hopefully, your line manager will ask you for feedback about themselves – I encourage you to offer what you notice about what is working well in the relationship between you, for example:

“I really value that when we have a one-to-one booked, you always make time for me, and it doesn’t get cancelled, it makes me feel valued, plus I can move projects along more quickly as I see you often enough.”

In addition, as part of your performance review preparation, you will want to prepare feedback about your line manager, what you value and see as their strengths and what could be an area of stretch for them from your perspective.

Top Tips

• Create reflection time.
• Stay curious.
• Increase your self-awareness beforehand.
• Gather data from a variety of different angles including the what and the how.
• Adapt your style to be in partnership with the line manager.
• Be prepared to share feedback.
• Notice any defensiveness that you may feel when being given developmental feedback.

In summary

As you start to reflect on your own performance review preparation, I encourage you to use this as a valuable opportunity for a broader reflection about who you are, what your satisfaction levels are and your strengths and stretch, in addition to consider where you want to focus in the longer term.  

I’d love to hear how you get on and how you find the different approaches to your performance review preparation. If you would like support with preparing for your next performance review conversation, get in touch to see how 1:1 executive coaching sessions can support you.