Performance Review Reflection

Performance Review Reflection 

A performance evaluation is an important tool for keeping communication flowing between teams. Periodic evaluation is a chance for managers and employees to review the recent past and discuss expectations moving forward. An evaluation also serves as an opportunity to set goals, both as individuals and teams.

Along with the performance evaluation often comes the self-assessment. An opportunity for employees to self-reflect and consider what their strengths and weaknesses are, self-assessments are not only important to growth as a worker but as a person. By critiquing their own work and behavior, employees can gain insight that helps them improve.

For managers, self-assessments offer several benefits. They illuminate how the employee sees themselves in the context of the team and the organization at large. It also highlights any disagreements or misunderstandings between the manager and the employee. And, of course, self-assessments offer an opportunity for feedback to managers about what motivates and incentivizes an employee to do their best work.

1. Be proud.

One major goal of the self-evaluation is to highlight your accomplishments and recollect milestones in your professional development. A good self-assessment should point to specific tasks and projects that highlight your best work. When describing those accomplishments, employees should emphasize the impact those achievements had on the whole business to emphasize their value to the company.

Julie Rieken, CEO of Applied Training Systems Inc., said you should strive to connect your actions with a manager's goals. This type of alignment is encouraging to any manager and conveys that you understand your role within the larger context of the company. 

"If your manager needs to hit a certain number, share how you played a role in hitting the number," said Rieken. "Accomplishments you list should connect with business objectives."

2. Be honest and critical.

Self-assessments aren't just about highlighting triumphs. You should also critically assess the times you came up short. Being honest means pointing out weaknesses that could be improved upon or past failures that taught you a valuable lesson. Recognizing your own flaws is important to demonstrating your ability to learn and grow.

Still, it's important to not be self-deprecating in your assessment. Timothy Butler, a senior fellow and director of career development programs at Harvard Business School, advised employees to use developmental language when critiquing the areas in which they need to improve. 

"You don't want to say, 'Here's where I really fall down,'" Butler told the Harvard Business Review. "Instead, say, 'Here's an area I want to work on. This is what I've learned. This is what we should do going forward.'"

3. Continuously strive for growth. 

It's important during self-assessments to never stagnate; humans are constantly adapting, learning and changing. Whether you've had a great year or fallen short of your own expectations, it's important to remain committed to improving and educating yourself. Taking a moment to list your goals and objectives for the coming year during a self-assessment demonstrates that you are not content to settle.

"The first step is to adopt a growth mindset and understand that adult human potential is not fixed. We are always in a state of becoming, and our potential increases or decreases based on many factors, including the environments where we live and work," Hassel said. "Adopting that framework prevents people from becoming too transfixed on their perceived failures and from becoming too attached to their triumphs."

Managers will also see a willingness to improve and take on new things as a sort of coachability. If an employee has been struggling, making room for growth could improve their performance. On the other hand, an employee thriving in their position requires growth opportunities to prevent boredom or stagnation.

4. Track your accomplishments. 

When it's time to discuss your accomplishments in your self-assessment, providing hard data to show what you've done throughout the year is highly beneficial. Employees and managers generally know how you have performed, but having concrete numbers to back up any assertion strengthens the validity of your self-assessment.

"If employees ... spend 10 seconds a day writing down their one biggest accomplishment, success, metric hit, feedback received for that day, they'd have 10 times more data than they'd ever need for self-assessment," said Mike Mannon, president of WD Communications. 

Hank Yuloff, owner of Yuloff Creative Marketing Solutions, agreed: "We teach our clients to keep a list of daily and weekly accomplishments so that when it is time for the self-assessment, there is very little guesswork as to how valuable they are to the company." 

5. Be professional.

Employees should always be professional when writing self-assessments. This means not bashing the boss for poor leadership skills or criticizing co-workers for making their lives more difficult. It also means not gushing in an overly personal way about a co-worker or manager you really like. Whether you are providing critical or positive feedback, it's important to remain professional. 

Being professional means giving the appraisal its due attention, like any other important project that crosses your desk. Dominique Jones, chief operating officer at BetterU Education Corporation, advised treating your self-evaluation like a work of art that builds over time. You'll be much happier with the result if you give yourself time to reflect and carefully support your self-assessment, she said. 

"Use examples to support your assertions, and … make sure that you spell and grammar check your documents," Jones wrote in a blog post. "These are all signs of how seriously you take the process and its importance to you."