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Stop dreading performance reviews and set powerful goals
Work performance reviews, school grades, Lyft ratings, and test scores are a source of some dread. These externalities where other people assess how well you’re doing all matter. Performance reviews are data points around how others view you and how good you are at your job. Often they also correlate to financial success. Your performance rating will affect the promotion, the size of your bonus, or the number of new customers who try you out. Your high school grades and SAT scores directly affect which college you get into.
Yet what happens when your self-accomplishment doesn’t map to the performance review you’ve received? What matters more, the internal sense of satisfaction or someone else’s validation that you are doing well in their system? They both matter, yet many of us fall into the trap of passively awaiting our grade with a sense of dread. I’m sharing a different perspective, where you as the heroine of your professional accomplishments can work through 5 points and set powerful goals in service of your own accomplishments.
- Do the work that you love and the rewards will follow
- Understand the company’s context
- Know your context
- Common fallacies
- What matters most for you
Do the work you love and the rewards will follow
I worked at Facebook for over four years. I’ve written countless performance reviews, and had even more conversations with individuals wanting to know how to be successful at the company. I helped to run a process of product design calibrations where each half, all the managers would assess each designer’s accomplishments to determine what is a fair rating for each person, especially compared against how their peers are doing.
The consistent piece of true advice that’s often considered a trope is “Do the work you love and the rewards will follow.” What this is intended to do is to have the designer focus less on the grade she might receive and focus instead on the work itself — the people and the products, plus the craft of the work that she’s creating. If you do this well, you will get your positive rating. If you do this well over a period of time, you will get your…
