Category Archives: Performance Reviews

How to write performance reviews, contribute to performance reviews, and getting the performance rating you deserve.

3 practical tasks to do now to improve your performance review

Office Mates by apbeatty

It’s still January, right? Didn’t we just go through that awful performance review process at the end of last year? Why are you talking about this now, Scot? After all, there isn’t another performance review until July. Or December. Isn’t it a bit early?
Well, not so much. You see, all that effort [...]

Read the full article »

How to do a performance review of your manager

It is coming to the year-end performance review time. We’re all concerned about our performance review, of course, but now is also a good time to review the performance of your manager in terms of how effective the manager is with you and your work. Most people evaluate their manager every day — based on [...]

Read the full article »

The single best phrase to hear from your manager in your performance review

It is common wisdom that performance reviews are tough on both the manager and the employee. Reviewing a person’s work and offering constructive criticism is a job skill for managers and employees. So what do we do when it comes time to do the performance review?
Performance reviews are all about the data
Look at what most [...]

Read the full article »

How to add goal attainment to your performance review — when you have no goals

There is a paradox when it comes to writing your performance review. You are supposed to write about your goal attainment, but your manager never gave you goals in the first place. Before you discount the paradox, consider that not having goals happens frequently, either through urgency or poor management practice.
Consider, for example, a time [...]

Read the full article »

The single biggest mistake when writing your performance review

It is that time of year when we all have to start thinking about  — and writing — our performance review. Strikes fear to the heart, doesn’t it?
When I was a manager, I read hundreds of self-reviews that I used as a gauge for the employee’s perception of their performance. Out of those hundreds of [...]

Read the full article »

The single most important action to take on your performance review

We’re coming up to performance review time and Cubicle Warriors know a secret about performance reviews that most employees ignore: your performance review rating is determined before your performance review is even written. That’s because the actual review is given to the employee long after initial ratings are determined, the ratings are compared to the [...]

Read the full article »

The One Performance Review Fact You Can’t Tell Your Coworkers

Most of us can easily recognize that our performance reviews — and bonuses and raises — go through an entire budget process before our ratings are given to us at the end of the year. When there is only so much money to go around for salaries and bonuses, you can only have so many [...]

Read the full article »

SMART Goals and Writing Your Performance Review

We are at that time, if you receive your performance review at the end of the year, where you will be expected to write your self-review on your performance. Yet looking at your SMART Goals now often reveals problems when it comes to getting your performance review right. It’s time to check out the goals [...]

Read the full article »

The ultimate fatal mistake when starting your dream job

When we start our jobs, it’s easy to simply coast along with whatever the manager is giving you to do. But coasting doesn’t make for success in a new job, especially our dream job. Too often, people start new jobs and then are gone from them within eighteen months. Sure, sometimes we misjudge the fit [...]

Read the full article »

The Performance Review Calibration Session

In larger companies, managers don’t have to just review their direct reports and assign a performance review rating. They also need to assign a performance review ranking. The ranking is just as critical as the rating. And the calibration session is where the ranking is done.
Calibration sessions are the hidden part of the performance review [...]

Read the full article »