Why You Need To Prepare For A Fantastic Performance Review Now

Summer is the smartest time to prep for your year-end performance review — and this simple storytelling framework will help you get there.

Summer is the smartest time to prep for your year-end performance review. Here’s why: even the best managers forget. Writing performance evaluations is hard, and buried under a busy year, the moments that made you shine may have long faded in your manager’s memory. Recency bias — giving more value to recent events, over events from earlier in the year — is a common occurrence in performance reviews. Managers are busy and recent stories are easier to recall.

What’s more a lot of top-achievers believe in the adage, “Let the numbers speak for themselves.” But what that really means is that you are letting other people evaluate the data and come up with their own interpretation. Maybe it’s clear as day to you that you’re a high performing sales team member, but assuming that everyone is on the same page should be considered naive realism, the tendency to believe that we see the world exactly as it is, objectively and without bias.

Don’t wait until the week before your sit-down with your manager is scheduled to make sure you are on the same page. Alongside striving for excellent performance review metrics and hitting quantifiable goals, you can use the summer to make sure your own perspective on the value you bring to your team is understood, not just by you, but by your peers and managers as well.

Take Advantage of Summer. Prepare For Year-End Your Performance Review Now

When you let your performance numbers speak for themselves, you are really letting people tell their own story about you. A lot of top-achievers fall into this trap because they don’t like to brag. It can be hard to differentiate between bragging and asserting your own point of view, especially when the topic is one’s own accomplishment, but they are different.

This is where leadership storytelling comes in. Leadership storytelling is not simply about recounting events. It’s the intentional assertion of your point of view. Storytelling at work creates meaning of events and understanding your role within them. Often, especially when we are busy, we just move from one meeting to the next. One event to the next.

But when do we stop and ask the bigger questions? Are there patterns we are missing? When we stop and reflect on the meaning of our work, it will help us prepare for the year-end performance evaluation. It shows us where we stand, and where we still want to go. Professor SJ Murray writes about how the ancient philosopher Seneca “compared the benefits of deep reflection to the alchemy by which bees transform nectar into honey.” When we reflect on the raw ingredients of our lives, it gives them the chance to turn into something much more powerful and meaningful.

A Simple Story Discovery Tool To Help You Prepare For Your Performance Review

So sit down and take a minute for the IRS. No, I don’t mean the Internal Revenue Service. Here’s what it means for Story Discovery:

I = Incident

• What are some events that have occurred in your worklife in the last six months? It could be anything — from a big sales deal that went through to an uncomfortable silence during a team meeting. Try to reflect on both big and small moments. Both positive and negative interactions.

R = Reflection

• Reflection is what turns an event into a story. Take a moment to reflect on the event. Think about it from your perspective and other people’s perspectives. Consider questions such as, what makes you uncomfortable? What surprises you? Why?

S = Significance

• So what? What does this experience mean? Who should care or benefit from hearing this story? What does it mean to the person who is evaluating your performance?

Example Mid-Year Performance Review Reflection Using The IRS Story Discovery Tool

Incident:

• A high-stakes pitch presentation where a potential client asked an ethical question no one on your sales team was fully ready to field. You stepped in to answer the question to the best of your ability based on your company’s values.

Reflection:

• You felt super uncomfortable not having a ‘perfect’ answer. You are used to having all the answers. But you realize that being present with prospects when they ask challenging questions could be just as important as having the ‘right’ answer.

Significance:

• It’s not only the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ of your interactions with the prospects. Even though you didn’t have the perfect answer, you listened thoughtfully to your prospects’ concerns and did your best to address them.

It’s important to shape the narrative of an event like this before it’s shaped for you. Every leader needs to be proactive, and stay ahead of the game. In this scenario, because multiple people were there at the sales meeting, other team members will start shaping their own story (even if unconsciously).

How Story Discovery Helps You Prepare For Your Year-End Performance Review

If the sales lead in the example above didn’t use the IRS story discovery tool, she may have tried to suppress the story. She could have hoped that everyone (including herself) would forget it and that her manager would only evaluate her on strong sales numbers. Instead, because she took the time to name the incident and reflect on it, she found significance in it. She now has the power and the time to shape the story.

Rather than being afraid of the uncomfortable meeting, she’s using it to share a leadership story that will help her team build trust with other prospects. At the same time, she’s asserting her point of view: even when she doesn’t have the perfect answer at the ready, she can be an effective salesperson and team leader.

Why You Should Prepare For Your Performance Review Now

Because your performance review is still 4 or even 5 months away, you have time to reflect and tell the story you want to tell during your performance review. You don’t want to wait until the week before your review, scrambling through old emails, past calendar events and Slack messages to jog your memory about all that you accomplished in the last year. You can be proactive and make sure that you are telling the right story about yourself right now. Don’t just hope that your manager will see your effort, your skill, and your successes.

Metrics and goals will always matter during a performance review, but numbers alone rarely capture judgment, growth, or leadership — the moments that often separate a good year from a great one. So take a little time this summer, or whenever the pressure is lessened, to look back at what’s actually happened, find the meaning in it, and start shaping the story you want your manager to hear. Your future self will thank you for it.

If you’re a sales leader, overseeing a team, especially with early professionals, here’s a Harvard Quick Case centered around a performance review designed to explore how storytelling and listening can enhance perceptions of workplace performance, effort, and competence between early professionals and their team.

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