We are halfway through the year, which means for many of you it’s time to complete your 6 monthly review.
Picture the scene: Your manager sits you down, but you can tell immediately that she is not looking pleased. You have pulled together some rough notes of what you have been up to. Before you can even get started, she launches into her frustration at a recent meeting that that did not go well. This feels so unfair as this was the end of a long series of really successful engagements, but this was always going to be the tricky stakeholders. Before you can recover, she is saying that she feels your performance for the last six months has not been good, based on that last meeting. You are flabbergasted and all of your prepared notes are irrelevant.
Recency bias is something that happens to all of us. We tend to focus on the last moment or event and are unable to look past it to the full period we are reviewing. In fact, as you prepare for your own review, do you find you can only think of the things you did over the last few months, and not across the entire year?
Rather than getting caught up in reviews that either you or your manager are ill prepared for, you can start becoming much more systematic in how you gather information about what you are working on and how you are doing.
Here’s some top tips to help you do just that:
- Create a folder in your email that is marked ‘Great things to remember’.
- Each time you have a great conversation with a colleague, leader or customer, make a note of it, send it to yourself and file it in your folder. Be really descriptive in your subject line, as this will help when you get to step 5 below. Subject lines need to include the what and why, for example, ‘Feedback from x on project y’, or ‘Customer x compliment on delivering y’.
- Every-time you receive a compliment from someone, don’t brush it aside, but ask: ‘Can I quote you?’ Then put the quote into an email, along with the date, the person and the circumstances and store it up in that folder.
- Finally, every time you deliver a piece of work, or receive feedback from someone, store it in that folder.
- Each month, review the messages in that folder and do a ‘Summary for x month’ email to yourself, noting the main highlights and achievements. Send this back to the same folder and a version to your line manager (& if you have a sponsor or mentor include them).
- What you are doing is building collateral about your performance in real time and then when it comes to your six monthly review, you only have six main emails to review – your monthly summaries.
You will now be armed with a much richer range of data to describe your performance over the six months. Then, if something like the scenario happens above, you are armed with many examples of when something has gone right, or when you have delivered something extraordinary to share, including some valuable testimonials.
Are you ready to have your best year ever? How about getting absolute clarity about what that would look like, all defined on a one pager, that you can track and see progress over the year? I have limited coaching spots available that will help you do just that. To see if this is right for you let’s talk.