Writing good performance self reviews

AI prompt: lego person crosses the finish line in a race against various animals

It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means… performance review time!

Let’s talk about writing your self review.

• Understand how they’re used - at many organizations managers gather and figure out how everyone performed (often called “calibration”). Your manager may look to your self review to remember what you actually did, so they can advocate for you.
  

• Think of it as a cheat sheet for your manager - if your manager uses your self review to advocate for you, then a helpful way of thinking about it is as a cheat sheet.
  

• Be relatively concise - presumably your manager is a busy person. Even more so during perf review season. Definitely cover all the cool stuff you did, but do your boss a favor and keep it concise.
  

• Make it easy to read - another way to help out your manager: make it easy to understand what you did. Don’t write a long narrative. Write bullet points, and make them skimmable by giving each one a title.
  

• Relate your accomplishments to company goals - try to relate some stuff back to company goals. Doesn’t need to be everything. But at least make it clear that some of your work is directly related to higher-level goals.
  
  Company doesn’t have goals? No problem. Come up with goals you think the company should have!
  

• Talk about it with other people - lastly, self reviews don’t need to be secret. You can talk about them with other people. I’ve gotten a lot of value out of getting teammates together to help eachother come up with ideas and edit.

What have you found helpful for writing performance self reviews? Let me know below!