EVERY year, people struggle to do their annual self-evaluations for so many reasons. Some have difficulty in evaluating themselves because there are no established criteria in the organization to measure how well each one did. And even if it did, there is no added incentive, so employees just accomplish it for compliance. Others do not do a self-evaluation because their evaluations are left to the discretion of their managers. Others simply do not know how to evaluate themselves.
What these organizations do not understand is that performance reviews are opportunities for both employees and managers to agree on how they can best support the objectives of the organization. At the same time, this provides a venue for the manager to set their expectations for their team. For it to be an effective tool for your professional growth, your self-evaluation should reflect not only what you have done for the year, but also what you hope to accomplish in the next year.
Start your self-evaluation by listing your core functions so you can objectively track your accomplishments. Your primary tasks are usually based on your job description which also identifies your key deliverables. Once you have those, you can then categorize your accomplishments based on what is expected from you and what you have accomplished on top of those expectations.
From there, list down your accomplishments for the year. This should include projects that you have successfully completed, teams and committees where you significantly contributed, training activities, and any other activity that took up a significant amount of your time. This will help your manager understand your productivity and recalibrate your goals and targets as needed. Doing this will also help you understand if you need more tasks based on your core functions, or lessen involvement with activities that take away from your primary tasks.
Now that you have a list of your accomplishments, highlight your top three accomplishments. The problem with annual performance evaluations is that people forget what happened during the year just concluded, and then managers evaluate you based on the successes or failures of the past weeks or months. To remind your manager, highlight your top three achievements and how these contributed to the team’s success.
Emphasize projects and assignments that are beyond your core tasks. Your manager needs to understand the different stretch assignments that you were given so they can be reminded of your extra effort in accomplishing those tasks. Just make sure that these were tasks assigned by your manager and not activities that you joined to avoid doing your job. While it is good to join organization-wide activities that enhance engagement, these should not detract you from doing your real work.
While accomplishments are important, you also need to evaluate your behavior and attitude. Whether you like it or not, you will have to work with people on your team, and with people from other departments. As you grow in your career, you will discover that aside from being competent and skilled, you need to work well with others and be professional. Part of your self-evaluation should focus on how well you worked with others.
To justify your evaluations, prepare anecdotes to substantiate your accomplishments. Your manager has so many operational tasks that they might not remember events where you excelled.
By providing specific examples, they can see how you contributed to the overall success of the team. Use the Situation-Task-Action-Result (STAR) Method to summarize your anecdotes and provide a clear picture of what you have done. For example: “There are new members in the team, and I wanted them to be up to speed with what we do so I created a new hire onboarding presentation and kit which helped them adapt quickly to the team.” By using the STAR Method, your manager will easily get the whole picture.
Your self-assessment should also include your own weaknesses because your manager needs to know that you are working on them. For failures throughout the year, you can rephrase them as opportunities for growth and mention what you have been doing to overcome them. This can also be one of your goals for this year which tells your manager that you really want to grow.
If possible, ask trusted colleagues for feedback on your performance. They can provide valuable input to your performance, and you can improve in your work. Just make sure to keep an open mind and listen to what they have to say. Ask follow-up questions to fully understand what they are trying to tell you. On the other hand, it will also work to your advantage to keep positive feedback from the people you have worked with so that you can show them to your manager as proof of the quality of your work. These are things your manager will appreciate because positive feedback from stakeholders directly tells them you are doing well.
Include in your self-evaluation what you want to work on so they can provide the needed support to achieve your goals. Your manager can only evaluate you on certain interactions with you and might not be aware of what other tasks you are interested in pursuing. By telling them where you want to grow, they can start thinking of projects and assignments to give you as opportunities for professional development.
Lastly, ask your manager what they hope to accomplish this year. This will help you identify where you can significantly contribute to help them succeed. Remember that your success depends on the success of your leader, so your goals have to be aligned with their objectives.
In the end, you and your manager need to discuss your self-evaluation and you need to know exactly what they expect from you in the next year. Now is the best time to negotiate and set clear expectations for the coming year. Once you and your manager agree on your performance evaluation, strive to do well and exceed expectations.
Image credits: Dylan Gillis on Unsplash