How much time did you spend planning your last week-long vacation? It probably took you at least several hours. How long did you spend planning for your last year-end review? If you are like most people, you probably spent less than an hour. You know where I am going with this; unless you work on commission or you are your own boss, your year-end review should be a priority. For most people working in corporate america, reviews drive compensation and promotions.
Your review is an important opportunity to remind your manager how great you are, how much she should want to retain and promote you, and what information she needs to get you a sizable bonus and a raise. This post will walk you through how to make the most of your year-end review.
Create a list of what you did over the year
The first step in having a great review is to put together a summary of your accomplishments. Ideally, you have been noting important milestones, accomplishments and contributions throughout the year. If not, then this could be a great New Year’s Resolution for the coming year but there is no need to despair. There are a number of ways you can gather the information for your list:
- Review your calendar. You likely had meetings and time allotted to the most important things you did this year. Go through month by month and jot down the work associated with how you spent your time. It’s easy to forget what you did in January when November rolls around.
- Review your professional goals for the year. Many companies have employees write out their goals for the year. If you have yours written down, assess what work you have done against each goal throughout the year
- Scan electronic and paper files. Whether you keep key documents on paper or electronically, go through your key documents files and email folders to identify key accomplishments for the year.
- Consider your volunteer and extra-curricular contributions within your company. Even though your leadership of volunteer activities or your organization of company fun events may not be in your job description, if you are helping to build a company’s culture and facilitating relationship building, that is of value to your employer. While these activities alone may not earn you a promotion, they may make a difference if you’re one of several contenders for a promotion.
- If you’re a manager, document your team’s accomplishments. Have your direct reports complete this exercise for you. It will help them and it will help you; their accomplishments are your accomplishments. In fact, part of my motivation in writing this post is so I can share parts of it with my direct reports.
As you are compiling your list, think carefully about the work for which you take credit. At a Wall Street Journal event the other night, I heard the CEO of McKinsey & Company say, “In all my years, I have never had a man say that he had areas for improvement in his self assessment, but women will often list a number of areas for improvement.” On average, women tend to be more self-depreciating and less likely to claim credit for work than their male counter-parts. Knowing this information, encourage yourself to be bolder about what you list in your accomplishments. You lead your team, so their accomplishments are your accomplishments. There is no need to be shy; even when you push yourself outside your comfort zone, you are probably still very far away from being inappropriate.
Summarize your accomplishments
Once you have a list of contributions for the year, it’s time to write up the summary. Think of this like writing a resume; you want to be execution and results driven. If there is one lesson I took away from my decade in consulting, it is that you should not underestimate the impact of a polished and professional looking presentation. When you give your manager a well written summary, the impression that you give is that you are organized and in command of the facts.
I suggest organizing your year-end summary one of two ways. If you have specific goals for the year or a compensation plan that outlines how your bonus will be considered, put together a presentation that addresses each goal or compensation plan element in sequence. There should be an executive summary on the first page that outlines each goal and the high level result followed by a detailed discussion of each element in an appendix page behind the executive summary. For example, if the goal is satisfactory audit outcomes and you achieved this, the summary point would be “Achieved successful audit outcomes in all audits.” Then, there might be a detailed page behind that listing all the audits, their dates, and the findings.
While it takes additional time to create detailed pages describing the specifics behind high level outcomes, it’s important. It adds credibility to what you did and helps your manager remember all your contributions which in turn makes it easier for her to defend why you deserve more compensation and responsibility. It’s important to include numbers and metrics where ever possible.
Once you have finished going through each element of your goals or compensation plan, review your list of accomplishments. Were they all covered and included? If any were not covered, create another category on the summary page and write up those accomplishments there. If you need a title for those activities, something like “Additional Contributions” or “Other Key Accomplishments” are good catch-all phrases.
If you do not have a clear set of objectives or compensation plan elements for your role, review your accomplishments list and group them into categories (trying not to have more than 5-7 categories maximum.) Once you have created your categories, use the same summary and appendix format defined above. I have created a template you can download here.
As you think about how to write up the summary and details about each accomplishment, make sure you are using “action” words. In my post about writing a strong resume, I included a links to several good lists of action words. In your year-end reviews, your contribution descriptions should all start with action words. Also similar to writing a resume, quantify your work and your results as much as possible. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you quantify your results:
- What did your work accomplish? If people were impacted, how many and in what time frame? How long did you work take to accomplish?
- What changed financially in your business as a result of your work or work you contributed to? Financial metrics include things like sales, revenue, costs, profit, and balance sheet items. Sometimes noting the lack of change can be important. For example, if you grew revenue without increases costs that is a great story. Did metrics increase or decrease? Was work done more efficiently? By how much?
- How did core internal or operating metrics at your company change or not change based on your work? Operating metrics include a wide variety of numbers, and there are some good lists of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to consider here and here. Did metrics increase or decrease? By how much?
If possible, it’s great to have someone you trust at work review your summary before sharing it with you manager. Your colleague may be able to help you refine and strengthen your contributions summary. If there’s no one you can share the summary with at work, consider if a colleague outside of your company could be helpful. Sometimes you have to go it alone, but take a few minutes to consider who could help.
Share your summary with your manager in advance of year end
There’s a concept in negotiation called “anchoring” which essentially means that wherever a negotiation starts “anchors” the discussion. If you tell your boss that you believe you did an outstanding job this year and present a summary to support that claim, your year-end review is anchored high and your manager has to talk it down if they disagree.
Of course, if you have not done a great job this year than anchoring high may not be a great idea; it would show a lack of self awareness and may backfire. However, women in particular often anchor too low because they want to appear modest and respectful of the broader team’s collective effort. Corporate America overall has shown that it will pay you less if it thinks you will accept it. Save the modesty for your personal life. If you have done a great job, anchor high and ask for a raise twice as high as you think you should receive. The worst case is that you get told no, and the best case is a pay raise that will compound over time. A $6,000 raise in a given year would be worth $420,000 if you retired 30 years later and invested the raise each year. That is a quarter of a million dollars difference from one year’s pay increase.
Use the concept of anchoring and review your accomplishments with your boss in advance of the year end review process. This is helpful because of an important fact many people do not seem to realize: unless your manager owns your company, she likely does not have the final say over compensation. Your summary of accomplishments is something your boss can use to justify your bonus, compensation increase, and/or promotion to other people. Having a succinct and self-explanatory summary of your accomplishments helps tip the odds in your favor. If you don’t provide it for your boss, you are hoping that your boss knows your story well enough or has enough time to do that work themselves. Your career advancement is too important to leave up to chance or in the hands of others.
Answers to common questions
What if my performance this year was not good?
My first response to this question is to wonder if your performance really is poor given the data. Sometimes we can be our own worst critics and in reality you are doing a fantastic job. However, if the data objectively shows that you failed to deliver against your key goals, proactively addressing the situation is a good idea. Spend time identifying what went wrong and document what you plan to do differently going forward to improve results in the coming year. Talking about what you have learned is also a helpful way to emphasize that you won’t repeat your poor performance in the future. One year, I missed a sales growth metric. In looking at the goal, I realized that it has been set based on the prior year’s results but that the prior year had included a one-time anomaly. I was able to document that if you removed the anomaly, the current year’s growth was an improvement year over year which helped the year end conversation. While I still missed the goal, I was paying attention and looking at the problem. It also helped me avoid that problem going forward; I now proactively watch for anomalies that may unfairly influence goals.
What if my manager disagrees with my summary?
If you manager disagrees with your summary, than that is important information to know. In the moment that you are discussing your summary with your manager, hear her out and don’t get defensive. Repeat what she said back to her without judgement. You should use phrases like, “I understand you are saying [insert her point].” Thank your manager and ask her for time to consider her feedback before discussing things further. This gives you critical time to digest her feedback before you engage with her. Once you have a moment to yourself, ask yourself if the feedback feels true to you. If you can, discuss the feedback with a trusted colleague to get a third party’s perspective. If the feedback is fair, when you next talk to your boss you can discuss how to address her feedback in the future. If you disagree, prepare for a follow up discussion where you state your case as calmly and rationally as possible. If that gets you nowhere, consider appealing to your bosses’ boss or a colleague of your boss. At some point, if you company does not see the value you believe you are bringing to the organization, than this job may not be the right fit. It’s always good to figure that out sooner rather than later.
I work in a small organization with several other people. How do I think about performance reviews in this context?
It is always important to document what you are doing, be it in a small or large organization. However, if there are only one or two people in the office it may make sense to share your summary with everyone in the office to get their input. It might also make sense to suggest this exercise to everyone and have everyone share their summaries as a group so you can collectively decide what the implications should be for the coming year.
In summary
While it does require an investment of time, writing up a year end summary of what you have achieved is worth it. If you have best practices to share that aren’t included in this post, please add them below. If you have other questions not addressed in this post, please ask them in the comments section below and I will try to share them. In the meantime, good luck with your review!
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