It took me a couple of years of iterations and thinking through to finally get it. The performance review process isn’t about giving them school marks for their job. It’s about checking the common understanding between you and your teammates. How you both see their commitment to the company’s mission and their self-development progress.

Even if the first impression says that it is you evaluating them, in reality, a performance review is two side process, where also you, direct manager, can learn how you are doing with your duties.

There are many excellent publications about how to led 1:1 and performance review meetings so that I won’t go deeply into details. Instead, here I would like to recall some of my learnings, hypothesis, and takeaways from conversations I had with my teammates in the last years.

You give them “three” they say “four”

How many times did you give them a lower score than they self-assessed? After that, you probably heard, “You underestimate me. I worked really hard in the last 6–12 months”. And they probably did. So what happened? Maybe they worked hard, but their efficiency was not so good to meet the expectations. But perhaps it was you, not being clear enough when sharing those expectations with them.

It also works the other way — you give “four”, they say “three”. Some of them can be humble and modest, but others probably don’t even know that they do a great job.

In both cases, it is worth checking how often and what kind of feedback you shared with them over time. Is it only about good things or only about bad things? Maybe you didn’t share it at all? Did you set proper goals? Can they clearly tell when goals are achieved and when they aren’t? Wouldn’t these goals too hard or too easy. Or too irrelevant (e.g., not in line with the company’s mission)? If you think this can be a case, I recommend checking Google for S.M.A.R.T. goals.

Next time when you have to score their performance, reflect on all of those above — check if you give your direct reports proper framework to do the right self-assessment. Then, and only then, performance review matters.

Their duties are their key achievements

Sometimes it’s more than just scoring. What if you ask them for key achievements, and you get the response that is very different than yours? It can be either good or bad. If you both talk on the same level of abstraction, e.g., you expected them to make enhancements in the code architecture, but they moved on with QA and automation instead, this can be great. If the goal (e.g., improvements in the delivery process or parallelization), was achieved, you can be only happy. There was progress in things that matter, moreover, your teammates went out of your suggested solution bias.

But things are getting worse when they are happy with achieving things that should be casual for them. It mostly relates to senior engineering positions. You probably expect from them scalable behavior — optimizing processes, building easy-to-follow architecture, inspiring less experienced team members.

It is great that they deliver single features they are proud of. But sometimes you need more (like 10x more 🔥), and you cannot merely expect they will write the same code 10x faster. But you can challenge them to share their knowledge and experience more comprehensive, to simplify the hardest things, or automate the most manual ones.

To step back and rebuild something from scratch, to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in long term perspective.

It’s worth reflecting if your teammates are aware of evolving expectations. Things that were their goals become their duties. Technical goals sometimes transform into people-related challenges.

Performance review shouldn’t be focused on the quantity, but growth and development. Not on how many things they delivered, but what they did to achieve it faster next time or not to make the same mistakes.

You see only the limited piece of the full picture

When you share a performance review, you all should always remember that this is just your opinion. No matter how close you are to the person you’re talking with, you see her/him through your glasses only. That’s why you should encourage them to ask for additional feedback from colleagues they work with. If you synchronize it correctly, your direct reports should get their full-picture performance review — from you + their teammates.

Now, If you don’t look at their peers’ feedback before finishing your review, you can be really surprised by how those opinions can be different from yours.

For your reports, it will also be valuable — they will see themselves from a couple of different perspectives and can learn that yours isn’t always the best/only one.

What if you don’t have the luxury to mix your feedback with others? Make sure that your teammates understand that your review is about how you see them and only this. Don’t tell “You are”, start with “I think…” or “I could observe…”.

Oh, and don’t use “You…” too. Talk about their behavior, engagement, situations. Exchange opinions, discuss. But most importantly — talk less, ask and listen carefully.