Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to the It Depends. Podcast. As always, I am your host. My name is Kevin Goldsmith. I am a chief technology officer. I have been a Director of Engineering VP of engineering, a developer and engineering manager. And along the way, I wrote articles and wrote blogs and wrote a book, collecting those different articles of different blog posts. Book is called It Depends Writing on Technology leadership from 2012 to 2022.
And in this podcast, for those who are new, uh we serialize the audio book of the book. So every episode you get a new chapter from the book again, for those who are new, there's also a newsletter. The podcast appears every other week on the alternate weeks is the newsletter. The newsletter is serializing the book also, but serializing it out of order. So you get different chapters from the book in the newsletter and in the podcast every other week.
If you'd like to know more about the book, there is a website, the website has information about the book. It has links to all the stores where the book and the audio book are available that website is it depends book.net, so you can go there and if you have questions, you can email me contact at. It depends book.net, very easy. That link is also on the website and this link and any other links I mentioned will always also be in the show notes.
This week we are starting a series of four chapters talking all about performance reviews. And I wrote this originally, I I released each of these uh like a one week at a time in, in uh in December kind of anticipating people are going to be starting to write their end of year reviews, timing on the podcast of this and not great. I did uh all these chapters have already appeared in the newsletter. I will give the link to the newsletter uh that contains each as I do them.
Um But those I tried to release kind of at appropriate time, sort of beginning of the year, middle of the year, some companies do twice a year review, some companies do one, some companies do at mid year, some companies do it at the beginning of the year. So try to anticipate this. This is coming a little bit early probably for your performance review cycle for the, the end of the year, but keep it around
us as reference. And this chapter in particular is talking about the stuff you do all year round to be ready when review time comes. So in the chapter, I talk about, you know, reviews are probably one of the things I hear most complained about by managers. Just the sheer amount of time it takes the paperwork. And I have as both a employee
and a senior leader reading reviews. I've seen a lot of really poorly done reviews from managers who clearly felt like this was a burden on them or they were too busy to do a good job on them. I talk about in the chapter and I think this is right. And, and this is common wisdom, I didn't invent this. We should be giving good feedback all year round.
So the review itself is really just a restatement of things that are all being have been talked about with, with the employee realistically that that usually doesn't happen. Um We try uh some of us try, I certainly do. I, I can't say I'm always great at it. I always try but you know, I talk all the time about the chapter like sometimes that stuff gets lost, other things superseded. You know, we, we all try to do this.
So what ends up happening is that that piece of paper or that electronic document with that review becomes pretty important to the employee. Even if you have been doing a good job, giving them feedback throughout the year, that document is super important because this is the the work equivalent of a permanent record that you might have heard about when you were in school. This idea that this is the the the documents that follow you around certainly within your company.
And it is not the worst practice when you're interviewing somebody within a company to go back and look at their performance review and see like you have them. It's information that's important. You should have that reference. Also in some companies, if you're being promoted, especially if there's something like an arbitration board or like a promotion committee, they will go back and look at hopefully your performance reviews.
So these documents do kind of have an outsized importance. It's also usually the time of year where we talk about like, hey, what's your raise going to be or are you getting promoted? And so for that, like this process has a much bigger impact in the mind of the employee maybe then should but not un rightfully so. So it is really incumbent on us. And I've always felt this way incumbent on us as managers to try and do a good job to actually do the right thing
for the employee. But it is a lot of work. And I talk about in the book like I, I can't say like, oh, I always start really early and it's a very straightforward process. No, absolutely not. Like I, I have spent weekends and evenings leading up to those kind of closing dates, just scrambling trying to do them.
And I will also say like, you know, I've had employees clearly when I see, you know, maybe if you see this in a review, an employee, like, writes a couple sentences doesn't really put a lot of energy into. It doesn't seem like they care that much.
I have, I totally admit, like I've looked at that and looked at all the reviews I have to do and go, ok, well, if they don't care that much, well, I can get by with, which is giving them, you know, a few para you know, a few sentences that just kind of describe what's going on instead of really trying to write like a long kind of very descriptive, very informative thing when I see.
But when I see an employee that has gone through that effort and is clearly kind of thinking through their own progress and is clearly wanting more feedback, I will go and do the work to give them sometimes a page in, in a box that's, you know, five vines long of information. I've also seen companies where they don't want a ton of that, like they give you forms and the forms are fixed length and, and you're really not allowed to enter some in.
I think they do that one as a service to everybody to kind of take some of that pressure off.
But even then, even if I can only fit five lines in the form, I'm probably gonna write something bigger and I may hand that to the employee directly because again, I think his manager is one of the best things we can do for an employee is show that we care and show that we're paying attention, show that we're interested, show that we value them and they're important enough to us for us to spend a few hours once or twice a year, thinking about how we can work with them, how we can
help them improve. I think that's not a lot to ask. I will also say I will fully admit, like, do I do this every time? All the time you can ask anybody the work for me sometimes. Yes, sometimes. No, I'm, it's a work in progress. I always try and do this. So it, it'll depend a lot on, on other things sometimes what's going on. But I always try to do this. This is always my intent and the things I describe in the chapter about how I assemble the data. I absolutely do that.
Hopefully you're doing one on ones and in these one on ones, you're writing things down. So you remember, what did we talk about? I review that before, the next one on one. I absolutely review that um, review time because I want to remember because it's very easy. And I, I mentioned recency bias in the chapter very easy to forget anything from like more than a month ago.
And sometimes that's some of the somebody's best work and you've maybe you're gonna remember the high points, maybe gonna always remember a few of the low points, but you're gonna forget some of the just like good work people are doing in week, in week out. So it is important for you to actually go back review, think about it and, and put together that picture across that time. So in the following chapters, we're gonna talk about. So this one is about assembling the data.
Next chapter is about uh writing the review, then we talk about delivering the review. The final chapter is about uh in this series is about raises and how you argue for raises. How do you deliver raise information and you know, hopefully your company gives you training on all this. And it's, this isn't the first you've heard of it.
I'll tell you that I've been in those trainings now dozens of times and they're never adequate and oftentimes they're just admitted you're just kind of figuring it out on your own. So that's why I wrote these, these articles, chapters, blog posts is to give you more information to take some of the pain out of that process. And so now I present to you chapter 19 from it depends writing useful performance reviews, assembling the data.
We are now more than halfway. 01 thing I should also say we're gonna be talking about this because this podcast comes out every other week. This is what we're gonna be talking about for the next couple of months. So I'm actually really excited about this by the end will be into fall, not that far off, possibly of your, the beginning of your end of year review cycle. So hopefully by we get, by the time we get to that point, you'll be very, you'll feel very well prepared.
And because we're doing this now in end of August or beginning of September, now, you'll, you'll have time to start, go going back and assembling some of the data so that when it comes time for review, you're not scrambling. All right, here we go, writing useful performance reviews. Assembling the data originally published on December 4th 2021. It's December and that can only mean one thing for many of us it is now or soon will be time to write performance reviews for our team.
Writing reviews can be daunting for many, especially those with large groups or little experience. I often hear managers, even senior leaders bemoaning the effort it takes to write the reviews for their group members. However, there are some things you can do that will make the process less onerous no matter what format or schedule your company has. Why do we do performance reviews?
The rationale we used to hear for performance reviews is that they are for the employee to know how they're doing, to give them helpful feedback on what they're doing well and where they may need to improve. Today, we try to provide this feedback. Often throughout the year, I often tell the managers on my teams that there shouldn't be any surprises in the performance review. It should instead be a summing up of the feedback that this person has been receiving all along.
If we give feedback throughout the review period, why do we need to do the performance review? It is for the company and us almost as much as it is for the person receiving it. Ideally, we maintain a narrative across the year with our feedback, reviewing months of our notes and prior communication before each one on one, all too often, the larger art gets lost in the whirlwind of work. The feedback we give is usually very transactional about what has just occurred.
If there are significant overarching discussions, we may be able to tie the feedback to that but often the narrative gets lost. The review is a chance to look across all that has transpired over a much lengthier period than the time between one on ones. It is a chance for us to take stock and find new patterns or trends that we may have missed to look at the bigger picture and then build a shared understanding of that picture with the team member.
The review is also for the company because the company keeps a record of employee performance to justify bonuses, promotions, salary increases, and stock offerings. It is also vital to have a history of performance for a new manager if you move on from your role, sometimes you will move on to a new job or the employee will move to a new team.
When that happens, all the shared understanding that you have built up is lost unless it is written down, an employee who has been working years towards a new role may be set back significantly if their new manager doesn't understand the efforts that they have made over time is only looking at what they see in the present moment. A well written review is a valuable document for the person receiving it. First. It is a checkpoint for them to refer to as they work towards their career goals.
Second, it is a useful document for you to help them on their career path. Third, it is a favor for their future managers at your company. Finally, it is a critical document for the company and your manager to understand how to manage compensation for the person preparing for the performance review start early, often writing reviews seems like a great deal of work because we wait until our company's official kickoff of the review period.
The people and hr team lets all the managers know the schedule, does a few meetings to discuss, update the process and opens the forms for manager to enter data. If you wait for that moment to begin preparing your reviews, you may find yourself spending a lot of nights and weekends trying to get your evaluations prepared since your regular work continues.
During this time in the past, I've spent more than a few sad weekend days sitting in a ski lodge huddled over my laptop writing reviews while my family was out on the slopes. Having fun reviews happen at the same time every year, your company may adjust the date slightly, but you can be confident that reviews will happen around the same time each year. When the dates are announced, you should be prepared.
If you are incredibly diligent, you may be collecting and organizing data for your reviews year round. If you haven't done that, you can start reviewing amassing and organizing supporting data as review time approaches so that you don't have to struggle and potentially miss things. While the format of the reviews in your company may change periodically, the general things that are measured likely won't. There are many sources of data you can assemble for the review.
As I start my preparation, I create a folder on my computer for the review period and a sub folder for each person in each folder. I assemble all the documents and data for the performance assessment. I prefer to keep local copies because it's less likely that I will accidentally share the folder or file to focus. I often go off site to work on reviews and sometimes these places have sketchy connectivity.
Having the documents stored on my laptop is function well for my process, my primary data always comes from the notes I take during my one on ones and in meetings, I used to store all my notes and Evernote organized by meeting for recurring meetings and tagged with the people in the discussion. The storage approach made it easy to find all my notes for each review person to track what we spoke about across the review period. However, during the pandemic, I switched to paper notebooks.
Now I keep an index of what pages people appear on this index makes it easy to find all my notes, referencing someone as I review my meeting notes, I assemble meaningful comments or things I notice into a new document in the person's folder to organize my data for the review include where I got it from for each item. In case I need to go back to the source, the person's prior reviews are essential.
I always download copies of any previous reviews for the person in the system and put them in the folder. It is vital to remember our prior review conversations and see any reviews from before they reported to me, reading previous reviews, helps me to understand the different challenges and strengths they've had and understand their career story of the company. So far. Email and Slack exchanges may remind you of other events from the year.
Occasionally things come up and are resolved between one on ones or meetings so they don't appear in your notes. I scan over the email and Slack exchanges that I have had with the person during the review period to see if I missed an event in reviewing my meeting notes, I copy, paste these exchanges into the notes document in the person's review folder or summarize them. There make a list of peers of the person from whom you want to request feedback.
Your company may include a formal peer review element in your performance review process. However, if this isn't part of the company process, you will still find it valuable to ask for peer review feedback. The first step is to list the people you would like to ask for feedback. So you're ready, you may also write the template for the peer feedback request to prepare you to send them out.
I've noticed that in companies with formal peer feedback process as part of their reviews, people quickly become inundated with feedback requests, your chance of getting valuable or any feedback is greatly improved. If you send out the request early before people have feedback, fatigue. If you know that pure feedback will not be part of your company's process, you may still want to send out the feedback request early to get the responses with enough time to follow up if there are questions.
However, make sure that you specify a date by which you would like the feedback returned and don't make that date too far in the future. Or people will put the request aside and forget about it. The message template goes in the top level performance reviews folder and the list goes into the person's folder. If you want to be tricky, you can put the list in a CS V file to make it easier for a mail merge. You may generate a lot of email performance feedback requests.
As part of this process, I've automated this over the years when you receive the feedback, save a copy of it to the folder, you may need to ask for self evaluation. If your company does not include self evaluation as part of the review process, you may ask the people you review to do that for you. If you are unsure what to ask. Use your company's career pathing rubric for their job level.
Ask them to compare themselves to the rubric and give examples of how they have met exceeded or missed the expectations. If you use individual goals or ors they should talk about how they achieved or missed them. They should also talk about the areas they want to improve on for the coming review period.
You want them to complete their self review early enough that you have time to follow up with them or others on anything that comes up in that document, your company will set the dates for you if it includes self review as part of the review process, save the self evaluation to the person's folder, review, the work output, a critical part of the performance review is reviewing the actual value the person created for the customers and company, a portion of your performance review as a
lead or manager covers what your team achieved. Think through your team's accomplishments and think about how this person contributed or detracted from those projects. Add concrete examples to the notes document. Look over the person's commits to the code of the project. Did they review others code? Did they contribute helpful comments? Did their code require many fixes? Did they contribute to the project documentation? Look over their comments in your project and bug tracking systems.
Did they contribute helpful information? Did they help others? It can also be very tempting to try to be objective when looking at work output, counting lines of code produced, number of commits, number of issues filed or closed or story points completed might seem like unbiased data, avoid this temptation at all costs.
People have different approaches to knowledge work even if your team has strong guidelines on how work should be done, people will always have methods that your seemingly objective process might miss instead focus on the value they contribute to the team and watch in the peer feedback. What they contribute that won't show up in the source management or issue tracking systems. Save your observations on their work output in your notes document.
What if the person didn't report to me for the entire review period? If the person is a new hire and still eligible for a performance review, you will use this process. But just for their time in the company, you have to make allowances for their onboarding and focus more on how they learn to contribute than on their actual contributions.
If you are a new manager to an existing team, spend as much time as you can with the prior manager to understand how they approached each person's development, read the reviews for each person before talking to the manager. If the manager has left the company, you can still reach out to them. Hopefully, they will still want the best for their old team. Depending on how long you were in the team during the review period.
You may need to emphasize the peer review component more than you would have otherwise be aware that changing a team's manager is very disruptive to the team, you will only have seen the results of that disruption and how the team now works. If the person joined the team from a different group in the company, consider doing a joint review with their prior manager to cover their work before joining your team.
If that doesn't seem necessary, you should still have an extended conversation with their former manager after going over the person's previous reviews. This process seems like a lot of work. It is, it should be, it's important stuff. Think about the best reviews you've received from your current or former managers, not just the performance reviews that were the most positive.
But the ones that made you feel like your manager cared about your development, a good review inspires you with the knowledge that your manager and the company recognize the worthy work you've done. You know that your areas of improvement have been considered and are essential for your career development. A good review requires good data. Therefore, it is incumbent on you to make sure that you are going over as much as you can.
Not just what you can remember at the end of the review period, also known as recency bias. The first time you go through this process, it will take a great deal of effort, but the payoff will be worth it for the next period. You will learn to collect and organize this data as you go. If you assemble and categorize data all the time, it will be helpful in your one on ones as well and not just at performance review time. Now you have the data. What next?
Now that you've assembled your data, you can evaluate the data against the expectations of the role and level I will discuss that in the next chapter. I'm hoping that you got some value from that chapter that you learn something new gay, least got some ideas that you can use next time around. You're doing performance reviews. If you're an individual contributor, ie you're not writing other people's reviews.
Can you hear this? I'd be really interested to hear what you think about this and so write me at contact at it depends book.net this week, September 6th 2024 depending on when you hear this. I'm speaking at leading INGE in New York City. I've mentioned that in the last few podcasts, something new. Um that I haven't mentioned before is that they've arranged a book signing for me. So I will be signing copies of the book and in fact, I will have copies of the book for free.
So at this point, if you, if you're having to be in New York City and are attending the conference or you're coming for the conference, just letting you know, you can either bring your book if you already have it or you can get a uh I only have so many copies with me, but I will also be signing free copies and giving those out of the book. So please, if you're at the conference, please stop by say hi, glad to meet you. Glad to see you. Thanks a lot.
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