Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies
Danielle Cobo: Would it interest you to get a glimpse into the annual performance review process? What makes now the best time to prepare for your annual performance review? This episode will go behind the scenes of the annual performance review process. So you can set yourself up for success during your self-assessment and maximize your.
Danielle Cobo: Before we begin. There's two statistics I wanna share with you. The first one is according to trending economics, the annual inflation rate in the us as of July, 2022 is 8.5% from an over 40 year high of 9.1%. Hit in. The second statistic I wanna share with you is according to the research study by the conference, board's long running salary increase budget survey, which includes 180 organizations.
Danielle Cobo: The medium salary increase budget is 3%. right now the annual merit increase is 3%. However, inflation's at a high of 8.5. now more than ever, it's extremely important to set yourself up for success and prepare for your annual performance review now so that you could potentially be getting above that 3% and getting exceeds outstanding expectations.
Danielle Cobo: Before we begin to, I'm gonna share a story with you. I had a very alarming experience or I would say maybe eyeopening experience. When I became a manager for a fortune 500 company over 10 years ago, it was my first manager's meeting. And I was asked to prepare an assessment on each person on my team. I was asked repair a PowerPoint presentation and on each side would be an assessment of each person.
Danielle Cobo: It would have their name, their tenure, how long they've been with the organization, what their personality traits were, what their strengths and what their areas of opportunity were. Then at the end of the presentation, I was asked as well as all the other managers were asked to put each person in a nine box.
Danielle Cobo: If you're not familiar with the nine-box it's okay. I didn't know it at the time, either as a first time manager, the nine-box grades is an individual assessment tool that evaluates an employee's current and potential level of contributions to the organization. What it looks for is how is your overall performance and how is your overall potential?
Danielle Cobo: It looks at what are their strengths, how long they've been with the organization, what are their opportunities? Are they relocating? And when you're putting each person in this grid, it's looking at, does their performance align with behaviors? And is this person interested in getting promoted or not? that was in preparation for the manager's meeting, but here's what happens behind closed doors that most people don't know.
Danielle Cobo: And I'm sharing a little secret with. Eventually, when we got to the manager's meeting, all of the other managers sat in a room and one by one, each manager presented their overview of their team, each individual person, and how they fit in that nine box. Now this exercise is extremely helpful because it opened.
Danielle Cobo: Conversations on saying, Hey, I might be struggling a little bit with this particular person. Maybe I don't necessarily know where they want to go. Maybe some opportunities within the organization. Maybe they're. Not performing at the level of some of their peers and how can we get them to that next level?
Danielle Cobo: a, it was a great exercise because it opened up the conversation and helped us managers come together with some ideas and some solutions to get everybody going in that high potential and high performance. It also was pretty alarming when it looked at, are we hiring the right talent? What's the percentage of people.
Danielle Cobo: That are potentially going in that box of, we need to maybe move them out of the organization. And so when I was going through this exercise, it was a very eye-opening experience of what happens behind closed doors, as well as who's gonna be the person in that room. When my manager's doing the same exercise about their management team, who's gonna be the one advocating for me and I, I putting my best foot forward.
Danielle Cobo: When filling out my self assessment, when filling out the annual performance review for that merit increase, or to potentially go in that nine box where that's at promotable, how how annual performance reviews are measured is pretty much the similar compared to any industry that you're in, but it looks at your overall rating.
Danielle Cobo: It looks at outstanding. Are you achieving or meeting your expectation below or unsuccessful, and some organizations will base it off of certain measurables. Maybe based off of certain metrics that they measure each particular area within the annual performance review while others might actually take a bell curve type approach as.
Danielle Cobo: When you're looking at your annual performance review, even if you don't have it currently right now in front of you, or maybe you won't have it for a couple months. Typically annual performance reviews. The self-assessment happens at the end of the calendar year or at the end of the fiscal year.
Danielle Cobo: What you can do is. The first step in setting yourself up for success is reaching out to your manager and double checking and saying, Hey, what are the key strategic initiatives for our organization? And what are the key strategic initiatives for my particular role, typically, an organization has five key strategic initiatives that you are being measured on, on your annual performance review.
Danielle Cobo: So knowing those ahead of time will help you build your self assessment so that when it comes time to fill your annual performance review, you already have all of your accomplishments and achievements ready to go. And it's a matter of copying and piecing it because you've put that time in ahead of time.
Danielle Cobo: When you're looking at each key strategic initiative, let's say for example, it's sales performance, you're going to then put. How you measure yourself. So example might be meets expectation is a hundred percent, 110% might be exceeds expectations and 120% of your sales quota might be outstanding.
Danielle Cobo: It's different for every organization. As I said, the company that I previously had worked for, they went off of a bell curve. And one of the challenges with the bell curve is if the organization. Overperform that number, but you were at the bottom 33%, even if you had hit a hundred percent, they might put below expectations because based off the bell curve, it wasn't as high as everybody else.
Danielle Cobo: I have mixed emotions about that because to me, if you are hitting a hundred percent, you are meeting the expectation when it comes to rating. In each of the key strategic initiatives, what you're going to want to prepare is a star format for each key strategic initiative. What that's going to look like is what was the specifics of that particular key strategic initiative?
Danielle Cobo: What was the task to achieve it? What actions did you take to achieve that goal? And what was the result? for example, if the key strategic initiative is to hit a hundred percent of your quota, what are the specific steps that you have taken throughout this previous year to hit your quota? The task was to hit the quota.
Danielle Cobo: What were some of the actionable steps that you took and what were the results? what steps did you take to grow your business? if leadership is one of the key strategic initiatives, because you are part of leading a team, you're a people manager. What were some of the ways that you attracted top talent?
Danielle Cobo: How did you onboard your team? How did you create collaboration among your team? Were there certain individuals that were promoted within your organization? What steps did you take to help them prepare for that promotion? You wanna be very specific on your annual performance review on your self assessment.
Danielle Cobo: you know, your business better than anyone. Your manager knows what you're doing based off of the performance on reports and based off of what they observe and what you tell them. But they're not always in the car with you. They're not always working alongside you. So this is your time to shine. This is your time to share exactly what you've been doing to set yourself up for success and achieving the goals of the organization and what they've laid.
Danielle Cobo: reach out to your manager right now, at some point today, reach out to them, ask them what are the key strategic initiatives also looking at behaviors. A lot of organizations not only look at what the key strategic initiatives are. They also look at what are the behaviors that they're wanting from their organization.
Danielle Cobo: That's going to foster the company culture that they want. Also, they may look. Core values. How do the people that are working for the organization? What steps are they doing to align with the core values of their organization? Again, any time that you're filling out any of these measurables on your anal performance review, you wanna be very specific into the details.
Danielle Cobo: What was the specific core value? What was the task to achieve? What were the action steps to achieve that core value? And what were the results. one, for example, if collaboration is a core value among that organization, what steps did you take to collaborate with your peers, with your teammates, with other divisions within the organization?
Danielle Cobo: How did you collaborate with your customers to help them and achieve their goal? Be very, very specific. And as you go, one of the things that you can do is the beginning of the year. When you find out these key strategic initiatives, you find out what you're measured by. Have an ongoing list. Every time that you have a win, something that's worked well, something that has exceeded the expectations or you've heard from your manager.
Danielle Cobo: If that was a great idea, tally it, write that down. Maybe you have a word document and you just kind of keep it open on your desktop and you continue to add to it if you didn't do at the beginning of the year, it's okay. You still have time to do it. But keep track. One of the things that I did as a manager is I had a word document and I had all the key strategic initiatives at the top of it.
Danielle Cobo: And then I had each person's name below and as successes would happen throughout the year, I would just write under each person's name. Here was the success story that they had. I wanted to make sure that I captured all of 'em throughout the year to put them in the annual performance review. When I was doing the supervisor evaluation.
Danielle Cobo: Because part of the email performance review is you are going to do your self assessment and then your supervisor, manager's going to do their assessment as well. it's important that you are keeping track. Also, if you are a people leader out there, We don't always remember all the successes that took place throughout the year when we're asked to do this one time a year.
Danielle Cobo: So be proactive and start keeping a running list so that when it comes to the time when you're doing 9, 10, 15 annual performance reviews at once, you can easily cross reference that list and then go into more detail when you're writing out the annual performance.
Danielle Cobo: Also keep in consideration annual performance review time is a great time to reevaluate your individual development plan. Your individual development plan is how you prepare for that next step in your career. It's how you go into what are my goals. What are the strengths that I possess? What are some of the opportunities to get me to that next level?
Danielle Cobo: And I'm gonna go into detail in next week's episode on how to build an individual development plan. But what you wanna start thinking about today and why now is the best time for that annual performance review is starting to write yourself assessment because again, the medium range for the merit increase is 3%.
Danielle Cobo: Most companies do a range between zero, if you're unsuccessful. And one to two, if you are below expectations, meets expectations is typically about a 3%. But if you wanna get to that four or 5% on that range of the annual performance review, merit increase, ensuring that you are preparing now and making sure that you are writing down everything that you've done to contribute to the organization and how you achieve your goals in your current role, but more importantly, what are you doing?
Danielle Cobo: That's outstanding that warrants that 5% merit. This might be a good opportunity to also open up that conversation with your manager. What are some questions that you can ask them to uncover? Well, what's important to them on their team. Every manager is a little bit different. And so there's gonna be the expectations of the organization.
Danielle Cobo: There's also gonna be the expectations of that particular manager. What is important to them when they're looking at who is exceeding and outstanding within their team? I know that one of the qualities that I looked for as a manager, when I was evaluating my team and doing the manager evaluations, Is it, wasn't just about how are you performing in that role and how are you proactively helping the other people on the team and showing up as a leader, doing your role.
Danielle Cobo: Is meets the expectation, which is great meets is a good score to have on your annual performance review. And if you're striving to get that exceeds and outstanding, then that means going above and beyond your immediate role and contributing to other areas within your team and the organization.
Danielle Cobo: And that's proactively supporting other people. And if it gets to a point where you are proactively helping other people on your team, Then sharing that with your manager again, sometimes they don't always know what they don't see. So it could be you including them in an email. It could be you going to your manager and saying, Hey, I've got this great idea that can support our team.
Danielle Cobo: Go through it's X, Y, Z. And would you be interested in me sharing this on my next team call? Would you be interested? Do you think this would be helpful in sharing this amongst the team as well? That right there is a leader that is right there is proactively supporting your team. And that's what warrants that exceeds and outstanding on an annual performance.
Danielle Cobo: So that wraps up today's episode on why the annual performance review, why now is the best time to prepare for it. I also wanna share with you, I do have a free download, which is the. Career accelerator workbook, which are steps on how to build an individual development plan, how to set yourself up for success and gaining clarity on your career goals.
Danielle Cobo: Not only now, but where you wanna be three to five years from now. So if you go to my website, I'm gonna include a link in the show notes. You can download that now. And then again, next week I am sharing how to build an individual development plan. Which also goes along with your annual performance review to set you up for success and achieving your career goals and getting that high merit increase.
Danielle Cobo: Thanks for tuning in.