pocaro on reviews
I was looking at my list of links, rather than my feed subscriptions, and realized I hadn't read John Pocaro in a long time. He makes some great points about how to approach a performance review.
Here are the surprises for me:
"Take time to reflect." This is very hard, often because for me, too much thinking and not enough closure is weighing on me very hard at review time. It must take someone super-evolved to be able to close the door and say the world can wait. I'm suprised it seems to work.
"Don't worry too much about missing an agreed-upon deadline." Of course the person reading your review will already know if the deadline, um, moved for some reason. However, I've also believed that this too is a metric. Perhaps it's naive, but I think it adds to your credibility to keep track of these things with the same level of strictness that you tried to keep the deadline in the first place.
"Sometimes mistakes can be the best thing." This is an unbelievable story by John about a nice nice manager. Did I mention nice? Yes, there are nice people in software. Just beware they get real scarce sometimes around review time. Did I say that? There are so many nice people.
"Realize that half the equation is perception." Wow, finally the key to the missing link between the scores and the performance. On paper, it all seems so rational, with everything on metrics and all. Apparently the whole thing is skewed, so it's OK to lighten up.
"Ask your manager to edit some of their negative comments." Can't second this one enough. Thanks to John to being bold enough to say so.