You’re a manager, and it’s review season again. You need to find time to write reviews for ten reports, a handful of peer reviews, and one for yourself on top of your normal responsibilities. You push through because you know that mishandled promotion cases, generic performance advice, or lackluster career conversations can result in your team feeling undervalued – which may ultimately drive them to seek opportunities elsewhere.

It is really difficult to write a good review for someone (including yourself) if you’re writing from memory. You’re inevitably going to forget important accomplishments and are likely going to experience recency bias.

You can avoid much of this pain by encouraging your team to keep track of their progress and collect evidence throughout the year. This will help you avoid common performance review pitfalls and gain alignment with your reports. 

Dispelling misconceptions

A lot of employees, especially those early in their careers, do not have a good understanding of performance and promotion cycles. To them, it might seem something like this:

Reports may think it is enough to just do the work, and that their manager will plan their career and make sure they get promoted when they’re ready. This may work out okay for new grad engineers where things are more formulaic, but that will quickly break down as they get more senior.

This diagram is a more realistic portrayal of events:

Including reports early on in these processes sets them up for success throughout their career.

Your role as a manager

It’s your job to bridge the gap between the two diagrams in the previous section. It’s helpful to zoom out and start by explaining how career ladders, calibration, and promotions function at your company. Calibration ratings and promotions should be based on your company’s ladder – making it imperative that your team understands the expectations of someone at their level and the next level.

Before each review cycle, spend time reminding your team how everything works, and highlight notable changes from previous iterations. Spend additional time with newer employees, even if they’re senior in their careers, to describe your expectations and to break down how things work since they can differ between companies. 

If you’re a manager who doesn’t know how these processes work at your company: 

• Ask your manager about them in your next 1:1
• Read internal docs
• Reach out to your HR Business Partner (HRBP)

These are core managerial concepts, and knowing how they work well before these processes happen is incredibly important for you and your team.

Once your team understands calibrations and the impact on their career and compensation, transition to talking about how to make calibration a success. It is a combined effort to make you successful during calibration, since you are the one representing their work.

Don’t recall, record

Writing down your accomplishments and tracking your work is not something most people relish. It can be boring, tedious, and it is one more thing people need to remember to do. Because of this, clearly articulating the benefits of documenting and tracking work to your team can help you motivate them. 

Planning docs, project and team retrospectives, and metrics dashboards help develop robust software, but are also great artifacts to reference when career conversations or reviews take place. The good news is that a lot of these materials are often already produced when the projects are taking place.

These practices also help make your team’s work visible since planning docs and metrics dashboards are often shared with people outside of your team. It isn’t enough to “just do the work.” Others at the company need to know they did the work. You should draw an explicit connection between this concept and calibrations when you’re explaining the importance of making their work visible.

You can also remind your team that you won’t always be there to help them with this type of work. Being able to independently prepare for performance reviews will help insulate them from bad managers or changes in managers, and will improve their self-reflections, accelerating their growth. 

Teaching your team to continually plan for performance

Similarly to how good planning can contribute to the success of a project, there are steps you and your team can take throughout the year to make your career conversations more impactful, and performance reviews more accurate.

I encourage everyone on my team to write down weekly notes about themselves and the people they work closely with.

Project artifacts, weekly notes, and other accomplishments should be organized to create an individual’s hype list. Hype lists are incredibly useful when having ladder-based career conversations, which feed into self and manager reviews.

Making a hype list

A hype list tracks your accomplishments. This could include being someone’s mentor, features they’ve built, a blog they wrote, or anything else significant. The hype list should be shared between an employee and their manager.

Format

I use a spreadsheet with four columns: month, what, impact, and notes. Each year gets its own tab.

• What: a project’s name or a brief summary.
• Impact: how did the work affect customers/their team/the company/etc? The impact section is a great place to include metrics. “Built feature x, used by 10% of our customers,” stands out a lot more than “built feature x.”
• Notes: reference supporting information such as design docs, retro docs, links to dashboards, and any other information you think is important.

Hype lists aren’t just for individual contributors; managers need to track their accomplishments as well. Make one for yourself if you don’t have one.

Hype lists are low effort if you add things a few times a month, and aren’t just useful for career conversations. They can also be used to update your LinkedIn or résumé, and are helpful if you change managers.

Ladder-based career conversations

There are many different kinds of career conversations that serve different purposes. Ladder-based conversations map past achievements to categories in your company’s career ladder. They are a great way to familiarize folks with their career ladder and track progress against their current and future level.

If your company has career ladders, hopefully, they are actively referenced during reviews and calibration. If this isn’t the case, or your company doesn’t have career ladders, consider taking this on as a project. This could be a great item for your own manager hype list!

I recommend having a ladder-based career conversation with your reports leading up to review season. This should get you on the same page about ratings and promotion readiness, and it should make self-reviews and downward reviews a lot easier.

You can have these conversations more frequently, especially with folks who are earlier in their career. I also recommend going through this exercise before someone from your team switches teams within the company. Providing an up-to-date career document to their new manager will help keep their career progress on track and is a great way to onboard their new manager to their past projects.

Reaping the rewards

If your team has been doing great work throughout the year and tracking their progress, and you’ve had a recent ladder-based career conversation, writing self-reviews should be much less stressful and take less time in your next performance review. The dreaded “what are your areas of improvement” question should be easily defeated by looking at past notes and project retros. 

Better self-reviews and peer reviews should make your job as a manager less challenging as well. 

Tips for managers during calibration

Your delivery of your team’s accomplishments during calibration can have an outsized impact on ratings and promotions – it is critical for your team’s careers that you master this process. Public speaking can be scary, but you must manage that fear so you can advocate for your employees effectively. 

You and your team have spent the last six to twelve months tracking their work in preparation for calibration. Here are some tips to help you represent them well during calibration.

Create a cheat sheet per employee

The content you present and the questions you get asked during calibration are fairly predictable. Having prepared answers for common inquiries allows you to respond quickly and confidently and helps prevent you from stumbling over your answers.

Here’s what I include in my cheat sheets:

• Short descriptions of projects with metrics.
• Prepare some answers: list 2-3 questions you think might crop up and prepare your response ahead of time.
• Patterns of success spanning multiple review periods: the focus should be on this review period, but briefly referencing projects from previous quarters is helpful.
• How concerns from the last calibration have been addressed.
• If they’re up for promotion, share examples of how they’re operating at the next level.

Talk to other managers before calibration

Start by pre-calibrating with your manager. They should have context about what your team has been working on, and can pressure test your team’s ratings. If you don’t do this, your manager might question your ratings live during calibration, which won’t instill confidence in your peers.

If there are other managers who have worked closely with someone from your team, reach out to them before calibration. Ask if they will vocally support your employee. You can also use this time to preemptively address potential concerns they might have.

Closing thoughts

Career conversations and performance reviews are time-consuming and can require a lot of emotional energy, but they are core competencies for a manager. I encourage you to view them as an opportunity rather than an obligation. You can have a positive impact on people’s careers by building these skills and making sure they’re rewarded for their contributions.