The Leaper
On my short list of professional competitive differentiators, I would list my inbox strategy. I have a zero tolerance policy for unread mails. Zero. Any mail, however big or small, which lands in my inbox, is instantly read. There is an industrial strength set of mail filters that move mailing list noise out of the way, and yes, that means I ignore a good portion of my incoming mail, but most mail addressed directly to me is consistently and expediently read.
There are other inbox strategies I employ to figure out when and how I respond, too, but I admit the combination of these strategies is not foolproof. I read mails and never respond, despite having good intentions to do so. I passively aggressively ignore mails I just don’t want to answer, and sometimes I just forget to respond. I have a carefully constructed excuse when I’m called on these mail transgressions. It’s a standard preface in all emails and phone conversations where there needs to be an acknowledgement of neglect and it’s…
“Sorry, I’ve been swamped…”
This isn’t a lie; it’s an excuse.
Now, there is a bit of pride in that I have a life where I’m scrambling. Yes, I’m proud that I’m busy. I’m a happy member of the busy club because I’ve been to the bored club meetings and, well, they’re boring.
The pride vanishes in the guilt that there was neglect. I forget to respond, I fucked up in some manner, and here I am with my standard disclaimer: “swamped”. The guilt is the emotion that lingers. I just checked my Sent box of 20,483 messages and found the word swamped 712 times… in the last year. How unoriginal and pathetic.
And then I remember the worst part. It’s pathetic because when I use the excuse that I’m swamped, I’m telling you absolutely nothing.
On Excuses
I had a boss — we’ll call him The Leaper for reasons you’ll understand in a moment. The Leaper was a bright guy, a worthy mentor, politically savvy, and generally a person who would look out for his team. The Leaper had a lot of responsibility as VP, so his management strategy was to randomly sample his teams looking for — you guessed it — places to leap.
The Leaper’s skill lay in his ability to detect bullshit. Being bright, a former engineer, and familiar with the problem space, he could tell when he was being spun. He knew when he was hearing less than the truth. Generally he was understanding when he sampled ambiguity, but there was one sure way to get him to leap: answer a question with an excuse.
The Leaper attacked excuses as a personal affront. He wouldn’t let anyone leave the room until it was painfully clear that the excuse card had been played, that it was unacceptable, and that the proper steps were taken to make sure it would never happen again.
For first time excusers, it was a painful perspective adjustment. See, when The Leaper asked a question where the answerer wasn’t comfortable answering, they did what I did when I ignored a mail — they made an excuse. It’s a knee-jerk reaction with seemingly little consequence, but that’s not what The Leaper saw. He saw the lame diffusion of blame and a weak defense.
An excuse is an abdication of responsibility. There are no healthy excuses. I’ll explain.
On Delivery
“But Rands, it’s really Antonio’s fault! He owns the deliverable, he missed the date, it’s his fuck-up.” Calm down. You’re arguing about the wrong part of the excuse.
An excuse has two parts: the content and the delivery. Your Antonio content may be spot on, but the reason The Leaper is going to leap on you is your delivery. It sounds like you’re diffusing, it sounds like you’re spinning. You’re not delivering the facts, you’re delivering emotion and weak opinion. The best data in the world is useless if your means of conveyance is suspect.
Yes, with confidence, you can deliver weak content and not trigger a leap, but this only delays the inevitable. Your chutzpah may disguise the content, but since your content is weak and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about, you’re eventually going to take the reputation hit… twice. First, when the crap content is discovered and then again when everyone realizes you were pitching your facts on false confidence.
Well done there.
The irony is thick. In order to avoid looking like you didn’t know what you were talking about, you opened your mouth and only added to the confusion. If you told The Leaper, “I don’t know, but I will know tomorrow,” he’d be cool.
Life in a big or small company is an information game where you are judged by the amount and accuracy of your information. This game becomes more complex as you leave the individual contributor role for management, but even as an individual, you are expected to be aware of your surroundings and able to describe them to others.
I know that feeling when someone in authority spends 30 seconds looking at something you’ve been working on for six months and immediately finds a painfully obvious flaw. The mental conversation starts with, “There’s no way he could…” and it finishes with “Holy crap, how could I miss that?” It’s disorientating, and when the question is asked of you: “Why didn’t you think of that?” I know where the excuse comes from. It’s alarmed spin, it’s poor marketing, it’s the uncomfortable admission of guilt.
So, what are you going to do? Clearly, there’s a reputation hit here, so what’s the right move?
My advice is to take a small amount of time to say something real. Honest, clear, and brief. Sure, these are executives and they might be pissed, but the last thing to do in that scenario is to add fuel to the fire by actively demonstrating your discomfort.
There are executives who like to see you squirm, who revel in the discovery of flaws. While they might be right, this does not give them the right to be cruel. I’m talking about that deliberate dead silence after the flaw has been exposed, and everyone sees it now and everyone is wondering, “How could we miss that?” In that moment, someone is expected to say something. This is your opportunity to say something of value.
An Opportunity to Communicate
Working for The Leaper for years, I can now sense the moment before I’m about to employ an excuse. I can feel the chain of events that are about to occur as I construct my weak redirection of responsibility. I hear what I’m about to say in my head — It’s not my fault — and then I stop.
I want you think of the very last conversation you had and I want you to think of one thing that you did not say. Maybe you were in a hurry and you blew off someone’s question. Maybe you were in a great conversation. Perhaps you were talking to your Dad. What is the topic you should have brought up? What is the small thing you could have said to make that conversation more valuable?
This is everything that crosses my mind after I stop with the excuse. I think about all the throw-away phrases I use where I could have actually said something valuable. I once wrote, “Every time you say blah blah blah, a creative writing teacher dies,” and I meant it. Each time you open your mouth, you have an opportunity to build something. That’s the perspective you want during the uncomfortable dead silence, not the victim-based emotion of excuse.
I’m in a hurry, but being in a hurry isn’t an excuse for not taking a small amount of time to say something real.
Hurry
Most interesting ideas come to me between 8am and 10am. This is sacred time. The day is young, I am rested, and the coffee is fresh. I spend most of this time in the car driving to work. The music is providing a creative, catalyzing ambiance to structure my thinking. I create two or three start-ups during the average drive to work.
And then I get to work and I google my ideas. “How about a service that adds threading to Twitter?”
Fuck.
“Wait wait wait, what we need is people feeds. An RSS-type thing that shows me the relevant events for the people I care about.”
You’re in a hurry.
Do the math. We are all staring at the same set of data. Yes, there is a lot of data and there is a very low probability that you’re able to surf it all, but here’s the rub: There’s a lot of us. In fact, there’s a shitload of us, and when you combine all of us with the equally huge amount of data, you understand that when I arrive at work and google my great ideas, I’m no longer surprised when my precisely designed drive-to-work business model is already in play.
Fuckers.
You’re in a hurry.
The epiphany I want to talk about is this: What are you waiting for? Seriously. I know you’ve got a mortgage and 1.5 kids, but during your sacred time when you discover that bright idea and subsequently discover that no established competitor exists… why aren’t you making the leap?
I know what you’re waiting for.
See, you’ve been doing the same comfortable thing I’ve been doing for twenty years. You’re obeying the structure of the organization where there are charts that describe who owns what and who owns whom. I am intimately familiar with the mindset that reads:
“We will complete our work by following the rules of mediocrity.”
Do just enough. Don’t rock the boat. Make yourself indispensable without being noticeable.
And it works. There is absolutely no way to argue that following the rules doesn’t result in a comfortable life, but…
You’re in a hurry
Maybe you’re waiting for validation. You’re waiting for that someone you respect to say, “Yes, you bright person, you should do that thing.” It was your parents when you were a kid and then it was your first boss, but now it simply needs to be you.
What you need to understand about these people that support you is that they’re not here to slow you down, they’re here to get the hell out of your way so you can be brilliant. You need to discover the moment when you actually know better than everyone around you — when you make the first move without asking permission.
Try it. You don’t need to quit your job and go build the next Twitter. Try it with something small. A thing where you’d normally preflight it with your boss, bounce the idea around the hallway a bit, and then move forward. Skip the preflight. Skip the hallway and move on your idea.
Don’t worry if someone else is already working on your idea. I’m certain they are, but they are decidedly not you and it’s the you that makes your idea unique.
Whether you’re successful or not, it’s a terrific way to get in a lot of trouble. There’s a long list of established rules and regulations that you violate with your creative impertinence, but it feels great, right?
Trusting your gut and charging forward. It can be addictive.
It’s not your only operating procedure. There are teams to communicate with and strategic corporate alignment that needs to be maintained, but then there’s you, on the subway to work, drinking a Starbucks when inspiration strikes, and rather than just soaking in that brief moment of illumination, I want you to do something about it because…
You’re in a hurry.
The Crisis and the Creative
If you polled my team about my daily agenda, they’d say, “He’s either running to meetings or in meetings.” Glancing at my calendar confirms this: 14 meetings this coming Monday - double-booked for five of them. Sweet.
Yes, I go to meetings all day, but it’s more than that. I’m also managing a constant distracting flood of interesting decisions that find me no matter where I’m sitting. When they arrive, I must make an instant prioritization call: Crisis or Creative?
A Spectrum for Everything
This will be the third system I’ve described regarding prioritization. The Taste of the Day describes how I deal with tactics, identifying and recording tasks that need to be done, as well as a system for punting tasks that are lingering aimlessly. The Trickle List goes strategic and imparts direction for my day — what are the daily investments I want to make in my people and myself?
The Crisis and the Creative is less a system and more a mental model for all of the work on my plate. It’s similar to The Taste of the Day in that it’s a lens by which I look at the health of everything I’m responsible for. The model looks like this:
As my day moves by in a rapid progression of people, tasks, and meetings, I often need to stop and make a snap decision regarding whether or not to engage in whatever is sitting in front of me. In that moment, I place this thing in the model and assess. This is what I’m thinking:
The Crisis — This is any item I’m responsible for which is in Crisis. The definition of Crisis varies on a daily basis and can mean anything from “Word on the street is the quality of this feature blows” to “The program managers say we’re going to miss our date”. Crisis means it’s not working and I need to pay constant attention. Oddly (or sadly), there’s always something in this category. More on this aspect of management in a moment.
The Creative — The title for the other side of the spectrum should be The Strategy, but I’m incapable of not using alliteration, so it’s The Creative. This is anything I’m responsible for which, by investing in or completing, means I’m growing, I built something, I took the team towards new. The Creative are my responsibilities, which take us places either because I have the experience to recognize that they will or because through pure force of will I will make them so. They rule.
These edges are the main reason I’m running to all of those double-booked meetings. Whether it’s Crisis or Creative, activities in these buckets run hot. Whether I’m making sure that someone isn’t going to quit or I’m jump-starting a brand new project at a time when no one has a free second, when I’m working the edges, it’s fast and furious. The issue is that I’m responsible for a lot more than just the work that’s running hot.
See those boring lines in the middle between Crisis and Creative? That’s an important part of the model. Items in the middle are the silent non-Crisis, non-Creative responsibilities that are my team just making it happen. It’s all very important work, but it’s work that occurs with very little investment from me because I’ve hired, manage, and work with competent people who excel at what they do. The middle isn’t responsibilities that I’ve delegated and need to check up on, this is work the team just does, and to understand how to get the work there, you need to understand the edges.
The Crisis
There are those who love the panic associated with the Crisis. They love the motivating threat of imminent disaster. This is especially true for managers because a Crisis gives them super powers. When it hits the fan, the team can be freaked to the point that they are incapable of making a decision because they don’t want to make it worse. This is why, when the manager shows up and starts making decisions, the decisions are often followed without question. The team is happy, they’re thinking, “Whew, ok, good — someone is driving us out of this mess.”
The larger question is — where’d the mess come from?
There are two standing goals when managing work that is in Crisis. Goal #1: Make sure the sky doesn’t fall. Goal #2: Figure out how to prevent future sky falling situations. It’s a balance. You can’t truly perform a post-mortem while holding the sky up, but, then again, you can’t truly remember what it’s like to hold the sky up a month after it happens.
When I’m standing in the middle of a Crisis, I’m doing two things at the same time. First, I’m frantically trying to fix the issue by any means possible. I’m also carefully looking to identify the root cause of the Crisis. This is information that vanishes in the joy of no longer being screwed once the Crisis has passed. Sure, we’ll still have a debrief once everyone’s caught their breath, but I’m going to learn more about what actually happened by asking questions at 10pm on a Saturday night after two weeks of not having a day off.
The thing I remind myself of throughout the Crisis is: if I’m responsible for resolving this Crisis, there’s a good chance I’m just as responsible for its creation. I don’t want to be grilling anyone at 10pm on Saturday. I want the Crisis to never occur again, which means being Creative.
The Creative
The panic junkie is the person who is addicted to Crisis and, in the absence of it, will manufacture drama in order to create additional Crisis. Their intent was originally good; they wanted to get stuff done quickly and discovered that the umbrella of a Crisis removed traditional organizational roadblocks. Problem is, they’ve becoming addicted to the power and momentum granted to them by driving the crisis. As soon as the current Crisis appears to have passed, they deflate, thinking, “Blah, back to the normal,” and immediately start looking for another Crisis. If they don’t find one, they create it.
I was one of these people and burned a lot of calories getting a lot done, but management by Crisis is a losing strategy. You become a corporate arsonist — burning through people and process in your apparent endless hurry, but you aren’t actually building anything.
There’s always a Crisis in progress. It’s a statistical fact that in any decent-sized group of people there is one person who needs help with some part of a Crisis. Get used to it. The question I ask myself each morning as I stare at the day’s selection of Crises is: “Am I going to play in the Crisis or the Creative?”
I’m not talking about being Creative about solving a Crisis such that it never occurs again, I’m talking about work that is purely Creative — where you’re actively improving or building a thing. It’s writing that piece of code that nobody but you wants; it’s spending two hours recruiting that guy you’re never going to get; it’s standing in the design room with a variety of dry erase markers and just filling that whiteboard with random.
I’m not talking about impossible tasks; I’m talking about Creative ones. I’m talking about inspired investments in an uncertain future. These are often hard tasks to measure, which means they are equally hard to justify to those sitting around you, but they occasionally, infrequently hit. You get the guy. You find the idea. You build something new.
Given the constant presence of Crisis and things to do, the act of choosing to devote part of your time to a purely Creative activity can be rough, but if you’re going to grow, there have got to be times where you let things go further to hell in the now because you’re choosing to invest in the Creative for the future.
That’s right. You are going to actively ignore a burning Crisis so that you can hide in the design room and doodle on a whiteboard. The panic junkies are going to be pissed. They’re going to walk by, laptops in hand, and wonder, “Why the hell isn’t he all over the Crisis? Doesn’t he know it’s, ya’know, A CRISIS?”
Yes, it’s a risky move. Yes, there are crises that can’t be ignored. Yes, if you piss off the wrong panic junkie, you’re going to hear about it — quickly — but the bigger risk is a panic-filled career reacting to disasters versus one where you’re recognized for what you’ve built versus what you’ve fixed.
A Personal Model
The Crisis and the Creative isn’t a productivity system, it’s an identification system — it’s your personal view of your world and, for me, it’s a set of reminders. First, I choose how I invest my time. Second, that a Crisis is an opportunity not only to save the day, but to make certain that future days never see this Crisis again by Creatively moving something into the predictable Middle.
And I want more Middle.
The more Middle, the happier I am because that’s more time for the edges and undiscovered opportunity always hides at the edges.
Your People
In your career as a geek, there’s a list of essential career intangibles. These are the things you need to do in order to be successful, which are also maddeningly difficult to measure. There is no direct correlation between completing these activities and a raise. It’s unlikely that accomplishing these indefinite tasks will end up in your review, but via organizational and social osmosis, you’ve learned these intangibles are essential in order to grow.
I want to talk about one: networking.
There are two types of networking. Basic networking is what you do at work. It’s a target rich environment with co-workers, your boss, and those of interest in close proximity. It’s work, but it’s easy work because your day is full of those you depend on and you’ve learned that professionally befriending these people keeps you comfortably in the know.
The other type of networking I’m going to call people networking and it’s harder work. This is when you put yourself out there. It’s attending a conference where you know no one. It’s driving to the city to sit in a coffee shop with ten strangers bonded by a programming language. It’s a leap for the socially awkward, but the infrequent reward is that you discover Your People.
I don’t have a good definition for these people, so I made a list. My hope is that as you read this list you’ll think of at least one person you know who is already Your People:
- Your connection with Your People instant and obvious; it transcends age and experience.
- The best way to discover if someone is Your People is absence. If, when they return, it’s as if they never left, they are Your People.
- There are more of them than you expect, but their number is disguised by the ebb and flow of their presence in your life.
- An investment of time with them will be repaid, but not in a way you can predict or expect. That is the point.
- Your People will piss you off because the relationship is genuine. They do not coddle and they do not spin. Consequently, Your People error-correct you in ways that others cannot.
- You may call on each other without reason, randomly. During these random visits, hours of time will vanish and neither you nor Your People will notice.
- Conversely, long silences are also acceptable and comfortable.
- Your People have a knack for showing up when you need them, even if you didn’t know you needed them prior to their arrival. I don’t know how they do this, but the more People you have, the more likely it is that this will happen.
- Your People rarely demand anything. But when either you or they make a request, neither the request nor the agreement to do it is ever in question.
- Your People keep in you in balance. Their presence reminds you first that that you’re never flying solo and, second, that there are two sides to every story.
- Your People instinctively know who you are and are able to say accurate and valuable things to you and about you with stunningly little data.
- You get mail all day from everyone, but you always stop to read mail from Your People.
- Your People will always be Your People — even if they leave and never return.
When I’m talking about Your People, I am not thinking of your best friend. Sure, your best friend might be Your People, but I’m talking about a larger population who aren’t necessarily your friends and who isn’t your family. These are a strange lot of people you’ve discovered in a motley array of places because you were searching for them.
Furthermore, I am not suggesting that those who are not Your People are somehow less valuable. In fact, the majority of the folks in your life are going to be extraordinarily more work than those who are instantly familiar. The work in bridging the gap between you and those who are harder to know is also an essential intangible skill.
Lastly, while Your People may be less work, they are harder people to have in your life. These are not people that let you sit in place, these are people who hold a mirror up to your fuck-ups, and who explain, in excruciating detail, exactly what you don’t want to hear. If they did not do these things, they would not be Your People.
You Tell Stories
All day. It’s a constant story being composed in your head. You’re doing it right now. You think you’re reading this paragraph that I’ve written, but what you’re actually doing is telling yourself the story of reading this paragraph. It’s your inner dialogue and it’s often full of shit.
I’m not saying you deliberately lie to yourself. Ok, maybe I am, but we’re all doing it. We’re all gathering data through the course of the day and creating a story based on that data, our experience, and our moods. It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon to guide the narrative in our favor. We see the world how we want. A carpenter sees all problems as a nail. I see problems as finite state machines.
As we edit our days into these stories, there is always a risk of fiction. This is why you need to identify and nurture Your People.
You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth.
Networking is the art of finding those who are willing to listen to and critique your stories, so go look at your Inbox. Better yet, go look at your Sent box. Check your phone and see who you call the most and who calls you. I’m certain that, right now, one of Your People wants to hear a story and they have one for you, too.
No Surprises
At the end of each fiscal year, companies take stock of their performance. How’d we do? Better or worse? This is a natural time to reflect upon individual performance — this is when your boss writes your review.
In my ideal management world, a review is simply a documentation of well-known facts, your performance over the year. It also contains constructive advice and insight regarding how your boss believes you can improve on that performance. My dream is that you already know all of this information because you’ve been getting year-round feedback from your boss.
I wish.
Whether your manager is consistently delivering this information or not, the feedback, written down, is completely different from receiving it verbally. The path to your brain via the written word is dramatically different than for the spoken word. Reading the highs and lows of the past year makes them permanent and makes them real.
And then there’s the surprise.
Show Me the Money
Bad news. The surprise has nothing to do with money. We’re not talking about compensation here. Yes, you did a splendid job this year and I think they should be throwing raises, bonuses, and stock your way. But it’s even better if it’s clear why you think you did a splendid job. Can you articulate it? And you might know, but does your boss? Can he explain to you, in detail, how well you kicked ass?
I didn’t think so.
See, your boss has you and a bunch of other yous who are all allegedly kicking ass, and all of that ass kickery is tricky to monitor, especially over an entire year. It gets even worse when one of your team members is not kicking ass. Legitimately or not, that’s actually where a lot of your boss’ attention is going. You read that right: someone else’s failure is distracting from your phenomenal year.
Let’s fix that.
There are three strategies I’d like you to employ when it comes to your yearly review. They are:
- Ignore the measures, focus on the content.
- Prepare for the fact a review is a discussion and, sometimes, a negotiation.
- Deconstruct the surprise.
Measures versus Content
I’ve experienced a lot of different review formats at different companies, but let’s boil it down to three buckets. A review describes:
- What you did.
- How you did it.
- What you need to do next.
This is a massive simplification of your review. Your review has all sorts of other corporate and division focus areas, but these impressive sounding labels are still just lenses through which you understand how you did versus what was expected.
For each of the buckets, there are two classes of information: the content and the measure. I want to explain how you can save yourself a lot of sleepless nights ignoring the measures, but first, a definition.
Sprinkled across your review are measures. These are words like “Needs Improvement”, “Satisfactory”, or “Excellent”. These words grab you because they’re easy to understand. They are effectively your grades, and you’ve spent a lot of your formative years waiting for grades to show up.
If I told you that you got an A on a piece of work, you’d internally translate that letter into a pleasant, “I did about as well as I could. Go me.” Grades - measures - are efficient, they do convey information, but they lack essential content. I’ll explain via example.
When I arrived at University of California, Santa Cruz in the 90s, they had no grades. Hippies. At the end of the quarter, you received a written evaluation. For each student in the class, the professor or the teaching assistant would produce a written evaluation — a plain English description of the type and quality of the work produced over the semester.
I don’t know who came up with the idea of ditching grades, but my hope was that they wanted to ditch the measures. The intent of measures are not to derive useful information, they are designed to allow for comparison and, duh, measurement. Am I higher or lower than you? How many As? Are there more As than Bs? It’s interesting data and I’m sure if you took a classroom full of data and plotted it on a graph, you’d learn something. Look! A bell curve!
A measure doesn’t help you in your career. Your performance review isn’t about comparisons to others. They’re about what you did and what you could do. What you’re looking for is the content.
Tell me which is more useful:
“You did well.”
-or-
“You finished the work on schedule, the customer was happy with the results, but there were lingering quality issues with the code. Looking at the last two releases, you had 2x the numbers of bugs than in prior releases. Focus on…”
We get hung up on grades, on measures, because they are so gosh darned digestible. They give us the illusion that they show us where we fit, but they don’t tell us what next?
At UCSC, the point of the gradeless report card was to create a vacuum where the professor would actually say something useful. You’re not going to get rid of measures — they serve a distinct purpose — but when you’re first reading your review, I want you to ignore those seductive one-word assessments of your entire year. Their simplicity, while comprehensible, is just going to obscure the complexity of your year.
Rather, look at the content behind the measures. Whatever your particular areas of focus are, does your boss do an effective job of explaining what you did, how you did, and what you could do better? It’s a simple set of requirements, but your boss is going to mess it up, which is why you need to be clear that…
A Review is a Conversation
The written word is intimidating. An assessment of a year is a big deal, so what are you going to do when you sit down with your boss and he hands you three poorly crafted paragraphs littered with the word “significant”?
No, you don’t ask about the raise. You freak out about the paragraphs. THREE PARAGRAPHS? I’VE WRITTEN MORE IN EMAIL THIS MORNING THAN YOU JUST WASTED ON MY YEAR.
Calm yourself.
Think of this pathetic piece of paper as an opening offer — a poor offer. Your job is to transform this travesty into an accurate reflection of your year and you’re not doing this just out of a sense of self-righteousness, you’re doing to set the set the record straight.
This piece of paper is one of the only official documents of your career at this company. If you move, if your boss leaves, if there’s a reorg, this is often the first document reviewed to understand the degree of your asskickery and that means you want your boss to comprehend it.
“But Rands, I was just… so pissed. Three paragraphs? I spent my entire winter on the project. I was FURIOUS.”
Again, your review will contain surprises, and they will rattle you, which is why you prepare with a self review.
Whether your company asks for it or not, the moment the mail from HR alerts you to the review season, you start cobbling together your self review. Same buckets as above. My move is to keep a yearlong log of significant work as a task in whatever task tracking system I’m currently ignoring. Even if you haven’t been paying consistent attention, you’ll be surprised by what you can dig up in a weekend of considering your year.
Take a look at your year. How’d you do? No, really, I’m not actually reading it so you can have an honest opinion. Was it a great year or did you just think it was great? Yes, your boss’ opinion about your year is key, he does sign the checks, but it’s a key surprise reducing technique to walk into the review with an opinion. This moment of personal honesty you’re having with yourself is a big deal because that’s the foundation you’re going to stand on when the three pathetic paragraphs show up. Having a justifiable opinion regarding your year is a powerful, defensible position.
While it’s important to send the self review long before your boss writes his review, it’s more important that you have this opinion, this well-defined opinion, when sitting down to read your boss’ review. Does it document what you did? Everything? Does the description of what you did match your perception? No? Why? Don’t tell me, tell your boss, and make sure he gets it because it’s these types of historical perception mismatches that form an unhealthy basis for emerging misunderstanding and resentment.
The point of a review is the debate — to align your perceptions with those of the person who signs the checks, but even with all this structured healthy debate, there’s still going to be a…
Surprise!
I don’t know what the surprise is. It’s your review. Some of the doozies over the years from mine include:
- The total absence of recognition for a multi-month multi-team project that kicked ass.
- A reversal of opinion regarding a piece of work I’d done, usually towards the negative.
- Completely contradictory areas of improvement.
Unfortunately, the surprise is the point. A review not only forces the alignment discussion, it serves as a warning for the coming year: What do I need to do differently to avoid being blindsided when the next review arrives?
Fact is, you’re never fully going to get your boss on-board with your year. There are opinions he has which aren’t going to change, which means if you don’t want another surprise next year, you have to change.
A review’s value lies not only in the documentation of what was observed, but also what was not.
The Permanence of the Written
In many years of reviews, the only consistency I’ve noticed is that they’re getting shorter. My unsubstantiated paranoia is that lawyers apply subtle corporate pressure to retain less descriptive documentation of what actually happened in the company. But perhaps it’s just a growing professional laziness.
Whatever the reason, a brief review is just sad. If you’re staring at three useless paragraphs, you have a couple of problems. You’ve got a company that allows crappy reviews and you’ve got a boss who is unable or unwilling to articulate either the quantity or quality of work you’ve done.
That’s all sorts of screwed, but it’s only complete breakdown only occurs when you don’t react.
The first review I wrote was awful. It was three paragraphs derived from scanning status reports from the past six months. I sat in the room as she read the review and she didn’t have to say a thing for me to understand that I’d be spending the weekend actually writing the review. I got an accusing, furious glare. You didn’t even try.
So I did.
