My annual review is coming up in January, and if it is anything like my six month review, I know I’ll be asked to think about three things that I am good at and three areas for improvement. To put it bluntly, this self-evaluation is not my favorite thing to do. I always sit in front of a blank piece of paper thinking, “why don’t you ask my direct reports, or my coworkers? I feel like they’ve got better answers for you.”
Eventually, I stop feeling sorry for myself and really try to dial in and think about my performance for the year. With a background in education, I like a bit of reflection now and again, but I’m never sure if I’m tackling the task the right way. I decided to do some digging into best practices on writing a self-assessment.
As it happens, there were two common themes: Make it useful to your supervisor and put your best foot forward, honestly.
To make your review useful to your supervisor (and HR), try these tips from Amy Gallo and Huffington Post:
- Understand how the report will be used
- Knowing if the evaluation will stay internal to the office or unit or go to HR can help you figure out how to write
- other considerations:
- Align your comments to the goals of your unit; look to yearly/quarterly goals, and strategic plans for the language to use.
- If your unit has a goal, let your supervisor know how indispensable you’ve been in reaching it.
- Organize your thoughts around the goals; it will help keep you brief and focused. Plus, it’s helpful for your supervisor if the reports go up the ladder.
- Be bold and specific about your accomplishments.
- If you’ve got numbers, use them
- If you’ve got testimonials, include them
- Make a clear “ask” for professional development opportunities for yourself that would benefit your unit.
- This is a great place to make the case for your own personal development. Make it a sell; how will it help your team do more?
Now on to what we’re really worried about; how to talk about what didn’t go so well. There were three key pieces of advice that I found.
How not to shoot yourself in the foot while writing your self-evaluation:
- Use growth-focused language to describe the areas where you still need work.
- Try this: “An area I need to work on is time-management. While working on the annual fundraiser, I learned that other units work on different schedules, and moving forward, we are going to coordinate six months ahead of the event instead of three.”
- Not this: “My lack of planning caused a hiccup in our event with our partner unit.” – It might feel more honest because it’s blunt, but it isn’t a good look.
- Don’t get defensive or critical of others: focus on you
- Someone been making it difficult for you to do your job? Been there. Don’t focus on it in your written self-evaluation; if it needs to be addressed, do it in a one-on-one meeting.
- Have a paper trail if you’ll need it.
- For example, if your plan not to get defensive about so-and-so, who is making life difficult, goes sideways because your supervisor asks a bunch of questions, you might want to be able to demonstrate how you did your best to get things done. (See #2, though, and rise above! Simply talk about what you did to move things forward. Resist the temptation to complain about this person.)
When you’re writing this out, make sure to leave yourself plenty of time to look at it again and edit. Do not write your self-evaluation the night before your meeting. Once you’re done writing, freshen up on Thanks for the Feedback.
According to Aubs 