Ah, performance reviews! Every engineers favorite time of year... not. So many employees and managers alike fear this season. Sometimes it's the tedium, paper-pushing feeling. Sometimes it's the nauseating self-agrandizement and politicking encouraged by the process. And, often, it's the realization that you would need a hundred hours to provide really meaningful feedback to your entire team and you just don't have that kind of time.
But... how you review and compensate your people is the "sharp end" of your culture. In the end, all the words you use to describe yourselves are empty if they aren't backed up by praises & raises during a Review Cycle. There is no way to avoid having a Performance Review Process, because even if you have no process -- that is your process. Employees know that you are judging their performance against others. They know you will fire people who don't meet expectations, even if those have never been vergalized. They expect occasional increases in compensation, usually yearly, sometimes more frequently. While there is no "right way" to do performance reviews, and no "right time" to implement a process, not having a review process means you are OK with your employees being stressed out because they don't know how they are officially performing. It means you are OK rewarding the squeakiest wheel that comes complaining to you about comp, rather than your top performer who is silently shipping features left and right. Perhaps that's OK for the stage of your team/company. We would venture, though, that even a VERY lightweight process is better than no process. Find the right recipe below.
But why can't we managers do much, much better? What's preventing us from turning performance reviews into the most rewarding time of the year? If feedback is a gift then why aren't we treating it like Christmas?? Aren't we incredibly lucky to have such talented people working for us? Let's have fun celebrating their accomplishments! Aren't we incredibly lucky to be surrounded by such motivated individuals? Let's hold up a mirror to help them see what they need to grow even further! We are blessed with the opportunity to change people's lives for the better. Let's embrace this moment and give it everything we have.
There is, unfortunately, no magic process or recipe that will accomplish the above. There is only your mindset. If you eargerly away performance reviews, if you show your excitement, then you have a chance of infecting others with your enthusiasm. If you dread their arrival, if you procrastinate, then you'll play into your employee's worst fears that performance reviews here will suck, like they do everywhere else.
So before you try any of these recipes, work on yourself.
Every performance review system we've seen or heard of is made up of the parts below. Each is done differently in different places; some are skipped entirely. We'll explain the purposes of each below, and walk through specific recipes to give you a feeling of some things you could try.
Jump to #Putting It Together if you want to see some examples of end-to-end process documentation.
These are reviews written by the employee themselves. They may or may not be shared with other employees; they are always shared with the Engineering Manager + HR. They can be completely open-ended or strictly adhere to some template per process. There are several reasons why we'd recommend having self-reviews:
- Employees own their own careers, ultimately. No one else can be responsible for their growth or advancement over the years. As their manager, you should obviously help them, and you might feel completely responsible -- but you may not be their manager one day. Having them think about their performance is an important step in having them think about their career. Teach them to fish.
- Peers (and you!) may not remember everything the employee has done. Everyone is busy; having the employee document their most important accomplishments, strengths, and areas for growth will help everyone provide more relevant feedback.
You can have folks write self-reviews with no prerequisites... In fact, this might even be a good idea when taking over a team that doesn't have enough process. In the long run, however, 'naked' self-reviews that don't refer back to any goals, level expectations, or role expectations will devolve into self-aggrandisement and politicking. Try to get these ingredients in-place WAY before you try to cook up self-reviews.
- Personal Goals📄: what was this individual supposed to accomplish since the last performance review?
- Team Goals📄: what was the team supposed to accomplish since the last review? Is our employee amplifying team performance as well, or too selfishly working on their own goals?
- Level Expectations📄: what are the competencies/behaviors expected at the employee's level?
- Role Expectations📄: what are the competencies/behaviors expected in this role?
- Company Virtues/Values📄: what are the overall company values that the employee should be displaying?
I personally really value spending time reviewing my performance. I spend a lot of time on it - often 8+ hours, at least once a year. I encourage my people to also put a big chunk in, perhaps ~4 hours, and definitely not less than 2. The written review should end up at least 2 pages, sometimes 4-6 is appropriate. Most recently I've used this template which is pretty lightweight. Descriptions of the sections are below.
I also "code review" these self-review drafts before publishing them out. Most engineers are not very good at talking about their accomplishments, growth areas, and areas for improvement. By asking them questions or pointing out where they need more detail it helps them tell their own stories better. That serves them well later in their careers.
Repeat this section 3-6 times, depending on the lookback period of the self-review. I've found that roughly 6-8 weeks should translate nicely into one section.
- Project Name or Responsibility & 1-paragraph description.
- This is mostly to ensure people not super-familiar with the project know what you've been working on. It has the nice added benefit of communicating across the organization different projects that are being worked on.
- I call it 'responsibility or project' because sometimes folks have open-ended roles, like "TL", that deserve their own section.
- Your contributions to this responsibility/project.
- 1-2 paragraphs. Here I am looking for an actual story about how they contributed. Generally just bullet-points don't cut it for me because it doesn't paint the picture of why the work mattered.
- VERY IMPORTANT to have documentation: docs you wrote, pull requests, code reviews, links to metrics. No documentation is a big no-no. I'll send it back to the employee if they aren't documenting their contributions.
- Impact of your contribution to the project (small, medium, large, critical).
- This helps calibrate across employees later.
- It's also a good yellow flag if you see someone constantly claiming 'large' or 'critical' impact and you've heard from others they are not doing that much. People will usually inflate their impact a little so only look for huge inflation. Either expectations are wrong, or our employee is blind to their actual team performance. Both will require your attention.
- 1-2 ideas of what you could have done better. 1 paragraph.
- I love this question because it tends to ellicit more precise answers than the later "Areas for Improvement" section. You can also compare what they say to their peers, if you are getting peer feedback.
- This section will often help you identify employee blind spots📄. Look for patterns across projects here to determine if you need to unlock new dimensional thinking📄.
Repeat this section 2-3 times. Make sure the instructions include giving examples where this strength made a big different to their impact and/or team output.
You will mostly use this to see if their peers agree; if not, you have excellent blind spots📄 to work on.
Refer to your Level Expectations📄 and Role Expectations📄 if you can. Ideally your employees are finding strengths in the areas you need them to be strong :)
Repeat this section 1-2 times. Again, make sure the instructions include giving examples where the employee could have had more impact and/or team output, if they improved here.
I generally recommend limiting the number of "areas for improvement" because it can be demoralizing to have half a dozen things listed here. If you are able to help your employee find -- and improve -- just ONE area over the next 12 months, you're probably already doing better than 90% of managers!
Feel free to refer to the expectations again for this section. The more you do that, the more those expectations become "real" and not just a document you wrote that everyone ignores :)
I make the Virtues a required part of the self-review -- that way they have 'teeth'. Each employee must rank themselves 1-5 on each Virtue and provide a bullet point on what they need to get to the next level. If they are a 5 (you should have quite a few!) then they need to include one bullet on how they can help someone else improve -- since that's what 5s are supposed to do...
I have my self-reviews going back almost 15 years now. I'm happy to share examples of how I do this for myself if you reach out to ask.
Peer feedback, also called 360 degree feedback, is a process where peers get to give each other feedback. In this case ' peers' are usually anyone in the company other than the direct manager; it can include other teams, other departments, or even skip-level managers. This process is often run as part of the Review/Compensation cycle, but sometimes you'll see it run completely independently, to make it clearer that is feedback for growth and does not impact the employee's compensation. Use your judgement.
A peer feedback process isn't always the right thing to implement. Here's a short list of pros/cons. Feel free to add more :)
Pros:
- Helps avoid politics by limiting manager power in the review process.
- Helps team dynamics by making it clear you need to support your peers.
- Helps managers understand their employees better.
- Makes peers more involved in the growth of team mates.
Cons:
- Expensive! It takes a lot of time; imagine each peer is asked to rate 4-6 others, and it takes 2-3 hours. You could be spending almost 2 entire business days across everyone
- It can increase politics if peers tribelize and have an 'us-vs-them' attitude.
- Insensitive peer reviews can inflame tensions across a team.
- Self-review: this is optional but recommended. Share the self-reviews with everyone doing a peer review so they have a chance to refresh their memories.
- Peer choosing algorithm: there are 3 main ways of doing this, you can mix & match if you'd like.
- Let folks choose their own reviewers.
- Have managers choose the reviewers.
- Automatically choose reviewers based on code interactions, team structure, email exchanges, etc.
I used to request written feedback during peer reviews, using the script below, which basically follows the Self Review script.
1. Project Section (repeated for every project in Self Review):
1. What was impressive about the employee’s contributions to this project?
2. How could the employee have contributed even more to this project?
2. Strengths Section (repeated for every strength in Self Review):
3. Do you agree with this strength? Give examples of yes/no.
3. AFI Section (repeated for every AFI in Self Review):
4. Do you agree with this AFI? Give examples of yes/no.
4. One more thing…
5. If you could magically change one thing about your peer, what would it be?
The challenge with this recipe is that if you have ~5 reports and each has ~5 peer reviews, you need to manage 25 responses. Invariably, the responses end up being vague, or you have some questions you'd like to follow up on, or you have a pattern you noticed from a couple of reviewers and you'd like one more data point... And so you end up spending a lot of time going back to reviewers.
I use this recipe more than the one above now. Kudos go out to Joseph Unruh for teaching me how to do this.
Instead of asking for written feedback, I basically do the above but in an interview setting. 15 minutes is often enough to get 80% of the value; 30 minutes is almost always enough for any level of seniority. I take live notes during the conversation. Reviewers really appreciate not having to spend hours wordsmithing a document; they save time and I save time as well.
Follow-up questions are key here. Learning to be a good Interviewer is really important.
This is the Main Dish. You can skip pretty much every other part of a review process, but you can't skip this one. If the employee doesn't get a review from their manager then you can't call it a 'review process'.
The purpose of a Manager Review is to motivate the employee so you get higher performance from them going forward (' increase capacity to win'). That's the only purpose from the business's perspective. You might have additional reasons ( good!) but don't accidentally confuse them with this one. You should choose the review process that maximizes future ' capacity to win' (while balancing this with current 'winning', of course). That might mean, in some organizations, spending more time on certain manager reviews and less on others; or even using different recipes for different individuals. You might want to be 'fair' and treat everyone 'equally' but remember that fairness and equality are just other spectrums that you should land on wisely, depending on what your team/company needs at this point.
So how do you motivate an employee in a manager review? There are generally 3 approaches we've seen:
- Call out what they are doing well. Positive reinforcement tool!
- Create a desire for self-improvement. Carrot tool!
- Create a fear of the consequences. Stick tool!
- Self-review [optional]
- Peer-reviews [optional]
Note that if you have these ingredients, or the other ingredients earlier, and you don't use them, you'll create a ton of confusion. Your manager reviews absolutely must take any self-review, peer feedback, and standards into account. The only thing worse than spending a ton of time writing reviews is then finding out that the manager ignored that input...
This is the lightest review process we can recommend. Do this if you have serious burning business priorities preempting you and "increasing the capacity to win" is basically irrelevant.
- Choose one of the following ratings for each of your employees:
- Does Not Meet Expectations.
- Meets Expectations.
- Sometimes Exceeds Expectations.
- Exceeds Expectations.
- Strongly Exceeds Expectations.
- Shoot an email to your employee as follows:
- Subject: Your Rating For QX20XX
- Body: "Hi Jane, your rating for QX20XX is '[rating]. Let's discuss your performance in our next 1:1."
- It has to be an email. Slack is rude. Verbal-only communication does NOT count as an official rating.
- In your next 1:1, give a brief explanation why you gave them that rating, and what they can do to improve it next time. Ask if they have any questions.
Note that in this approach you are going in unprepared and with an employee who doesn't quite understand why you gave them the rating you did. The in-person conversation may be heated. The employee might quit. Or perhaps they'll shrug and say 'ok' and keep doing their thing. Use your judgement in this approach; often it's less work to do more of the prep (other recipes) then it is to go hire & train a whole new engineer.
I love the challenge of unlocking people's potential by truly understanding them at a deeper level. I'm not incredibly good at it though so I use my manager reviews as a forcing function to both contemplate this question and to experiment with different feedback techniques. That means I'll often gather a ton of 360 feedback, collate it, and add my own thoughts into documents that end up 4-8 pages in length. It's time consuming and I don't recommend that everyone do this. For me, though, it's very meaningful and I've almost never regretted doing it.
- Create a working doc for the manager review with a Strengths and an Area for Improvement sections.
- You don't know what these are yet so keep them empty. We'll be using them as a 'staging area' for our thought process.
- Read the employee's self-review. For each strength/AFI that you agree with, create a new bullet in the staging area
for it, and add supporting evidence that the employee called out. For example:
- Strengths
- Execution
- Jane Doe: "I tracked every bug in Project X and how it was doing in QA so I could update our PM on how close we were to release in daily standup."
- Python coding
- Jane Doe: "I reviewed 50 PRs in the last year, some of which were quite complex, and I left tons of useful comments. See for example and "
- Read every peer review. For every quote you find insightful, add it as supporting evidence to the appropriate
section.
- Ideally, you should start seeing 3-5 quotes (sometimes a lot more!) starting to support a strength or AFI.
- Clean up the strengths/AFIs as follows.
- Some might to too big, with too many quotes that feel disjointed. Split these into more granular groupings.
- For example, 'Execution' might have 8 quotes in it, and you notice it's really 2 categories, one around ' Releasing a high-quality product' and the other around 'Communicating clearly with product'
- Some might be too small, with only 1-2 quotes. Cut them.
- This is the hard part: pick 1-3 strengths and 1-2 AFIs. Cut the rest. Even if the feedback feels SUPER relevant.
- If you don't feel bad deleting some of the feedback, you're doing it wrong :)
- Some might to too big, with too many quotes that feel disjointed. Split these into more granular groupings.
- Now pull these out into their own sections. You will write your own manager review perspective for each strength/AFI
on top of the peer feedback.
- Your perspective should be independent of what others wrote, although obviously it's influenced by them.
- Try to pull out wisdom from the quotes. Paint the picture to the individual about why this strength is so important, or how they can grow in that AFI.
- Keep it to 1-3 paragraphs. The quotes should do most of the work once you've set up the context.
- Now finish the document with a Summary that starts the document.
- In your Summary start with their performance rating. Compare it to previous ratings, if they have any, and explain what's changed.
- Focus most of the summary about what the employee needs to do in the next year. You should be painting one or more paths for them that would increase their Winning. The more concrete you make it the more likely they will understand your feedback and what they can do about it.
- If you gave them more than one Area for Improvement, only focus on one in the Summary. I.e. what is the ONE THING, that if they improved on in the next year, would significantly make them more valuable to the company?
- The summary should be about .5 - 1 page in length. It can repeat the parts below and tie them together with more storytelling.
- Schedule a 1-hour 1:1 at least 1-2 days ahead of time with the employee called "Manager Review".
- Tell them they will get the written review one day before the meeting.
- Alternatively, you can tell them they will be getting the review at the beginning of the meeting. This sometimes works better with more junior employees, or with very hard to digest reviews.
- Send the review ahead of time if you said you would.
- In the review meeting, I like to start as follows:
- First, I reiterate the rating. "Hi Jane, thank you for meeting today. You are meeting my expectations as a Sr. SWE, and I was really impressed by XYZ. I think you can exceed my expectations in the next rating cycle if you do XYZ." Keep this short - a couple of sentences.
- Then, I like to let the employee choose where to take the conversation. I say something like: "this is your time
and I'm here to help you understand the rating and feedback you received. Do you have any questions or topics
you'd like to start with?"
- THIS IS KEY. The only way to know what feedback they've absorbed is to listen to them talk about the review. Are they pensive? Are they defensive? Are they curious? Do they seek to understand or seek to reject?
- If the employee is having a lot of trouble digesting the feedback sometimes I pause the meeting and ask them to sleep on it. This should be rare though.
- If the employee starts pushing back hard, saying "this is not true" or "I don't agree with this feedback", then you need to pull out some of the advanced techniques
That concludes the manager review. Of course, it would be a waste to put all that time into a review and then ignore it for the next 12 months, until the next Review Period. Read our other Growth recipes about how to use this Manager Review throughout the year.
- Sr. Ops Manager
- Engineering Manager
- Sr. TL/M
- Lots more examples in the firing directory...
- TODO(dmontauk): move those here and link the other way?
Calibration is the process of normalizing performance scores to avoid the Lake Wobegon effect where "all the children are above average". Calibration is really unavoidable; even it happens implicitly (managers talk to each other in private to cross-reference their people) or explicitly (you set up a process to cross-reference people). Like most things in management, being explicit has advantages -- even you explicitly tell your managers to talk privately :)
Note that the curve is up to you: perhaps you do believe most of your people are 'above average' because you hire that way. Or perhaps you subscribe to the Vitality Curve approach. If you'd like to contribute some recipes around how to decide on curves we'd love input!
You probably don't need to calibrate if you have a small team. It starts coming in handy around 10 engineers or so. You might still want to, though, because of the other benefits of calibration...
While the main purpose of calibration is indeed to ensure some amount of fairness across an organization, as managers we can use it for a much more powerful purpose: improving our own management skills. Calibration is a unique moment where managers come together to discuss their people. It's the best time to encourage a specific management culture, since you have all your managers in the room. The questions you ask, the focus you have, will reveal your hidden preferences to all YOUR managers. So think carefully about what you want to accomplish in calibration, other than just setting the curve.
TODO(dmontauk)
Kudos to Wade Chambers for this recipe. He introduced me to it at TellApart in 2015. I was part of a few calibration meetings at Google the years before and this was the first time I saw that calibration could be used to think about growth instead of just setting the curve. The magic mostly comes from three tools:
- Visual Management: The right visual representation of the entire team, on one board. It's one of those situations where the right UI completely changes the process.
- Right Question: The department leader mostly asks one question: "what can we do to move this individual into the next box?"
- First Team: managers should help each other grow every individual. Make this everyone's problem.
Ingredients:
- Level Expectations📄: these are necessary to have the team align on how different individuals are performing. Note that calibration is an excellent recipe to run if you want to improve your level expectations as well. Use the questions & debate that happen to clarify the level expectations.
- Self-reviews, Manager reviews: these are optional but should help a LOT in the discussion if you've done them.
Here is my rough recipe:
- Put together
a board like the
following.
-
- This works pretty well in a spreadsheet/remote format. In-person do basically the same thing with sticky notes.
-
- Have your managers place all of their individuals on the board before the meeting.
- Do NOT include anyone who will be in the meeting! Their performance should not be public information (unless that's your culture).
- Use colors (red/green) to show individuals who have moved down/up from the last calibration.
- Use stickers or "tags" to denote a few important characteristics to discuss:
- Rockstars: individuals that currently ' anchor' the team and who may not be looking to grow into a new role/level.
- Superstars: individuals that currently thrive on challenge and may need more such opportunities soon. I label these 'high potential'.
- Single Points of Failure (SPOF): individuals with unique knowledge that would cause business disruptions if they won the lottery.
- Schedule a meeting to discuss all the individuals.
- I won't usually schedule more than 2 hours even with a bigger team because it's good to run out of time and see that everyone wants to have another follow-up session, rather than hoist a 4-hour session on folks out-of-the-gate :)
- Budget about 15 min/person, or roughly 2.5 hours for every 10 people. Some reports will be quick, some might take 30 minutes to discuss.
- Invite all your engineering managers. Optionally, invite your Staff engineers and maybe even some Sr-level folks that you think would benefit from the conversation.
- I sometimes invite folks outside my team as well:
- At Doxel, I would invite Erik, our technical recruiter. He had a very sharp nose for management/growth and would often sharpen everyone's thinking. It's very motivating for an engineering manager to see a non-manager have better people intuition than they do ;) This also helps engineering/recruiting stay aligned on talent and future hiring needs.
- At Doxel, I would sometimes invite Reid, our Head of Product. Product is often in the dark on how engineering managers keep their teams accountable and what challenges they are facing. Inviting them to calibration is opening the kimono and can help build trust across departments. At larger organizations you can invite peers/other engineering managers for the same reason.
- Note taker: I take copious notes, shared privately with attendees.
- People are more accountable when what they say is recorded. Grab the most important information, especially any actions your managers claim they will take.
- These notes can be excellent ingredients to other recipes:
- Skip-level 1:1s: use them to connect with individuals on how they are doing.
- Information gathering: use them to uncover departamental issues.
- Future calibration sessions: refer to them before your next calibration so you are refreshed & ready to ask hard questions.
- Kick off the meeting with the right tone.
- The point of the meeting is to increase the engineering team's capacity to win. Don't forget that and don't let your team forget that. Otherwise these meetings quickly devolve into 'checking the box': lots of talking without much being said and no action items.
- That means your team needs to identify individuals that are slowing down engineering. The situation needs to be turned around -- fast -- or they need to be removed from the organization. If you don't do this you are failing as the org leader.
- It also means that your team needs to identify Leverage Points -- individuals who, with a little investment, will produce a lot more ROI. If you don't do this you aren't a very good org leader.
- Note I said your team, not you. It's your managers' responsibility to grow their people. It's your responsibility to make sure they do. Don't solve their problems for them, which brings us to...
- Facilitate the meeting using all the standard tools. Specifics that will help you here:
- Spend less time on more junior people and more time as you go down to senior people. Your managers will need a lot more help with the more senior the people get.
- Spend most of your time on low performers + top performers. Feel free to speed things up on your "meets expectation" engineers. Except...
- Spend additional time on any folks that haven't budged in a while (2-3 quarters). Spend additional time on anyone red (they've moved down instead of up).
- Explicitly ask outsiders for their perspective (standard facilitation & it matters even more here since your recruiter or Head of Product may not realize they can contribute, since they aren't part of your 'management team').
- Drive clarity in your managers' minds on how unlock their people by asking questions like:
- "So what are YOU going to do to get Jane into 'Exceeds Expectations' in the next 6 months?"
- "Remind me, what are the action items for Jane? I'll capture them in the notes."
- "Alice was not meeting expectations last time. Why is she in the same box 6 months later?"
- "You have Dakota at Meets Expectations but also HP. What challenges are you giving her next week to prove out that potential?"
- "Jack, what would you do in this situation?"
- "Based on what I'm hearing, Dakota and Jaime are doing about the same, but Jaime is ahead on this board. What am I missing?"
- "Does anyone else have thoughts on this individual before we move on? Speak now or forever hold your peace..."
- OPTIONAL: if you have your Staff or Sr eng in the room, you'll need to excuse them once you reach that level.
- OPTIONAL: if you have company virtues, do the same exercise on the virtues and not just the levels!
That's it! I wish I could share some of the notes we've generated during our calibration sessions but they are quite personal.
You should run this every ~6 months or so. I'm not particularly good at following up on the action items -- ideally, engineering managers are incentivized already to grow their people (after all, it's their own success on the line...) so babysitting them on each AI feels heavy-handed to me. Every 6 months checking-in feels about right. If I notice an engineering manager isn't following up on the AIs after 1-2 calibration sessions then that's a HUGE red flag about their motivation as an EM...
TODO(dmontauk)
This is it. The final number. The input that (in employee's heads) goes straight into their salary raise / bonus / new stock grant. If only they knew... (oh wait, they can just read this)
Actual scores may not be necessary: "meets expectations" kind of says it all. But, we are managing engineers. They want numbers. We want them to want numbers. We ask them to quantify their work. It's kind of hypocritical of us if we don't do the same, right?
The challenge with providing a number is it opens up the management process to more criticism. That could be a distraction (does it really matter that Jane got a 3.4 and Jack a 3.5?), or it could be very healthy (oh wait, every woman seems to be slightly lower than her closest-performing male colleague -- interesting...). So, like all process, what you decide to do is the culture rubber hitting the road. You should pick the right tradeoff for the business.
The easiest approach is to just have every manager assign a number. 1-5 is a good scale; 1-10 seems like too much. You can translate these into:
- The individual should already have been fired. Why are we talking about them?
- This individual is not meeting expectations. There is a chance to turn them around, but they should be gone or a 3 soon.
- This individual is meeting expectations.
- This individual sometimes exceeds expectations.
- This individual is consistently beating expectations. Usually a sign they are close to being promoted / should be at the next level.
I like to break down my performance score into a few component parts to clarify to my employees what is important to the business. Ideally, the component parts are independent so the employee is getting maximum signal on where they need to improve to drive up their overall score.
The component parts I'll use:
- Impact: this is subjective, up to the manager.
- I try to tie this as much as possible to business impact and metrics. Having impact as part of the score allows you to reward people who had huge impact due to luck, or hard work, even though they aren't doing super-sell in other dimensions. It also allows people to see that they are having low impact, even if they are great engineers, because perhaps they are working on the wrong things. That encourages individuals to select more impactful problems to solve.
- Contribution to Team: this should be decided based on team feedback.
- Helping the team is usually at-odds with Impact (increasing the capacity to win vs winning), so it needs its own score weight so people aren't too incentivized to just go be cowboys.
- Expectation at Level: this should be decided based on your level/role scorecard + calibration.
- For each expectation you should give them a score and then average them. That helps folks see where they need to improve.
- Demonstration of Company Virtues: this should be decided on your virtues scorecard + calibration.
- Don't skip this! Company values/virtues don't matter if they have no teeth. Putting them directly into the performance score gives them a huge bite.
I weight all of these equally. Theoretically, I could add different weights to different parts, but I think at that point we start losing clarity. Instead, it's better to come up with 3-5 top-level components that all matter exactly the same amount. Feel free to wordsmith or change them completely to get that property!
Usually the various recipes above are not done in isolation, and some communication/training with the entire organization about the process needs to occur. Here are some final recipes to do so.
You claim to be a "growth factory" --> prove it. You claim to reward your top performers --> prove it. You claim you don't tolerate poor performers --> but do you have the guts to give them a PIP when the whole team complains? Prove it. You claim you have a 'no assholes' rule --> so why did you give an 'exceed expectations' to your best coder that everyone hates working with? You claim to run a tight ship --> but you don't do performance reviews, because then it forces all those conversations above AND you need to explain to your top people why you aren't paying them more...
If you love geeking out about review processes...
How you review & compensate your people is the "sharp end" of your culture. Try not to be one of the 90% of L&Ms who says one thing and does another.
May or may not feed directly into comp changes ("coupled" or "decoupled" feedback).
No surprises help people grow --> don't just treat it like paperwork! Mechanical vs personal.
Public or private feedback? --> Twitter sharing my private feedback with all my peers! --> Always shared my self-review with my team, and encouraged others to do so as well. --> Sharing my previous 360s here. --> Impressed by sales QBRs where they basically need to do a "public 360"!!
- TODO(dmontauk): organize all my own performance reviews to show folks a history over a whole career.