Transcript- Preparing for Your Annual Review by Holly Burton

Preparing for Your Annual Review – Transcript

by Sophie Odgers

(Edited for length and clarity)

Intro

A lot of you might think the way that to prepare for this is by dreading my future and not thinking too hard about it because it's going to be a frustrating experience. And that's because for a lot of us, annual reviews really feel like torture.

I know that was the case for me for many, many years, where performance reviews most of the time were more like personality reviews. They weren't so much about what I was doing at work, but about who I was and how I conducted myself, and the way that I communicated. For a lot of us feedback can be really gendered and if it's not really gendered, can be incomplete and not that helpful. And so the whole thing can add up to be a frustrating experience, or worse, kind of a useless experience that doesn't go anywhere that we dread and our manager dreads. I'm hoping, like I said before, that by the end of this talk, you'll be really looking forward to it and feeling like it's one of the best things you get to do all year with your manager.

Why Performance Reviews Matter

Here's why I think performance reviews are so amazing and why this really matters to you. And, yes, I'm saying that even as somebody who's been told in a performance review by a boss that I need a whole new personality. Here's why this matters and here's why even if that's the feedback you're getting, you should really pay attention.

First of all, performance reviews are a tool that help you advance by helping you really understand exactly what the skills are that you need to get to the next level. Whenever reviews are done well, you'll get information from your boss that helps you understand the gaps between where you are and where you want to go, and exactly how you need to close them.
That's really an amazing benefit because there's no other time throughout the year that you have a structured meeting set in place to make sure that you're getting that information.

It's really to your advantage that this structure exists, because then you can use it to create a great conversation. As well, you get to improve communication with your supervisor. Most managers don't get any training on how to do the managing at all and certainly, a lot of them struggle with performance reviews, too. So going into your performance review, feeling like it can be an amazing exercise for your career, can really help you hone your communication to your supervisor so they understand what value you provide, but also help you help them hone their communication to you so that their feedback is more useful. And finally, the other thing that's amazing about performance reviews is that it helps you be in charge of the direction of your career.

A lot of times, reviews feel kind of like job interviews in the sense that the other person's totally in control of what's about to be said and what the verdict will be, but actually it's a two way conversation where you are telling your supervisor what you want and where you'd like to go, and what amazing things you did all year, as opposed to just them evaluating how you've done. This is an amazing tool for you to influence the direction that your career goes in a specific company and the other amazing thing is they help you set up your salary negotiation. You get to tell your boss about all the successes that you had. This is the thing that's a tough thing for most women, not necessarily because they struggle to talk about themselves necessarily, but because society is not really set up to expect us to talk about ourselves.

Women tend to get penalized when we brag, or even when we just plainly state our accomplishments. So, the nice thing about a performance review is that it's a time where that is explicitly expected; that is the point of the meeting and so you're less likely to be perceived as kind of like braggy or stepping out of line when that's the whole reason you're there.

It also gives you a lot of control over the narrative of how your skills are perceived. So rather than your boss deciding what it is that you do that's valuable, you get to tell the story yourself of how your skills can be valued. I've got a good example of that so you can see the power of you being able to control the narrative of what things you've done.

Example: How to Have an Amazing Performance Review

Okay, so now I hope you're feeling a little bit more excited about performance reviews. I know I am! I want to share with you one of my favourite #WIMDIwins from a few years ago from somebody who attended this workshop. Now, this was a WIMDI member who had a performance review coming up and she showed up to this talk, took copious notes, learned everything that she needed to, and then went into her conversation with her boss a few days later with a whole new tool chest and really tried to advocate for getting a better raise than she thought she was going to get. Her goal going into that conversation was to get a 10% raise and here's what happened:

She was feeling, going into the conversation, that she wasn't going to get the raise that she wanted, that 10%. At the beginning of the review, though, her manager actually offered her 7%, which was really good. She was really excited about it. Then she used all the tools that she learned and at the end of the conversation, she walked away with three times that 7% amount, i.e., 21% raise. It was amazing. She was actually only going for 10, but she ended up basically doubling her goal because she was able to correctly explain to her boss all the value that she had been delivering and then ask him to compensate her, commensurate with what she had been doing.

So hopefully you will have some amazing similar results and share them with us, because there's nothing that warms my heart more than hearing what Anne did a couple years ago.

#1 Before Your Performance Review

Amazing. Okay, so let's talk about how you do it. Step one happens one to two months before your review. Hopefully you're there. If not, you can still get this done in time, but a few months before you're going into your performance review, you need to focus on just getting all the work done that you're supposed to do. So what I mean by that is look back at last year's performance review, take a look at all the metrics that you were supposed to hit, the goals that you had, all the professional development that you were supposed to do, and make sure that you're actually doing it. You want to be able to go into your review with an amazing list of wins that you've done. Go in saying, "Yes, I've done everything that you wanted and more." You want to start a few months ahead, so you still have time to close any gaps that you find.

Take a look back at what you're supposed to have done, analyze those gaps, and then make a plan to close them before your review; the big takeaway here is that if you want to have a great review, you've got to be doing good work. Obviously, we all know there's a few people who somehow manage to get all the praise in the world for doing kind of mediocre work, or maybe not very much work at all, but in general, if we want to move up, if we want our bosses to be impressed with the work that we're doing, we've got to get the work done.

#2 Identify & Frame Your Wins

Make sure that you start a couple months ahead of time, or heck, even a few quarters ahead of time and make sure that you are meeting all the goals that you set out to meet at last year's review. Then, once you've done that, I want you to identify and frame your wins so they're as appealing as possible to your manager. What I mean by that is start by looking at, okay, so what did I achieve in the last year? What were all the amazing accomplishments that I had and what's noteworthy? Now, this might be something that you struggle to do on your own. I know that's the case for most of us, that we kind of under underestimate our own achievements and overestimate our own failures.

It might help you to get a colleague, or a friend, or a loved one, or maybe like a work bestie or something like that to help us remember all the amazing things that we did. Make a big long list of all the things that you achieved in the last year and then I want you to frame those accomplishments in a way that will catch your boss' eye.

The trick that I like to use for this, and if you've attended WIMDI events before, I'm sure you've heard me talk about this, is my good friend, the business alien. The business alien is kind of a construct that I use as a shortcut to understand what matters in business. The business alien is this adorable little alien who comes to Earth to learn about human beings and because he's new to Earth, he doesn't understand anything about what we do; he's totally confused. But human beings spend a lot of time doing this weird business thing; we spend eight hours a day – a third of our days—we spend on this working thing, so he really wants to understand it.

And to make his life easier, we tell him that work, or business, is basically all about three things. At the end of the day, it boils down to: number one, things that will help us make more money, number two, things that will help us spend less money, and number three, things that will reduce the risk of us making more money or spending less money. And that's it. No matter what we're doing, if it's work related, it probably ties back to one of those three things, because that's the main point of business.

What I want you to do when you're looking at your list of achievement from the last year is go, "Okay, so this achievement, would the business alien understand why I'm doing this for business?" Does it make sense or not? You might say to the business alien, "Hey, I printed some reports," and he'd go, "Okay, do reports make us money?" No. "Do they reduce costs?" No. "Do they reduce risk?" No. "Why are you doing this?" He wouldn't understand, right? And you'd have to explain to him what it was about those reports that matter to the business. So maybe you produce reports that allow you to finally control the amount of reagent going on in your chemical processing plant so that you don't use more reagents than you need to, therefore spending less money on chemicals.

Now, the business alien will go, "Oh, I totally get it. This is about reducing cost, so I get why the reports matter." It's essential for you to get down to the basics of why the work that you do has an impact on things the business cares about, because otherwise they just come across as nice-to-haves. Printing reports is one thing, and printing reports that allow us to minimize cost of reagents is another; frame all of your accomplishments in terms that that business alien would understand.

One more thing you can think about is just how did you make your boss' life better? What did you do that made it so that they didn't have to work as late? What did you do that made it so they weren't so stressed out? What did you do that made it so that the whole department finished projects on time? What did you do that made them look good to their boss? It's always an amazing thing to be somebody who's helping your boss rather than hindering your boss. When you think through your achievements in the last year, think about ways that you concretely affected your boss's life in a positive way and include those as well.

Example: The Power of Framing Your Wins

Here's an excellent scenario to explain the power of how framing your wins and your accomplishments for a year is really, really powerful:

This is my friend, Sabrina. I worked with her a couple years ago at a mine and she is a mining engineer, just like me, and she is super amazing. Let's imagine that Sabrina is looking for a raise and let's say she's looking for a 10% raise. She was an engineer in training when I knew her, so let's imagine she makes 60k a year.

All right, so here's what Sabrina did over the last year: she looked at a bunch of nerdy stats about how long it took trucks to back up and how long it took us to load them and all this weird mining stuff. She printed out daily reports, our favorite tasks that we talked about earlier, and she also got a bunch of old maps into the computer so we could see them there. So if this is what Sabrina did, how much would you give her as a raise? What do we think is an appropriate amount of a raise, given that those are her tasks? Not a ton, right? I wrote this presentation and I barely remember what Sabrina did, it's just not that exciting. None of these are really headline grabbing pieces of information and she's probably looking at a modest raise, if anything.
Okay, what if I instead framed her accomplishments differently and I told you that actually what Sabrina did, is she improved production at the mine by 15%, which, on a mine site, is literally millions of dollars. She also standardized reporting. So not just printed the daily reports, but she made it so that every single day, when they printed them, the numbers were always correct, which hadn't been the case before she came along.

It's important, by the way, to have correct reports, because otherwise something terrible happens. You send them up to corporate every single day, and eventually those numbers, which are inconsistent, get reported to shareholders and then you have a liability problem, because nobody really likes it when you lie to your shareholders. Yikes, right?

Standardizing those reports, is essential to the business because it means that nobody goes to jail for fraud or anything like that. And then finally, not just putting old maps in the computer, Sabrina actually made the mine safer because those maps that she was putting in the computer were actually maps of where old underground mining locations used to be, i.e., giant holes in the ground, and it's really important to know where those are when you're mining, because otherwise you can end up with a giant haul truck, the size of a house, carrying a bunch of rocks in it, driving over, effectively, a giant hole in the ground without realizing it, falling in, and somebody dying.

When Sabrina uploaded these old maps into the computer, that allowed us to make sure that they were out there and visible on all of the truck driver and all the equipment operators' screens out in the mine, so that nothing unsafe happened. So actually, these were three really big things. If you've worked in mining, you would understand that this is the mining trifecta: help me improve production, help me make shareholders happy, and help me make sure nobody dies.

Looking at this list now, how much of a raise would we give Sabrina? This woman, by the way, 15% production increase, literally millions of dollars. How much would we give her? The point is, I don't know how much of a raise we'd give Sabrina, but I know it's a ton of money. I know that she has got actually a lot of leverage to go in and ask for a really good increase in her compensation because she's done things that the business alien cared about, and she's framed her accomplishments so that that's clear.

What a tragedy it would be, if Sabrina, with all these amazing accomplishments, went in and said to her boss, like, "Yeah, I printed some reports. I put some maps in the computer." Like, oh, I'd die. So, if you take nothing else away from tonight's presentation, don't say that you printed maps, or printed reports and put things in the computer, talk about how nobody died, and talk about how you made sure that you weren't accidentally committing fraud to your shareholders and then ending up in jail, right? It's essential that you frame your accomplishments in terms that people care about.

#3 Set Goals for Your Career

You need to be really strategic in how you talk about your work; people are listening all the time and it matters for how you're perceived and how people evaluate your chances for moving up the chain and for getting higher raises.

Once you have taken a look at what you were supposed to have done and what amazing things you did do, it's time to look forward and set your goals for the rest of your career. We're going to start with the simple question of "Where do you want to be in the next five years, two year, one year, six months?" Take a look at a whole bunch of different timeframes, but it's important for you to think about what's next for you. There's a really important distinction that I want you to understand; I want you to set your goals to be what you're actually interested in having, not what you think you can achieve.

I see all the time with my coaching clients that they do this thing where if you say, "Hey, what do you want? What's next for you? What's your next goal?" What they do is they look at all the things that they think are possible, and then of those options, they pick their favorite one, which is very different than choosing the thing that they actually want.

If I have to pick my dinner from what's in my fridge tonight, I guess I'm having cauliflower. But if you ask me what I'd like to eat for dinner tonight, the answer would not be cauliflower; the answer would be pizza, or bubble tea, or all kinds of yummy treats, right? And so it's really essential that when you're setting your goals, that you're not setting them according to what you think is possible. You're setting them according to what you want, and then later figuring out how to make them possible. Because when we decide ahead of time what's impossible and then set our goals according to that, we leave a whole bunch off the table. We make it so that the other thing that we actually wanted is definitely not possible.

Think hard about where you want to go, not just what you think you can do and then once you've identified that, think about what's important to you about that goal. The reason I want you to do this is because a lot of times when people set goals, they aren't really the thing they want, they're a way to get the thing they want.

A good example of this is what I call NASA goals; imagine somebody comes to me as a client and says, "Hey, Coach Holly, I really want to go work for NASA. That's my big goal." And I say, okay. What's important for you about working for NASA? And after lots and lots of conversation, I come to understand that it's not so much that they want to work for NASA, it's not that they're obsessed with the space agency's history, or that they really like living in Florida, or something about NASA in particular. The reason they want to work for NASA is because they really want to go and see what the Earth looks like from Mars; they want to see the view of Earth from Mars and they have decided, quite reasonably, that the best way for them to be able to go up to Mars and look down at the Earth and go, "God, it's just so beautiful from up here," is if they work for NASA and become an astronaut. Makes a ton of sense, right?
They say, "My goal is to work for NASA." But the problem about that is that it's really limiting. It would be hard for me, as a Canadian, to work for NASA. I would have to: one, become an American citizen, two, graduate from the right school with probably the right kind of degree. I would have to be in a certain physical condition and millions of people apply to be astronauts every time a slot opens up, and I would have to be the one person who's picked to do that.

It's a really narrow target for me to hit if that's the thing that I want, (to be able to see the view from Mars). But, if I take my goal away from working for NASA and make my goal what it really is - see what the earth looks like for Mars - suddenly there's all kinds of other ways for me to achieve that goal.

I could, for example, date Elon Musk, convince him to let me go up to Mars when he one day terraforms it like a weirdo. Okay, I could do that, or I could wait until the next Mars Rover goes up and watch a live feed. I could, if I lived in the 1800s, draw a picture of what I imagine it looks like and maybe that's actually more fun than seeing it for real.

When we're explicit about what the real goal is, we actually open up more avenues for us to meet it. So, I want you to be clear on whether the goal that you've set here is a NASA goal or a Mars goal and I want you to aim towards the Mars goal side, i.e., the most essential piece of the goal, not just the how you think you can get it part.

Once you've finally identified what the goal is and what you're looking to do, then I want you to look at what skills you'll need to meet that goal. We talked earlier about looking at the live feed from the Mars Rover. I need an internet connection and I need to know the address of the Mars Rover - easy - skills I have and could therefore do it.

If I want to date Elon Musk and get him to send me up to Mars, I have to wait for him to split up with Grimes. Done, sold, finished. I have to…lower my standards and then date somebody who loves to manipulate the stock market with ridiculous jokes about 420; that's all that's required there. So, whatever the skills are that are required for you to meet that goal, make a list of them so that you know what you're signing up for. Incidentally, please, nobody date Elon Musk. What a monster. Why am I choosing this as my example?

As you're setting your goals, I really want you to be ambitious. I want you to think about the things that you really want and not just the ones that you want, but actually the Mars version of the NASA version of what you want, and then figure out how you need to get there.

#4 Evaluate the Gaps & How to Close Them

That brings us to step number four, which is evaluate the gaps; figure out what's missing; what's in the way? Firstly, evaluate yourself against all the skills and the traits that you identified before, to get you where you want to be in five years, two years, one year, heck, even your current job if you're not already meeting all the requirements for it. Then, I need you to narrow that list down to just the gaps that are important, but you do not need to close every single gap. This is a huge challenge that I see with the women that I work with, but it's also a huge barrier that you will likely all face in trying to get promoted. Women are often held to higher standards than men are, where we have to kind of tick off 110% of the items on the list before we're considered ready to do the job.

It's a famous conundrum where men are evaluated based on potential and women are evaluated based on past experience; so, to get the job, you have to have basically already done it. Because that construct exists out in the world, women then tend to self-adapt to require of themselves that they meet that entire long list, whether or not the other side does.

What ends up happening is that when the other side requires them to hit 110%, then they don't get promoted, or when the other side is more lenient and has more reasonable expectations, they still require 110%, so they get held back.

I want to make sure that this situation here is not happening to you, that you're able to, A, not get in your own way and have reasonable expectations about how prepared you need to be for the next role, but even if the situation is reversed where your boss' expectations are sky high and you've actually done the thing you need to do to be ready to move up, that you are able to talk to them about those standards and help them come on down to a reasonable level.

#5 Figure Out Your Needs with Development Plans

It's essential that you evaluate which gaps are important to close and the important ones to close are the ones that you'd need to get done, to be functional in the role -- not so that you could be amazing in the role, not so that you could win a gold medal for your performance at that role, but just so that you could do the role well.

Obviously, if you don't have those skills, that's a challenge, but as long as you can be functional in the role, then I'd say those are the gaps that you need to close.

When you're doing this evaluation, I want you to be honest and when I say honest, I don't mean the way that it probably sounds, which is, don't overrate yourself. I mean it the opposite; don't underrate yourself. Be honest about where you sit in relation to these goals, with these skills that you need to have to get to your goal. Evaluate yourself so that you hit only the ones you need and you don't spend time ticking things off of a list that you probably shouldn't have to tick off.

Once you know what skills gaps you have and need to close, then you need to figure out what you need to do to close them; you might need training to close them; you might need a specific project that you take on so you get a chance to practice that skill, or you might just need time.

You might need to practice the skills over and over in a regular everyday context to get good at them. A lot of us think that what we need most is training or mentoring, but actually, I would say an underrated or under-asked-for thing is this idea of taking on a special project. A specific role that requires us to exercise a skill that we're trying to develop is a good thing to ask for.

Think about the different ways that you might close those skill gaps. Think about when you need to close them so that you meet your timeline, and what support you need from your employer to do so. Some of these things you might be able to close on your own and training is a good example of that. You might have training that your boss will provide to you, but you might have training that you can go out and get yourself. Or, if there is a particular project that you need to get experience doing, rather than getting that experience directly at work, go do it in a volunteer capacity elsewhere, take it on as a side desk project, even if there's no kind of official spot for you to be doing it at work.

Think hard about what support you absolutely need from your employer and what support you can provide on your own. And when you're looking at this, I want you to be greedy. Don't be afraid to ask for what you need. I know that happens to a lot of us where we get a little bit psyched out of asking for too much or being too much, or being too demanding. We're all a little bit worried about being all those things and so we tend to reduce our list.

Instead of asking for the five things we need, we half ask for the one thing that we think we can get away with. Be really greedy in what you're asking for, because if these are resources you need, people aren't going to read your mind and deliver them to you without you actually asking for them.

#6 Frame Your Needs by Creating a Business Case

So, we’re going to frame these needs in terms of the business alien. For every item that you need employer support for, create the business motivation for them to say yes. You want to think about how it aligns with things that the business alien cares about; for example, a strategic project that's been going on over the last quarter or something like that. Then, think about what your current value is to the organization and what it will be in the future once you close this gap and take on this development that you want to do.

A good exercise is to think about your value in terms of dollars. It is something that we don't often do, think about the actual dollars and cents of what we bring to our working world, but I want you to sit down and calculate –here's how much money I make for my employer, because a lot of us don't realize, A, how much money it is, or B, that that's the calculation that goes on at all. Companies don't tend to hire people just because, they hire people because on the whole, it helps the company function and helps them with one of those three business alien things, or perhaps all three.

Your value to the org in dollars has to be more than what they're paying you, and it certainly is otherwise they'd stop doing it. Think about what your value is now and think about what your value would be later, once you have this new skillset. Then, I want you to think about what problem you solve with this request. If, for example, you're working for an org where you're really struggling with a lot of chaos in project management –-you launch these projects, they sort of limp along until you all get it done—blaze of glory right at the end and everyone's exhausted and burned out. You might go to your boss and say, "Hey, I really want to do my PMP and learn all about project management, and if I'm able to do this, then I'll use those skills to solve some of the chaos that we have around our project planning so that we get everything done on time, under budget, and without burning out half our staff."

That's a good example of a request, send me to PMP training, that has got the business motivation for an employer to say yes, because there's something in it for them. What they get is less chaos, less burned-out employees, and projects that are done on time. Sounds pretty good for the low, low price of whatever getting your PMP costs –a couple of thousand dollars probably—not bad.

When you're doing this, I want you to be just as strategic as you were when you were talking about your accomplishments, because this is not a nice-to-have. It's not like, "Hey, buy me the entirety of the Aritzia fall collection because I'd find that nice," you're giving them a way to improve their position at work, a way to improve their lives and make things easier. I'm going to take my PMP and then I'm going to make it so it's less chaotic here.

#7 Planning & Making Your Ask

When you go in to make the ask, really know your stuff inside out; know exactly what you want; know what the business case is for it; know what you've done for them lately so they see the value you provide, and then do whatever you need to do so that you feel great about making the ask. You might practice a ton with a friend or a colleague. Maybe some of you are power posers, or maybe you've got kind of an alter ego like Sasha Fierce, like you're Beyoncé, or something like that.

Whatever it is that you need to do to feel confident going in and asking for the things that you need, do that. And then actually go and ask. Step number three is one that you can't get away from as part of this process, you have to go in, do the scary thing and ask. This is the bare bones approach; know what you want to say, do the things that give you confidence, and then go do it. And while you're doing it, be greedy! Again, it's not your job to negotiate for them. It's not your job to make your asks smaller so that it's an easy yes for them. You can ask for what you want and then have them tell you whether it's a yes or a no. And by the way, it's not really about being greedy anyways, it's actually about being a business genius, right? These are not requests that are just for you; these are requests, as we've seen through this whole presentation, that are for you, but that also help the business and help your boss.

The Key Shift Going into Your Performance Review

This is the key shift that I want you to understand going into your performance review, is that you're not asking actually for help or favors, you're creating business opportunities for your boss. You're creating ways for the operation to get more efficient for y'all to make more money, for things to get easier for them. This is not about something you want, it's about how do we help the business move forward.

The Checklist - What You Need to Do

#1 - Attend this presentation - you've already done that, great work.
#2 - Do a gap analysis for last year's goals, metrics, and the professional development you were supposed to get done and then close all those gaps, so you go into your review with a mile long list of amazing things.
#3 - Take a look at all of the achievements you've had this year, even outside of the ones that you were supposed to and frame them in terms of the business value that they create. So remember the ways that you help the company make money, spend less money, or reduce the risk of making and spending money. And also think about ways, concrete ways that improved your boss' life to make it easier for them. Then, from there, turn your attention towards the goals.
#4 - Think about what your career goals are for the next five, two, one year. Remember to choose those goals based on what you actually want, not what you think you can get, and then what you want most out of that list.
Then, think about why they're really important so that you end up with a Mars goal, i.e., the thing that's at the heart of it, rather than a NASA goal, i.e., the way that you thought you'd get there.
#5 - Once you've got a good goal defined for those different timeframes, take a look at what skills you need, and then do a gap analysis from where you are to that timeframe, and make a short list of the essential ones that you need to close. (Not every single thing that you could possibly need to be able to do that job like you'd been doing it for 30 years), but just the ones that you'd need to be able to be promoted into that role and start learning how to do it and do it for three or four years, or something like that.
#6 - Define what work you have to do to close all those skill gaps. So, how you'll close them, what timeline you need to close them in, what support you need from your boss or other people, and then what support you can provide for yourself. And then where you need external support, create the business case for it. Make it so that it's a win for your boss to give you the thing that you want.
#7 - Get ready to go in and make the ask, know your business case, give yourself all the confidence tools you need, go and ask, and then come back and celebrate with us!