How to Ace a Performance Review

Performance reviews aren’t one-sided affairs and, increasingly, they aren’t only once-a-year events—both of these facts should give you more confidence. Your performance review is the perfect time for you to gain clarity on expectations, help set your own goals, communicate ideas to your manager, and show how much you’ve grown in your current role. And, the more often you can have these conversations, the quicker you can advance in your career.

Here’s how to make sure your performance review moves you and your career forward:

• Document wins, challenges, and compliments. Your performance review is your time to shine! But don’t count on your manager noticing or remembering each of your accomplishments—keep an ongoing list of achievements, like how you increased revenue, decreased expenses, saved the company time or other resources, repaired a client relationship, etc. Also record any challenges you overcame and compliments you received from other team members or clients.
   
• Highlight three achievements to propel you forward. If you’re eyeing a promotion, a new role, or taking on new responsibilities, it can be helpful to highlight three achievements that support your ask. Ideally you want metrics that are a combination of what’s important to your manager, what impacted the organization, and what proves you’re ready to advance in your career.
   
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses. This can be most helpful if you have a new boss or are new to a role. Being a self-aware employee can be very valuable to managers—after all, it means less work for them! Instead of having to constantly remind you to work on your weaknesses and scrambling to figure out how to use your strengths, they can rely on you to self-improve.
   
• Make an inventory of your responsibilities. Jobs change over time. What you do now might be different from what you were hired for. It’s not a bad thing—in fact it can be proof to your manager that you are flexible, versatile, and eager to learn. However, if you want to be adequately compensated for your work, your boss needs to know exactly what you’re doing!
   
• Set goals for yourself and define future success. Your professional goals should be a mix of those both you and your boss have identified. When outlining these goals, make sure you’re both on the same page for what it means to succeed at reaching the goals and the expected timeframe.
   
• Ask questions. Now is the time to get clarification on your manager’s feedback or any interactions in the past year (or review period). Simply asking, “Can you tell me more about what you mean?” can save you from having to guess what your manager is looking for. If you feel you should have been rated higher in a certain area, consider asking your boss what it would take to score higher. Setting expectations is key!
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• Ask for more frequent feedback. If your company only holds official reviews once a year, you can ask your manager for more frequent feedback. This will keep your accomplishments fresh in their mind and you on track to achieve the goals you set together.