When running my performance reviews, I look at various dimensions.
- Outcomes – Did this individual drive outcome
- Competency Areas – Did this individual demonstrate competency in certain growth areas
- Growth – Does this individual demonstrate the desire to learn
- Engagement – Is this individual engaged
Outcomes
First is an assessment of inputs and outputs. In the perfect world, teams are judged purely on the impact of their work; however, not everything we work on will result in immediate results, and other times (it may rely on external factors), in other cases, it may be hard to quantify our impacts.
To better give an indicator of the progress that an individual has contributed i judge on the following three scales.
- Impact – The individual or team was able to drive direct results and met targets
- Learn – The individual was not able to drive the immediate results, but was able to have learnings to improve the next time around.
- Efforts – The individual put in the input but was not able to identify what could be done differently.
Competency Areas
Second is an assessment of whether the individual is meeting the standards of the full role. Specifically for PMs, I’m looking at the following attributes:
Impact
As mentioned above, does the individual drive impact directly? Are they meeting their targets?
Ambitions and Influence
Is this individual thinking big? Is he/she exciting and rallying the team? Are they trusted by the team? Do others go to this individual for advice?
Collaboration
Does this individual seek to connect stakeholders? Are they involving the right people at the right time?
Strategic Thinking
Does this individual think big? Are they able to connect the dots?
Planning and Execution
Are they able to execute complex Projects? Are they able to plan out and set expectations?
Ability to overcome challenges
When faced with challenges, how does the individual respond? Are they able to resolve issues themselves? Do they need assistance? Do they seek for mentors to help them? Do they look for alternative paths?
Communication and Organization
Do this individual communicate well with others, both laterally and upwardly? Are they able to keep everybody up to date? Are they often asked to provide updates? Do they proactively find ways to best communicate?
Learn
Are they learning new skills? Are they seeking new challenges? Are they assessing their own projects to determine if they’re able to do things better?
Growth
Regardless of the role, the strongest employees are the ones that are humble about what they know and don’t. They take the opportunity to learn from their gaps rather than see them as deficiencies.
For growth, I look for individuals that either 1) have a growth mindset (they embrace gaps as an indication of how they can improve), 2) take active efforts to grow their skills/self through active education efforts, and 3) use each experience to adjust and pivot how they approach problems.
Engagement
Engagement is the fuel for momentum. In order for an individual to perform at their best, they not only need to have the capability to do so, but they also need to be engaged (or even passionate) about the problems they’re solving for. Without engagement, individuals are not able to 1) go beyond the status quo and seek challenging problems and 2) overcome challenges that may arise.
If you notice, though i run multiple frameworks, the most important part of a performance review and feedback, in general, is whether an individual is learning to do better. An incremental change has a massive impact on how that individual will perform in the future.
