Stayin' Alive in the Performance Review
It mighta killed you, but it ain't whooped you yet
Workplace evaluations can bore. They can gaslight. They can stereotype. They can neglect. They can omit. They can bypass. They can do something else that starts with b and ends in words rhyming with spit, quit, and git.
And that’s in a good performance review. A bad performance review can turn your life into a Loudly Crying Face. At least, that’s how it’s been for me a time or two.
Starting with My Story
I once invited a boss of mine out for end-of-year drinks. My first year on the job were coming to a close, and I was holding a position I’d been hired for while he was away on extended leave. In all the busyness of his getting back to work and my starting work, we’d hardly had a chance to speak in months. Beer seemed like it would help.
But then, my boss said, oh right, and before we clock out for the year, we should do your annual performance review.
After what had felt to me like a pretty good year, I was here for it, no problem.
Reader, the review wasn’t good. I found out, for the first time in many months, that my boss had been nursing a deep skepticism towards me. My comfy assumption of being an easy person to work with—yeah, that was a delusion. Every time I came into the office all gooooooood-mooooooorning, I had only confirmed his sense that I couldn’t be trusted. I was a schmoozer. And because I didn’t know how he felt that way me, I had behaved in a way precisely calculated to massively annoy.
During our performance review, he talked very fast, clocking in at just under 434 words a minute. But I got the message. There didn’t seem to be a viable future for me on the team. That night, I sat on my couch in the dark and grown-man ugly-cried.
That weekend, we did go out for beers, and it was more than weird. We sat there nodding and smiling and sipping like people who trusted each other.
Moving to Your Story
If you’re lucky, you’ve had better performance reviews than mine. If you’re statistically normal, you’ve maybe had worse. Gallup came out with a report, noting that “2 in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.”
This is a newsletter about making change where no change seems possible. I call it mode/switching—or making an evolution in your orientation not in your situation.
Mode/Switching’s about creating a zone of agency for yourself. And this week, it’s all about making room for your soul after the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad evaluation.
Three Things to Try
Identify biases. One thing you learn in a hurry during your review is that everybody’s got biases. I wouldn’t recommend calling out your boss’s blindspots in the moment. (We’ll talk about an appropriate confrontation in a bit.) But naming those biases for yourself will help you breathe. Here are some nameable biases that Culture Amp writer Kevin Campbell puts in your lexicon—and which our Mode/Switch coordinator, Hannah, put into a snazzy little mnemonic graphic:
Do you recognize these biases? Let’s see how well you do on a quick quiz:
Think more slowly. This is the second mode/switch I recommend, but for you, it may be the hardest of the three. When you’re in a performance review, you are almost always, as the saying goes, of two minds. Or so says psychologist Daniel Kahneman who describes two mind habits as Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow. The first mind habit employs your intuitive brain, or what Kahneman calls “System 1,” which “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” The second is your exploratory brain, or System 2. This is the part of your brain that concentrates for extended periods of time. It “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.”
When you get a bad performance review, which of those two mind habits is likely to take over? Yep. You got it. You’ll be thinking way too fast. Fight or flight, baby.
Thinking slowly is hard—hard enough that I’ll suggest a few supporting practices that I myself use when I am bewildered and bemused and befuddled:
Advocate for yourself. For this last mode/switch, I’m going to recommend that you make the case for a re-evaluation. If you believe that your manager has mis-interpreted your performance—and if this negative review matters for your salary or your bonus—you really oughta screw your courage to the sticking place. Bring that evidence, find the documentation, and hold that conversation. Sometimes, you have to play the longer game and, instead of cramming it all into one conversation, create a stealth campaign to persuade your boss that you’re reliable.
Heads up, though: there is someone harder to persuade than your supervisor. In short, that unpersuadable person might be you. Or, more accurately, your own gremlin mind. All too often the most critical and narrow-minded judgments about you come, not from the folks around you but from inside your cranium. When your brain’s not your bestie, try saying to yourself, “Okay, I hear you. I note your criticism. And there’s something to it. But right now, I need to make this case to my boss.”
The Hardest Thing about Performance Reviews
Your performance review—look, they are about you. Who else’s name is at the top of the report? Who else has to do the hard, hard work of improving performance after a poorly administered evaluation?
But at the same time, and in a different light, that evaluation isn’t about you entirely. It’s at least as much about the people doing the evaluating. Next time, you’re in a review, it’s worth remembering what social scientists have noted, “As much as 62% of a rater’s judgment of an employee is a reflection of the rater, not the person getting reviewed.”
As usual, I reached out to some Mode/Switchers to ask about their experience of performance reviews. Here’s one reader’s response:
Actually, the really important question is, what song is at the top of your post-performance-review playlist?
Reply to this email with your coping song—or write to themodeswitch@gmail.com. And if you’re needing inspiration, our communications coordinator, Hannah Sherbrooke’s Listen While You Weep, er, Work playlist should get you started.