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I had never performed a serious self-assessment of my job performance before yesterday.  Sure, I'm always thinking about my job and trying to do the best I can.  I have received 360 degree feedback and I feel like I have a solid level of self-awareness.  And of course my wife always lets me know when I screw up.  But until Monday I didn't devote solid, focused time to self-assessment.

So what happened yesterday?  Actually it was about 2-3 weeks ago I read an article written by Jodi Glickman Brown on the Harvard Business Review blog, The Conversation.  (I also found it later on her blog.)  The article, "How to Sail Through Your Tough Performance Review," really struck a chord with me because I had always considered job performance reviews as an obligation rather than an opportunity.  Usually the process went like this for me:

• I write my review
• I send it to my manager
• My manager changes "walks on water" to "dog paddles just to stay afloat"
• We both review it, and we're done.

At my mid-year review, however, I got some less than positive feedback, and I wasn't exactly elloquent in defending myself.  Now I knew my 2009 end-of-year review was coming up.  I knew it wasn't going to be the greatest review I ever had but didn't know what I could do about it.  Until I read Jodi's article that is.  Here's what she wrote that hit me:

The goal of the performance review, from your perspective (not just your manager’s), should be to:

1. Highlight what you’ve done well
2. Acknowledge areas of weakness
3. Demonstrate what you’re doing now to make things better next year

In my head I was thinking, "She's saying I shouldn't just sit there and take it.  I have some input into this evaluation and I need to be ready to speak up."  To me this was almost a revelation.  It was one of those Ah-ha moments where you can clearly see a solution or where an idea forms practically fully developed into your mind.  I e-mailed the article to myself at work and set up a task with a reminder in Outlook to remind myself to complete my own self-evaluation before the end of the traditionally slow holiday period.

Over the next couple of weeks I did some thinking.  And took some time off.  And thought some more about the eval.  Then I went to some parties.  Saw Avatar (cool movie by the way, I just watched the trailer again, I might take some time this week to go see it again).  And ignored the reminders that popped up on my laptop.  And just like that the holiday slow down was over.  It was Jan 4 and everyone was back at work.  Fortunately for me everyone else did as much as I did over the holidays and used that Monday to get back up to speed and I had plenty of time to focus on a serious self-assessment of my job performance.

I'm not happy about it.  Not satisfied with my performance, I should say.  I'm happy with my self-assessment process and the fact that I actually did it.  I set some ground rules for myself going into it.

1. Full transparency.  Leave no stone unturned and be completely honest.  This was my assessment and I would be the one using it to improve myself, to add value to my performance (so to speak) so I could add value to my projects and for my customers.  Any reservations on my part would limit the value of the exercise.
2. Just write it down.  I didn't want to worry about format.  I was afraid this would constipate my thinking and sidetrack me.  Believe me, it often does.  I think to the point of distraction about where to put commas and whether to use "let" or "allow."  Crazy, I know, but I've learned to live with it. 
3. Leave no doubt.  When I was done, I didn't want there to be any doubt about how I felt about my performance in 2009.  If someone read the assessment, they should not be wondering if I was satisfied with my performance.  Good or bad, leave no doubt.

And that was it.  I started writing and caught myself breaking all three rules.  I often had to ask myself, "What or who am I hiding from?  This is about my performance.  I was there when it happened.  Remember?"  And I had so many ideas about format and word choice and punctuation that the thing took probably an hour longer than it should have.  But in the end I'm happy with my output and feel like I can use it to fend off hold an honest discussion with my manager about my job performance.

And a bonus!  As I was working on my self-assessment, I wondered if other people struggle with this kind of thing.  Do you have any difficulty or concerns or fears about your year-end evaluation?  Have you ever spent honest, devoted time seriously considering how you're doing your job?  Have you ever documented your job performance from a completely objective standpoint and used those results to add more value to your job performance?  If you haven't, or if you're just interested to see how this thing turned out for me, look for my next posting before the end of this week.  I'll write more about the process I went through, talk - briefly, I promise - about my formatting choices, and just overall what I did to create the document.  And lastly, I'll post the finished product revealing all my blemishes...the job performance blemishes at least.  Please let me know what you think about all this in the comments.  Talk to you again soon!