I Analyzed Thousands of Performance Reviews. This One Blind Spot Shows Up Everywhere

After having analyzed thousands of performance reviews, what I've noticed is that there's one blind spot that keeps coming up over and over again. And the blind spot is that you are treating performance reviews like a report card of the past. Most professionals walk into a review with a mindset of a student. They want that A grade. They want the validation that they worked hard. And so you walk into it thinking that you're being great on your performance, which is what you did, but the executive team is actually grading you on your capacity, which is what you can do. While you are treating the performance review as a credit card of the past, your executive team is treating it as a prediction of the future. So maybe you are winning the argument of your past achievements, but if you're losing the argument of your future capacity, then you're already falling behind. In this video, I'm going to be talking about the hidden criteria that really determines what is being evaluated. You're listening to Career Revisionist, but the podcast where ambitious professionals pursue mastery, breakthrough invisible ceilings, and accelerate into leadership. And now to guide you on the journey. Dr. Grace Lee, neuroscientist, executive mentor, and your trusted voice and career leadership. Let's start with the first criteria, which is performance versus promotability. Some of the most common feedback I hear from my clients that they get in their performance review are things like great work, reliable, key player in their role, or no significant feedback necessary. Keep doing what you're doing, things like that. On the one hand, you could read that as praise, and a lot of my clients do, but on the back of their mind, they're wondering, but something's missing. What are they not telling me because I'm overdue, a long overdue for my promotion, and I'm not getting better opportunities that I've been wanting. So there's a gap there. So yes, that's true. On one hand, you could read it as praise, but on the other hand, when it's about advancement, and it really is getting your next, get into your next level, it's a containment strategy. And the blind spot here is a belief that mastery in your current role equals promotability and readiness for the next one. And these two are often inversely correlated, because on the one hand, if you are excellent in the tactical execution of your role, then promoting you can create a production gap that the company cannot fill, or at least not soon enough. So that's why when it comes to wanting to be seen as suitable and ready for the next level, it is important for you to build systems so that you can delegate the things that you're tactically executing right now, so that when you do walk away, that there's no significant drop in quality. But if you find yourself too busy to build the systems, then your excellence is not really a ladder, but now it becomes the containment. The second criteria is proprioception. And this is the exact reason why sometimes senior leaders can feel uneasy promoting a high performer, even if they can't really articulate why or put the words to it. Now I thought I'd talk to, first of all, define what proprioception means. In nature, proprioception is your body's way of sensing where it is in space without you having to look at it. For example, you don't have to look at where your feet and your arms and your legs are, but you know the position it's in in space because your limbs are constantly sending signals to your brain to coordinate your balance, to coordinate your movement, and so that you're aware of exactly where your position is. So that's proprioception. In an organization, the brain, which is the leadership team, needs to know where you are, which you're part of the limb, where you are in relation to the market and the mission. And the blind spot here is what I call proprioceptive deficit. For example, if you have a deficit in proprioception in your body, then it's really, and you don't know the position of your arms and legs, well, guess what happens? You move around clumsily. So what does this look like in an organization with proprioceptive deficit? For example, you might be executing with excellence, but you're unaware of how your actions are affecting the department next to you. Or you might be turning results and you are beyond expectation and turning out results, but you don't really know how you're impacting sales and marketing. Things like that. It's like a lack of proprioceptive, a lack of proprioception of the whole part. And as a result of that, as I mentioned before, if you lack proprioception in your body, you move around clumsily, same thing in an organization. You move around clumsily that creates friction. And as a result of that, the perception of you is that, well, now it feeds upwards. The brain, which is a leadership team, doesn't really know where you stand, where the limbs are, where you stand in terms of the market and the mission. With proprioceptive deficit, even if your individual output is high, you could still be viewed as a disconnected limb. So let me share with you in a nutshell how to gain proprioception again. The first thing is to understand exactly where you stand, but the market and the mission. A lot of clients that I work with, they come to me and they say, well, my role really is a supportive role. For example, maybe you work in safety, safety and regulations. And I had a client like that and she came and she told me, well, I work in safety. So then when there's no problem, my department can never get the budget because we're not valued unless something goes wrong. Or so if you're in, if you find yourself in a role like that or a department like that, where that by nature, it feels like, well, no one really values it until something bad happens or no one really sees it because I'm really quite support or behind the scenes, then this is where it's important to shift your mindset. Do you have proprioception? Do you know where you stand in the market and the mission? Do you know what the connection is to what you do and the P&L, the profit and loss in it? Do you know where, are you making those connections? Are you connecting the limb with the brain? Now, if you desire that clarity, you can either look at your role in terms of ripples in the pond and to see that connection for yourself. It requires a lot of reflection and also requires business acumen and understanding, well, how does the business turn revenue? And what are, what do the different limbs do and what are the functions that determine a healthy operations? The alternative is you can work with me. If you click this link below the video, it's an opportunity for you to speak to my trusted career advisors. And that's where we're going to look at your situation. And my team is going to talk to you about what your goals are, your advancement goals, your career goals, your personal growth goals. And if it's the right fit, then you can come into my mentorship where every single week you have an opportunity to be coached and you can have my eyes and ears on your situation because I do some real training that's for your context, not just for a classroom, for real life context. And this is an value of opportunity to be able to learn as you go so that you can implement these strategies to be ready for your next level. Let's go to criteria number three, the ROM calculation. Now, it's common that you might be assessing your value based on ROI, return on the investment. But your boss is calculating your value based on ROM, which stands for Return on Management. And here's what the equation for ROM looks like. It looks like total value created, which is the numerator, divided by management energy consumed, which is the denominator, which is exactly why you could be a top performer in your industry, which is you have a high numerator. But to your leader, it's unprofitable because you also require a massive amount of energy, which means a high denominator. If you deliver excellent results, but on the other hand, you exhaust your leader then your ROM is low. And from having coached many professionals, high performing professionals, there are some common ways that I see where ROM is low. The first way is in escalating problems. And particularly problems relating to team dynamics. It could be dynamics with your peers, with dynamics with your higher ups, or dynamics with decision makers, just escalating problems. The second common area I see where ROM is low is in escalating decisions. Make it sometimes, you might want a sounding board, or you might have uncertainty about pulling the trigger on something. So escalating decision making. And the third area that I see is in asking for feedback. So then when it comes to becoming an asset, because this is really important to think in terms of assets, how can you become an asset to your company, to your leader as well, and also to the teams that you lead and the teams that you work alongside? And that identity shift is creating an asset that is low friction, high yield, so therefore a high return on management. And the way to do that is to really understand, and to become the person who is aware of how you're doing, who can dissolve the entropy before it reaches your leader's desk, and who understands human behaviors so that you can build relationships with equity. Criteria #4 is narrative ownership versus abdication. You see, that document that you receive, which is your performance review, essentially what it is, it's a narrative battlefield. So here's what I mean by that. I mentioned earlier that I had an opportunity to analyze thousands of performance reviews, and these are clients who share their performance reviews with me, to get my eyes and ears on it, or they share bits and pieces of it with me, or sometimes there are companies where your performance review is a very detailed form to fill out. with multiple boxes and multiple essay types of questions to answer. And it takes a lot of energy and a lot of time to complete these documents. And then they go and they get to their performance review, which is a scheduled conversation. And what comes out of it is narratives that clash or disagree, or they got to change their assessment a little bit, because your assessment and their assessment doesn't really match. And so that's what I mean. It's a narrative battlefield. And this is one of the blind spots that I see is, first of all, not understanding the narrative. And this is why the blind spot is either you own it or you abdicate it. Too many employees are waiting for their employers to write the first draft of the narrative. And that's what I call narrative abdication. And you know, you're hoping that their memory is good and you're hoping you are assuming that their perception is fair. Well, this might sound harsh, but it's strategic negligence. If you think about you as an asset, and let's say your career is the business, and you own the business, well, the strategy, the right strategy is for you to dictate the narrative. What's the narrative on the mission of your business? What's the narrative of your mission and your vision and your core values? If you allow someone else to write that for your business, can you see that as the CEO of your business, it's strategic negligence. So this applies for your career as well. And this negligence because, you know, leaders are busy. They operate on heristic mental shortcuts to make assumptions because they cannot possibly have kept track of everything that you did and all that you've achieved. You know, unfortunately, most companies have performance evaluations once a year. I've seen some that have a twice a year, but you see a significant amount of time goes by between each evaluation. And if you are depending on your leader, your boss, to remember everything, then it's going to end in disappointment because they simply can't. And they have a recency bias. They have confirmation bias. They have all of these heuristics that where they make mistakes. And I mean, if it was a meritocracy, then it would be fair. But unfortunately, a lot of these interpretations are really interpretation of your leadership. It's not always based on a meritocracy. It's based on what they could remember and based on their own values that are projected into that evaluation and into that narrative as well. If you do not supply the framing of your past year, then they're going to default to the most recent crisis or the most simplest label that they could have. And that's what's going to go into narrative. And if you think about it, having one performance review every year and that significant time goes by, and then you go in and you have the conversation, the performance review is like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, sometimes if you're lucky, it could go for 16 minutes. What can you summarize in the past year in such a short period of time that positions you? And how can you create an agreement on your achievement and the meaning and the value of your contributions in that short period of time? So that's why I say, well, the performance evaluation process is broken and it's definitely not optimized for you and your career advancement because it wasn't designed today. But there's something you can do that you have absolute control over, which is to own the narrative. But don't just own the narrative in that moment. Don't just wait for the performance review in order to own that narrative by that time it's too late. Own the narrative time and time again throughout the whole entire year and be responsible for the interpretation layer. How are they interpreting what you just achieved? Don't wait for a year to go by before you talk about that achievement six months ago. But don't just talk about it. Own the interpretation layer. What did that achievement mean? What was the market value that it brought to the organization? What about at the enterprise level? And this requires a significant amount of reflection but the reflection will be worth it. If when the formal review comes by the time it comes, the year passes and it comes, then you're going to be met with a leader who was with you to witness your journey instead of needing an hour in advance just trying to summarize the whole year. See, that's to your advantage and that is strategic. And criteria number five is understanding the language of reviews. You see, the language of performance review hides the real critique. And when you get that feedback on that document, it rarely gives you actionable feedback. It usually says something like needs to be more assertive or needs to communicate more clearly. Or you can be too intense, or you miss the bigger picture, or it could be something like need to show more teammanship. Things like that, which are very broad, kind of vague. And you leave that performance view scratching your head and you kind of wonder, well, how am I not doing that? That's literally what was on my mind the whole time. Or you're wondering, well, what do I do? I had one client who was a top performer in his field and he shared with me his performance view. And the one line on there that really was vague was, you need to show more diplomacy. What do I, what does that mean? What do I do? How do I know how to improve upon that? And that's really the language of performance review. And so then it's important to understand that language for yourself so that you can give yourself the action to make those adjustments. And these feedback phrases do sound generic, but you know, they are pointing to an underlying mechanism without pointing directly to it. And the blind spot and the mistake that most people make is when they get that feedback, what they're turned to is to fix the words themselves instead of addressing the underlying mechanism that the words are pointing to. Then they give you a concrete example. Let's say I have clients who've received the feedback, needs to communicate more clearly. So the blind spot here is that they try to fix the words. They try to speak more clearly. So they go and take these speaking classes and they think, oh, I need to, I need to and unstate my words clearly. So they take these pronunciation, you know, they try to increase their vocabulary, they try to study speech, and they try to exercise their vocal cords, all the mechanism, just to fix the word of communication, communicating clearly. They try to fix the words. But what I'm saying is that no, no, no, it's not about the words, it's the mechanism under it. So what's the mechanism under speaking clearly? It's thinking clearly. If you don't think clearly, you can't speak clearly. For I always say that, it's not a communication problem that you have, it's a thinking problem. When your thoughts are muddy, your words are muddy. And so if you are addressing the mechanism underneath it, it's becoming a more strategic thinker. It's becoming more organized when you're thinking. It is focusing more on thought leadership, rather than the exact words you say and the tonality used to say it, 'cause that's like, that's the tactical stuff. So this is where it's important that you don't take the feedback, the understanding the language of the performance review is not just taking the feedback at the face value of the words. That's like the surface level. And the reason why performance reviews are stated that way is because most leaders don't really know how to articulate what really is the mechanism. They'll say, they only know how to say, "You need to be more assertive." Or they only know how to say, "Well, you need to see the bigger picture." Because those are common and easy words to reach for. But it's up to you. You must take ownership of it, just like you're taking ownership of the narrative, take ownership of being able to understand what is the mechanism that this feedback is pointing to and address that instead of just the words. Your results matter. But the impact that you have on the system matters more. So use these lenses to make your value undeniable, to articulate it more clearly, to have your alignment be more proprioceptive. Because let's face it, you're not there just to be reviewed by someone. You're there to be revealed. [BLANK_AUDIO]