The form arrives in your inbox with four boxes and a deadline. Strengths. Areas for development. Anything else.
Whatever you type there is not a conversation. It leaves your hands, gets read by their manager, gets quoted in a room where eight people are comparing names, and outlives both of your jobs. That is worth about twenty focused minutes rather than the four most people give it.
There is one rule to settle before anything else. Do not put a criticism in writing that you have never said to their face. If you have been sitting on something since June, the form is the wrong place for its debut, and a person finding out about a concern from a review is a small betrayal they will remember for years. Go and say it this week, then write the version you already said.
Then stop writing adjectives. Great communicator, real team player, very reliable. All of it gets nodded at and discarded, because none of it can be repeated by somebody who was not there. Write the thing that happened, with a date and a consequence. She took the vendor migration in March, gave a cutover date in week one and held it, and two other teams planned their quarter around that date. That is a sentence a manager can carry into a calibration meeting and use, which is the only real test of anything you write on that form.
Add the part almost everyone leaves out, which is what you want for them next. The people reading it are allocating work and headcount, not just scoring a year. One line saying he is ready to own a service and I would put him on the payments piece does more for somebody than three paragraphs of praise.
On the development box, one thing, concrete, framed as what would make them more effective. Not a claim about their character. And nothing about the team, the process or your own frustrations, which have their own venues.
Take it seriously because this is one of the few moments when you can move somebody's year from outside their reporting line. A bland form is not neutral. It reads as a quiet vote against them.
Monday: for every adjective you were about to use about a colleague, write the dated example underneath it instead.
– Asael Shinder
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