How to breeze through your next performance review
If like most of us you are a cog in the wheel at a BB, this is the time of year for performance reviews / objective setting. For some this can be a bit of a stressful time, especially if you feel like you haven’t done much to show for the past year and you have little to no motivation for the year ahead. If you stick to a script you can be in and out of your performance review in 15 minutes and back at your cage cube before your know it. Read on for some tips
Don’t Panic, Prepare a General Script
It’s an awkward conversation to have so you’re going to have some awkward banter to start, but then again all office banter is pretty awkward - so after you spend 5 minutes talking about how excited you are about the 50 game NHL season or how you always new Jodi Foster played for the other team you’ll get hit with ”So how do you think you did this year”. Don’t panic this is where you launch into your script which has 3 basic elements:
- Generic positive statement about how the year went
- Something that you acknowledge you could’ve done better
- Generic statement about how you’re excited for the year ahead
Highlight Your Strengths
The key is to highlight your strengths first and then identify an area of improvement before your manager has the chance to. No one’s perfect so don’t act like you were. Coming out with guns blazing and showing that you know where you messed up means you’re not delusional and you know where you need to improve.
How to Game Your Self-Eval
If your performance management system includes more than just the conversation, i.e. self eval that you review with your manager, there are some ways to game the system there too. In a lot of cases, you can fill out the self eval with just about anything that sounds coherent and generously rate yourself. Most managers are too busy to read through and change anything so they will just give the sign off and you’re done.
If you’re not so lucky and your manager actually cares about these numbers then you can play an odds game. Usually you’ll be evaluated on a few dimensions (What, How, etc) giving yourself a score for each. As a rule, always give yourself higher marks than you deserve in at least one category (of course you’ll need to be able to back it up). You will usually get away with this. Think of it this way, if you give yourself an average ranking you then put it on your manager to justify ranking you higher. If you give yourself higher marks and you sound reasonably credible, your manager would have a harder time justifying giving you a lower rating. Don’t go marking yourself as a perfect employee either, this is not something to be abused, use this carefully.
Prepare Talking Points
Whatever the case may be, treat your review like an interview: prepare your talking points before hand. Be prepared to pull out examples of why you did well and at least one thing you can improve on and how you plan to do so. Remeber, don't stress, these things are just a formality any way...
Great post. Hate these things...
My 1 year is coming up.. Colleagues have said I'll get the 3-5% raise. I'm already HEAVILY underpaid.
Would asking for 15-20% be risky? My boss knows I'm underpaid and has even joked about it
Depending on how long you plan on staying.. Use it as an opportunity to set measurable goals and quantify as much as possible, so the following year you can go in and say I did A, B, C, and D like I was supposed to and on top of that I did E.... It's hard for them to deny hard facts or brush it off.
haha. that picture is awesome.
How should I prepare for my first annual review with my boss coming up? (Originally Posted: 02/11/2018)
My firm does annual reviews the first quarter of the year (I believe includes revealing annual bonus). I just started out of undergrad this summer and I have a few questions in general as I've never been through an annual review. Background is that I'm an analyst at a (~1B AUM) REPE firm and will be meeting with the CEO of my firm. I don't work with him daily, but I do communicate with him often and send him information when he requests it.
How do I prepare? Should I self-critique myself and send it to my CEO beforehand? One of my colleagues told me to create a list of goals for myself and send it to my boss beforehand. Assume I should do this, but my colleague didn't say anything about the self-critique. I think it's a good idea to compare how I think I did versus how my CEO thinks I did. I've also read that it's good to do this so that the person reviewing you has something to work off of if they don't interact with you on a daily basis.
I don't plan on asking for any kind of raise as I've only been working about 8 months now, but I want to know what my compensation will look like in the next 2-6 years as I move up the ladder. Is that okay to ask and assuming yes, how should I phrase it? My rationale is I'm looking out for myself and my future ahead of time (don't won't to be busting my ass if I feel like it's not worth it right?). Curious what others thoughts are?
Hey ILikeCommercialRealEstate, sorry about the delay, but are any of these useful:
Calling relevant pros to the rescue! mrfcflanker tennisguy30 geology rocks
I hope those threads give you a bit more insight.
Don't send a self critique to him. Do write down a short list of things that you have accomplished this year and things that you are proud of. Then write down 3 goals that you would like to accomplish this year and how you are going to do it. Then print out a list of your job responsibilities and rate how you did on a 1-5 scale. 5 being an 'absolute mastery' and 1 meaning 'you're on notice'. Use this to indentify what skills you would like to focus on developing in the next year..
Just have this stuff prepared. It will most likely be a conversation with him and he might ask you questions that pertain to the things I mentioned above. Just come prepared.
Also hold on to this stuff for your next review to demonstrate goals being set and accomplished. It doesn't sound like your company uses an official system for this.
Really appreciate your insight geology rocks
You show up asking for more money because you’ve closed deals this year. That simple.
Gotta love the "Compliment Sandwich"! Good post, OP!
http://www.youtube.com/embed/ewIT_KAQQlU
How should I prepare for my first annual review with my boss? (Originally Posted: 02/11/2018)
My firm does annual reviews the first quarter of the year (I believe includes revealing annual bonus). I just started out of undergrad this summer and I have a few questions in general as I've never been through an annual review. Background is that I'm an analyst at a (~1B AUM) REPE firm and will be meeting with the CEO of my firm. I don't work with him daily, but I do communicate with him often and send him information when he requests it.
How do I prepare? Should I self-critique myself and send it to my CEO beforehand? One of my colleagues told me to create a list of goals for myself and send it to my boss beforehand. Assume I should do this, but my colleague didn't say anything about the self-critique. I think it's a good idea to compare how I think I did versus how my CEO thinks I did. I've also read that it's good to do this so that the person reviewing you has something to work off of if they don't interact with you on a daily basis.
I don't plan on asking for any kind of raise as I've only been working about 8 months now, but I want to know what my compensation will look like in the next 2-6 years as I move up the ladder. Is that okay to ask and assuming yes, how should I phrase it? My rationale is I'm looking out for myself and my future ahead of time (don't won't to be busting my ass if I feel like it's not worth it right?). Curious what others thoughts are?
Hi ILikeCommercialRealEstate, any of these threads helpful:
No promises, but thought I'd mention a few relevant users that work in the industry: abaccarin marcomoura spur5
If those topics were completely useless, don't blame me, blame my programmers...
How common are bad performance reviews and how did your first one go? (Originally Posted: 10/20/2016)
First review coming up. I've been with my BB for around 6 months.
I did make a couple of mistakes early on (nothing major, formatting issues while trying to adjust to the new bank's template) but I think I recovered well. Still though, I am nervous as hell about the review.
How did your first review go?
In my experience, at the analyst level reviews are pretty fair. Politics start to play a role as you move up the ladder, but if you're doing a good job this should be reflected in your review. Whatever happens, take any negative feedback to heart, thank them for any guidance on how you can improve, and then work your ass off to act on that feedback. A big part of your NEXT review will be how well you improved on the specific action points they give you early on... and there will be substantially more at stake in your next review compared to your first.
By the way - don't ever get defensive about negative feedback if you do receive it, no matter how unfair you think it is. Trust me, this will only hurt you.
And for what it's worth, I've done very well for the past few years but I STILL get very nervous months before review season... I see this as a healthy mechanism to keep me from slipping away into mediocrity. When you become complacent and stop getting nervous about reviews is precisely when you are at the greatest risk of messing up.
The Review Process (Originally Posted: 06/10/2010)
Every six months at the vast majority of large banks, everyone goes up for review. From CIOs and COOs all the way down to the guy who goes around offering shoeshines.
When I had to participate in my first review two years ago, I had no clue how things worked. It was particularly difficult to give myself a self-assessment. So I wanted to share a few quick tips:
1.) Nobody is going to go out of their way to say you've done an amazing job over the past six months unless you do so, first. You need to be honest on your self-assessment, but you also have to show yourself in your best light. That means #2:
2.) It's important to know what your strengths are and focus on those. If you don't know what your strengths are, this is where those friends I've been telling everyone to make in the analyst program come in. Go talk to the friend who works closest to your group and ask him. If you have to acknowledge a weakness, don't dwell on it, and don't make excuses. Ideally, you want to turn that weakness into a strength by talking about the challenges you and the group have faced and how you've helped your group overcome them.
3.) It's good to be as specific and objective as possible about what you accomplished. During my first six month review, I listed things like: "Made 18 significant changes to [the system] over six months. Responded to 8 overnight pages; on six of those, the CFO would have been calling my manager if I had not fixed the system. Caught a major bug in our pricing logic that had gone overlooked by two quants and a senior developer; saved firm $X."
4.) This is sometimes a good official line of communication to management. In a number of my self-assessments, I would mention the fact that the market we served was going electronic and our group had some of the best programmers at the firm- and few people in the industry understood the nuts and bolts of pricing our product better than we did- not even the quants or traders. Sometimes, your manager- or his MD- will have to respond to stuff like this. If you want to make sure your manager is fighting for you and the group on something, this is the place to get it down in writing.
For more experienced hires (IE: people up for promotion):
1.) The appraisal process is often a political process, but the politics ultimately comes from how well you take care of different people. If you need to suggest reviewers, suggest people that have become your friends because they like your work. I did a lot of work taking care of a research team and invariably, I'd be suggesting some VP over there that I was taking really good care of and who liked me.
2.) Peer/outside reviews are not a totally fair system- you can be a great employee but if you don't get exposure to other groups- particularly managers in those groups- it's harder to get people to advocate for you. Work with other managers and show them that you're really competent, and they will start fighting for you- at least relative to people OUTSIDE their groups. You sometimes have to ask your manager if he will let you work with other groups.
3.) You don't ask, you don't get. If you're up for Associate or VP and it's not 100% automatic, REMIND your manager. Tell him that you're performing at that level and that it would be a travesty if you didn't get the promotion (If this is largely the case). This will prevent your boss from pretending he's doing you some sort of favor before he even gets the chance. You worked your butt off, you deserve the promotion, and staying an associate when people lazier than you are getting promoted would be like getting straight As but getting held back in seventh grade while your friends who got Cs are going to 8th grade.
Where I work, nominations for Associate and VP are getting submitted right now; you've got to bring it up in your mid-year review at the very latest. (Ideally, you should be talking with your manager right now to make sure he doesn't miss the deadline.)
I read an article on efinancialcareers a while ago with almost exactly the same content as your post. You plagiarising brah?
Good post nevertheless.
I might have read that three years ago in a rush (along with a number of other articles) when I was desperately trying to figure out how to handle my first self-assessment, but I haven't read anything on self-assessments recently. I know what works now. Maybe there could be some very loose and inadvertent plagiarism in there to the same extent that your Calculus textbook plagiarizes other Calculus textbooks when it comes to the concept of the Mean Value Theorem; there's some common best practices that everyone agrees on.
That said, some of this stuff probably isn't going to be in efinancialcareers because it's specific to the experiences of an analyst. As a first and second year employee, I didn't have the balls to walk into my boss's or MD's office, shut the door, and lecture him about fighting for algorithmic trading- but I had a convenient way of doing it with the self-assessment summary.
Given that I am posting from work, I can't put the cynical and brutally honest spin on this that I'd like; hence I'm putting a more positive spin on this just in case I ever have to explain myself to HR; hence the career guide-sounding tone. (If, just for kicks, I were saying the non-bonus self-review were a waste of time, it would be a much more awkward conversation with HR. OBVIOUSLY, that's just a random example and may or may not be true.)
Excellent post. Thank you so much for sharing!
To me the review process is like a parent speaking to their child. If you respect your parents/boss opinion then it's constructive. If you don't, then it's meaningless.
Needless to say, my next review is meaningless to me. My last review was nothing but bold faced lies so I don't expect this one to be any different.
transitive property is telling me you hate your boss
and great post illini, i've bookmarked for future use
The article on eFinancialCareers UK was only three days ago and also aimed at analysts. However, it doesn’t look like IlliniProgrammer copy/pasted it, and there are some additional interesting points.
"God gave you eyes Plagiarise"
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