Providing Good Feedback for Year-End Reviews?

I'm a second-year analyst and our staffer asked me to provide feedback on several of the first-year analysts I've worked with. This is the first time I've been asked to provide feedback on others in the workplace, so do you guys have any tips for providing actionable feedback that the first-years can actually use to get better at their jobs (I'd like to avoid the dumb, unhelpful general stuff like "better attention to detail", etc. etc.)

Also, I think that a couple of the first-year analysts are pretty bad at their job. I'm thinking that I should be honest to an extent and discuss their shortcomings, but any advice for not being a dick while providing this feedback?   

6 Comments
 

I’ve had to do this a few times. I do not think it is beneficial to have very negative things in writing as you do not know who all will see it. I assume you will have a discussion with the senior level person after writing feedback to clarify things and it will be obvious who is bad. I work in the cre lending side of a major bank so it could be different in IB.

Rather write things like:
If good:
“X has impressed me by his ability to turn documents and memos around with very little oversight”

If bad:
“X has a stable skill set but should continue to work on expanding hisMicrosoft office proficiency”
“X should familiarize himself with policy and guidelines to create more informed decisions”

 
Most Helpful

From personal experience, I've realized feedback is only helpful when you tell people stuff they can actually improve on for future workstreams / stuff they have full control over. If they aren't organized or respond too slowly, or need to get better at financial modeling, that's all stuff they can work on improving, and point them to stuff like either productivity apps, chats or courses that can help address these over time.

This reminds me of my first year review, where I remember one time my VP yelled at me over a calendar invite that my associate sent, where she booked 2 different client parties into the same Zoom invite link at 3pm - but it turned out the Zoom invite link didn't even belong to her, she had apparently used my zoom invite link. Despite the fact she never asked me if it was ok to use my Zoom invite link for those clients, nor did she CC me on any of the emails where she sent the calendar invite link, or let me know about this and just decided on her own whim to do this, my VP spent half of my review getting angry at me for not catching this as if somehow I was supposed to have known she stole my zoom invite link and sent it out to random clients... this would be an example of what not to do in an actual review.

 

Agree with the advice, and damn your VP sounds like an AH dude wtf did you even say in response to that

 

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