It's appraisal time that wonderful time of the year at work when your performance is
renewed, and I know that appraisals can make people really nervous because they have an
impact on your performance your growth in the company and your pay. So you might be
thinking, if you're watching this, what do I even write about. What score do I give myself
I have no idea. I like get it because self reflection is quite challenging and we don't
always do that. So I'm going to help you by guiding you through some questions that you
can think about, for your next appraisal, help you navigate what you should be writing,
what you should be including in there. And also if you hang on till the end, I'll give
you my top tip on how to make sure that appraisals don't continue to be this hard so that your
next ones get easier and easier. I'm going to start off by talking about what
score you should give yourself, because it is a balance between scoring yourself too
highly compared to your manager, where they'll think, maybe you're completely unaware and
delusional, and you actually have a lot of things to improve that you don't even know
about, or scoring yourself too low, which will make them question their assessment of
your good performance and they'll feel that they need to dig deeper, so you're kind of
digging your own grave that you don't want to do that. So, how do you strike that balance
of where you actually are. Well, you shouldn't have to look a lot further than your own previous
experience in previous reviews, have you given yourself a much lower score than your manager
or a much higher score than your manager, make sure that you were adjusting to that,
but maybe this is your first time doing an appraisal so you don't know what that line
is think back to your time at school. Why you that kid who cried after getting the 98
out of 100 results at a test because it's not about the score, it's about the mistake.
And do you tend to only focus on the things that you need to improve, rather than celebrating
the things that you're really good at. So, in my experience, most women, not all some
men's here but most women tend to tap on the books for themselves, because they go in thinking
about the things that they could do better, so bear that in mind when you're giving yourself
a school. Similarly, if you know that you tend to lock your bed or take it really easy
on yourself when you could push and challenge yourself a little bit more than, maybe you
shouldn't be about high and that's of course something that you can learn from. I always
feel that 10 Second dog's brain gives me inspiration. The question remains, how do you actually
assess whether you've been doing a good job, what are the areas that you look at, and I'm
going to outline for you the seven key competencies or skills that are important in pretty much
any role, and start to look at your performance and look for examples of things that you've
done in each of those areas as though you were looking at the profile of somebody else
to try to remove yourself from just being in your own head, looking objectively at these
areas. So the seven areas are the first is responsibility and accountability. Have you
done everything that you were responsible for doing, and luckily you have a job description,
so that should include things within your job description. Have you done everything
on time. Have you made sure that you've communicated effectively if it wasn't able to be done on
time Have you earned the piece of work that you have to earn, bearing in mind that if
you've also done things that have been outside of the scope, that's a positive and we want
to talk about that. So the first is responsibility, accountability. The next is teamwork. How
do you want to effectively with other members of your team, and maybe you have quite an
independent role where that's not required as much, but at some point you'll have to
talk with somebody else in the business. Are you effective at sharing your knowledge. Are
you participating in meetings where you're sharing your ideas and you're sharing your
learnings. The third key competency and skill is being focused on results. So it's great
to get your job done day in, day out, but are you moving the needle on the things that
really matter. Do you have your eye on what is actually going to make a difference in
my role. The fourth key area is commercial awareness. So, as you spend more and more
time in a role, it's expected that you'll start to learn more about the industry. Are
you collating that knowledge are you making sure that you're staying up to date. And that
could be learning more about competitors in the industry, it could be learning more about
what the news is and keeping yourself up to date with that so commercial awareness definitely
something you want to build the fifth key competency, are your communication skills,
and if you have a client facing role then that's also going to apply externally, but
internally as well. I think it's increasingly important, with a lot of remote or hybrid
working to make sure that you are visible like visibility has spoken a lot about so
have you communicated to the rest of the business what the projects you've been working on how
you can support them with some of the work that you're doing so if sometimes
if you don't shout about it, no one is going to do that for you so good communication is
key. Also if we've had any challenges with other employees or if other employees have
any challenges working with me, then that could be something that you want to assess
objectively as well. The sixth area is productivity and taking initiative so when you've seen
a problem. Have you just let it sit there and let it slide or even worse, have you just
moaned about it, not done anything about it. So where have you been proactive in your role
where have you taken steps in order to be able to fix something and make it better.
And finally, the last key area is your growth and self development. What have you been doing
to improve your skills and a good tip for this is to look up, look at the role that's
the next step up from where you are, what's required, what skills are required within
that role and how can you build towards those and demonstrate that you're doing that, within
your role as well. And again, if you've had a previous appraisal, you want to look at
your previous appraisal and see what are the things that you said that you wanted to improve,
and what are the steps that you've taken. Now that you've gone all of those key areas,
particularly if you're super critical of yourself, listen up. We can be hardwired to just focus
on the negative and think oh well I haven't done this and I haven't done that, which is
fine so when you start writing out your appraisal, I'm going to encourage you to start off by
writing your successes and block off 10 minutes to only think about the things that you've
done exceptionally well in each of those seven areas. So, challenge yourself to write down
at least 10 things that you've done incredibly well. And ideally, write down as many as you
can in that time just unfiltered, start thinking about them and you'll see that more and more
ideas will flow. Now of course you can trim that down to just the top three, but it's
important to spend that time really thinking about what you've done well, again, you're
going to be the one who's going to have to advocate for yourself. So think about, what
have I done well and let me write about all of those successes. How have I contributed
to the business. That's how you want to start off your appraisal. Following that, of course,
you also want to show that you are self aware and focused on growth and development and
improving. So, now you want to be critical of some of those key areas and some of those
behaviours and a helpful question to ask yourself is, in each of those key areas. If I had focused
solely on that. What more could I have done. And my advice is to keep the things you want
to improve about as long as the list of the things that you achieved and that you did
really really well well out. So you want to make sure it's a balanced view, make sure
you have as many points in the one, as you do in the others, so some of them you might
want to trim back. And realistically, you're not going to be able to work on all of them,
with so much focus at the same time, but if you're struggling to come up with things that
you could have done better, I can assure you there are always things you could have done
better, so really thought to think about you know if my key focus was to, you know, have
more commercial awareness. What could I have done more, maybe I could have attended some
industry events, maybe I could have listened to this webinar, maybe I could have shared
some things with it. So, what more could you have done in that space. At this point, you've
probably done what I think is the hardest bit self reflecting, and looking at your performance,
what you've done well and what you need to improve on. And the next key part of an appraisal
is to set goals. Now, we can have a whole other video on setting goals, making sure
that they're smart, that they're measurable that their time bounds and that they're achievable.
All of those things are really really important. One thing that I would add to the general
advice on setting good goals of work is to make sure that they are aligned to the business.
It's great that you want to improve certain things, but if you know that the overall company
objective is something in particular and you should know that and if you don't, you should
speak to your managers and speak to your peers and find out what that is. But you want to
make sure that the things that you want to improve really align with where the business
is going, that will always make sure that you are strategically relevant as just except
that you can't do it all alone. So, in addition to the goals that you're setting, think about
what help do you need in order to achieve those goals. Maybe you have a dependency on
another team member, maybe you need your manager to better outline what the goals of the team
or maybe you need some training from someone else in the business so you is, this is the
time to ask for the help that you need, because you're thinking about how you can improve
yourself so don't be afraid to really tell your manager some things that would help you
do a better job. Are you ready for my top tip. Why are you waiting and until the last
minute to put everything together. Of course it's going to be an arduous process, so you
don't want to be waiting until just before the performance review or the appraisal to
see whether you've been doing a good job and to assess that for yourself so what you can
do and what I do instead is just use some way of tracking the projects that you're working
on, I use a project management tool. There are so many out there. Personally, I use click
up so you can write all of your tasks, big or small that need to be done in order of
priority and how big or small they are, and then close them off as you finish them. So
at the end of the week, you can go back and see, of all of the tasks that got close off.
How did I do, was there anything I could have improved, and compare that against the seven
key competencies and skills and was there anything you could have done better, and you
want to keep on going right down in a list, sometimes they're going to be bigger and smaller
than others and that's fine, but if you have an ongoing document of this is why I did well
and this is what I could improve that will make your appraisal so much easier. Moving
forward, so that's what I recommend, give it a try and let me know how it goes. So now
I'd love to hear from you. What are some of the challenges that you've had with your appraisals,
have you ended up giving yourself a higher score or lower score than what your manager
did, how did that line up, and let me know if you have any other questions, I think it's
super important to help you progress in your career to be able to reflect on your own performance,
as well as take onboard the feedback that you receive. So best of luck in writing your
appraisal. If you enjoyed this video. My name is Eva Evangelou I'm a career coach, and I
make new videos on all things career, every Friday, so do subscribe and hit the bell for
new videos. Thanks so much for watching.