Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
I've got a question about self-evaluations at work.
This is always a good, good topic.
I hate these self-evaluations, but Josh says, “We have evaluations coming up at work which
involve a self evaluation.
How should you go about evaluating yourself?
Giving yourself a low ranking would not be good of course, because then you are saying
that you don’t believe you are actually doing well at the job, but if you give yourself
high rankings on everything it feels to me like you may come off as arrogant.
Is the best approach to give more rankings in the middle area (3-4)?”
There’s a couple of ways you can go with this.
Here’s what I would recommend.
Well, okay, you know if you suck.
If you suck, you can’t do this, right?
If you’re not really working really hard and you’re not really good and you’re
not doing a good job don’t give yourself super high ratings.
It’s not going to be a good idea.
But, if you’re doing a good job, if you’re doing a decent job, if you really don’t
need to hang your head in shame, if it’s not going to be ridiculous, then I would recommend
giving yourself the highest ratings on every single thing except for 1 thing.
Now, I know that this is going to seem a little bit weird and why would you do that?
Will that seem arrogant?
Won’t your boss say something about that?
But here’s the thing, you’re being asked to evaluate yourself.
So it’s like this, it’s like someone gives you a knife and they’re like, “Okay, cut
off as much of your hand as you would like.”
How much do you cut off?
Well, I’d cut off—I don’t know about you, but I’ll trim my fingernails.
I’m cutting off zero of my hand.
When someone gives you a self-evaluation I think it’s a really unfair thing to do because
you’re being asked to—the only thing that can come of it is that you’re hurting yourself,
right?
If you’re going to ask me to evaluate myself I’m going to say I’m a 10.
I’m a 10.
You’re going to give me a pay increase or determine my future based on that?
I’m going to do what’s best for me.
I’m always going to optimize for that.
Like I said, unless it’s absolutely ridiculous where you know you’re just falling behind
and you’re not doing a good job then don’t give yourself perfect ratings.
Let’s be realistic here.
That’s just dumb.
In that case, give yourself in the middle of the road, but give yourself the benefit
of the doubt.
Wherever you’re at, give yourself higher than that because you’re being asked to
evaluate yourself.
It’s totally different if someone else evaluates you and it’s totally different for you to
make your own evaluation of your own skills.
I did this video about looking in the mirror and honestly evaluating yourself.
I think that’s important, taking a personal assessment, looking in the mirror for your
purpose, but in this case what you put down on this paper is going to be used against
you.
You want to make sure that you don’t—I think a lot of people make mistakes and they
give themselves low ratings and you got to think about it this way too, right?
If you don’t believe in yourself then why should I believe in you?
If you think that you are on a scale of 1 to 10 that you’re a 7, then that tells me
something about you, right?
Be confident.
Be arrogant if you have to.
I don’t think it is arrogance.
Arrogance is when you project confidence that you don’t have.
Actually have the confidence, be like, “No, look, I’m putting 10 for everything.
I’m putting 9 for 1 thing.
Just to make it so that I didn’t put 10 for everything.”
When your boss says, “Hey, you really think you’re that good at all that stuff?”
Say, “Yeah, yeah, I do.
I do.
You asked me to evaluate myself and that’s what I think.
I’m 100% confident in my abilities and it’s not because that I’m necessarily the best,
it’s because I’m confident in my ability to improve and to continually improve.
I give myself a 10.”
I did a video on giving yourself a 10.
Sometimes you need to give yourself a 10.
You don’t do it often enough.
The other way to think about this too is this, I talked about this a lot of times is that
you want to do things that have unbounded up sides and you don’t want to do things
that have unbounded down—that only bad can come from it.
This is one of those situations where if you give yourself a lower rating, if you look
at this on a scale, the lower the rating that you give, if you give yourself a lower rating
then you deserve only bad can come from that.
Never is your boss going to say, “Hey, you gave yourself a 3, but I think you should
be worth a 10.”It’s never going to happen, right?
You’re going to influence that person and he’s going to decide that you’re worth
less because you’ve given yourself a low rating.
Giving yourself a low rating never ever helps you, if that makes sense.
Giving yourself a higher rating sometimes could hurt you, but the amount it’s going
to hurt you isn’t going to be much because they’re just going to toss out the rating
essentially, they’re going to ignore it.
But it could help you, especially if your boss is an idiot and has no idea of what you’re
doing, then you just give yourself a 10 across the board and there is plenty of bosses that
don’t want to do reviews and they’re in the corporate structure and they say, “Well,
whatever they give on the self-rating that’s what we—we just take that as what it is
and they stack ranked you in the stack racked system and they base it off of your own self
evaluation.
In that case it can only help you.
That’s why I would err on the side of giving yourself a much higher rating than what you
would modestly do.
This is not the time to be modest or humble because you’re not being asked.
Again, like I said, it’s like you’ve got a knife and you’re being asked to cut off
as much of your hand as you would like.
Like I said, I’d trim the fingernails.
If you want to cut off your fingers, go ahead, but don’t blame me.
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I will talk to you next time, take care.