Self-assessment or self-evaluation, when done properly, can be of great benefit to your career. It allows you to frequently assess your performance with all other areas of your toolkit. This can be an assessment of your core skills, your attitude on the job, your communication skills, your teamwork, or any other facet of performance that your job might entail.
Self-assessment is particularly effective because you can do it between official job reviews. This allows you to make corrections without management’s prompting. If you have done your groundwork, and you correctly view your job as a partnership between you and management, you will have a good idea of what your boss is going to review you on.
If you are honest, you probably know what your boss will focus on during his assessment. A few times when counseling technologists on their careers, I have heard about a poor performance review, with the employee complaining that he did not know what his boss was looking for.
I have to tell it to you straight. For all the times I’ve heard this, I am convinced that it is rarely the case. What makes a good worker is not mysterious:
Mastery of the skills needed to perform the base functions of the job
The ability to effectively plan and communicate the work to be done
The capacity to work effectively with management and coworkers
Outside of these key ideas, little elaboration is required.
Self-assessment is dangerous—vital, but dangerous. Typically, you are either too hard on yourself or far too lenient. This is critical to note.
If you are too hard in your self-assessment, you will lack motivation because of hopelessness. If you are too lenient, you will lack motivation to pursue further training and growth.
The balance requires that you always view your contribution from a long-term perspective. Growth is not measured in comparison to other employees but in comparison to your own past performance. For example, I do not assess a programmer’s growth in comparison to another programmer but in relation to where he was six months ago as a developer.
Sometimes assessing where you are from where you’ve come does not apply. For instance, if you are insubordinate or inappropriate in actions or word, you cannot make a gradual change. Such cases require a dramatic about-face and the willingness to deal with the consequences as they come.
Self-assessment only works when you are willing to be honest with yourself—not in some masochistic, here-is-everything-I’ve-done-wrong, take-no-credit–for-anything type of way. When done properly, self-assessment is extremely powerful and motivating. Why? Because it allows you to give yourself kudos for what you have done well, and it allows you to create a game plan (corrective action) for what you have not.
Part of this honesty requires evaluating your attitude toward your work. Do you expect excellence, or is mediocrity satisfactory? Before you answer too quickly, think about your expectation for tomorrow’s tasks. Are you expecting to provide real value? Do you even think in those terms—the value you provide to the organizations you serve?
I can remember approaching my boss at Blue Cross and performing an impromptu self-assessment in the hallway. I covered where I thought I was doing well and where I thought I needed to improve. I then asked if my assessment sounded accurate. She thought about it and nodded. I explained that my goal was to work specifically on one particular weakness before our next official review.
That simple conversation paid dividends in many ways. First and most importantly, I saw that I was in tune with my boss in regard to my performance. I was able to walk away with the liberating knowledge of where I stood. That was better than finding out “suddenly” that I was not meeting management’s expectations in some area. Besides, it is easier on the ego to point out your own shortcomings rather than have someone else do it for you.
In addition, this impromptu self-assessment served as notice to my boss that I understood my performance. This freed management from having to approach me with a plan of corrective action for areas of poor performance. Being a self-starter in this area immediately separates you from the majority of your peers.
As a manager, if I have an employee who knows what he has to improve on, I do not have to micromanage that correction. I need only to make available the resources needed, and the employee (theoretically) can take care of the rest.
In addition, sharing your self-assessment allows your manager to provide some input prior to a raise-contingent meeting. Your manager might disagree with your assessment, feeling you are doing well in an area that you feel deficient in, and suggest another area to work on. It might be that you need work on both areas, but the meeting allows you to see where management is focusing and adjust your personal growth accordingly.
Another benefit of my impromptu meeting was my realization that I needed to work on time management. After discussing this, outside of a performance review, my boss sent me to a time management seminar. This was significant because the seminar was sponsored by the company, for management only. My boss pulled a few strings to cover the cost of the full-day seminar and the associated planner.
She did this, I am convinced, because I was accurate in my self-assessment, and I approached her, not in a defensive manner, but with a request for assistance in improving in this area.
Management is not interested in seeing employees fail or “keeping them down.” In the huge majority of cases, employees’ success elevates their managers, and they know it.
How can you effectively perform a self-assessment? Numerous resources are available to help you with this. Books dealing with personal growth abound. You can take your pick of which titles to read. Include several in your library. However, as a jump-start, I will provide you with the four magic questions of self-assessment.
I must warn you, however. The questions presented here were initially given to me as an employer. They were imparted to me as a way to determine whether I should fire an employee. I restructured them to be viewed from the employee’s perspective. I figured that if the questions were valuable to me, as an employer, they would be equally effective for employees to assess their impact in the company.
As the owner of a small software integration company, I was faced—fortunately, rarely—with an employee who did not have the skills needed and showed no desire to acquire them, or an employee who had the skills but showed no interest in using them.
I am a nice guy, and the last thing I want to do is leave someone without his livelihood. Rest assured that most employers are in the same boat. Most have no desire to see anyone fail because it is both costly to business and is an emotional drain.
However, during one such time—when I had an employee who could not or would not produce—the following information was given to me to assist in creating a more objective evaluation of talent and contribution.
The four questions were provided to me strictly from an employer’s perspective and were framed as “Four Questions to Help You Decide If an Employee Should Be Fired.” The questions were given to me during a breakfast meeting with Richard Thayer of Thermax/CDT.
(A special gratitude to Mr. Thayer for opening this dialogue after many years.)
Read through each of the questions and see how it covers the key elements of skills, attitude, and team perspective in your career effectiveness.
Make a mental note of which question(s) give you the greatest cause for concern. Take one question at a time and determine an associated corrective action that will make that aspect of your career more solid.
Continue to perform this assessment over the life of your career. You will discover, at times, that different questions stand out and require corrective action. The great part about the questions is that they neatly provide direction for personal and professional development.
I use these four questions daily when assessing my performance. I still do this as a consultant and as a writer. I simply change employer to client or editor.
Some employees, although skilled, do not contribute enough to make up for their detrimental action. You must remember that you have been hired to take on particular tasks. You are being paid to make work “go away” in one sense. Few things are as frustrating to an employer as an employee who creates work, making management’s and other employees’ jobs more difficult.
You might perform your job well, but through your attitude or unwillingness to step outside of your job, you end up making another person’s job more difficult.
As you go through your week, understand the relationship that your work has on other employees and management. Being busy and working hard are not enough. Don’t confuse action with production.
You should, if promotion and growth are the goals, always be looking for ways to make your work more efficient for yourself and for those you come in contact with. If you see a way to streamline a task that makes less work for the next person, propose it to management.
This is a great one! Ask yourself the question. Think about it for a while. If you can honestly say that your employer would dread your departure and have a difficult time replacing such an exemplary employee, you are on the right track.
If, however, because of personal conflict, poor performance, poor attitude, and so on, you realize that your departure would be cause for celebration, you had better determine corrective action, and fast!
Remember that you are seldom hired to perform the job that your employer performs. You are hired to perform certain key tasks that a business or department needs. Overlap is certainly desirable through cross-training, but the fact remains that if you can master your specific job functions and perform these better than all others, your value is increased.
If you are simply another repeated skill set, you will likely be subject to the next economic downturn or “force reduction.”
From an employer’s perspective, few things are as frustrating as an employee who, when given a performance review, cites everything but himself as a barrier to his performance. Instead, this employee speaks about how Joe in accounting doesn’t complete forms properly, how his desk is uncomfortable, how his computer is too slow, and on and on. These things can certainly be factors, but employers are usually aware of problems with other resources or employees.
The fact is, in the huge majority of cases, areas of improvement in a performance review regard personal productivity. They are things that you control. It might be that Joe in accounting doesn’t complete his paperwork correctly, but be careful about citing this as a reason for your own performance problems.
This is perhaps the single most critical element of your self-assessment—ensuring that you focus your areas of improvement squarely on yourself. Although it is appropriate to be honest if certain resources are inadequate for the job, do not let them dominate your self-assessment. Remember: The focus of your self-assessment is caught up in that first word: “self.”
By keeping the focus on yourself, you set yourself up as a leader. If you are willing to take responsibility for yourself, you are one step away from being able to take responsibility for others.
Using the four questions, make a list of skills and attitudes to work on. Then go to your bookstore or library and find resources to help you take corrective action.
Or, better yet, approach your boss with your self-assessment. Find out what resources he recommends. As I’ve said, this helps you stand out as a leader and, you might be surprised, your manager probably has some good ideas to assist you.
Self-assessment is primarily a personal responsibility. It is not meant specifically to help you directly with a performance review. The role of self-assessment is more for ongoing career correction, regardless of whether your company has a formal review system.
Self-assessment is something that you should do regularly. The four questions are just one tool that can help you effectively view yourself as your employer views you. In career development, that is always the most critical viewpoint.
Take a moment today to go through the four questions. Be honest. If the space provided in this book is not sufficient, you can print out the Self-Assessment Form that is included on the CD-ROM accompanying this book.
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Question 4 talks about personal responsibility and factors that you can control. What are three items you control that could be improved to help your overall performance and value?
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Look at the coming year. Knowing when you might have performance reviews, set up a time to perform a formal self-assessment at least two months prior to your next review. Ask a trusted peer or mentor to review your assessment.