How to Write a Performance Review: 5 Steps for Managers

Free cliff notes from Episode 338 of The Manager Track

More than half of a performance rating reflects the manager who wrote it. These cliff notes give you the 4 places reviews go wrong, 5 steps to write a review that’s fair and useful, how to write for a high performer and for someone who’s struggling, and what to say when your report disagrees.

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What’s inside

Six pages for the week you sit down to write reviews for your team. Work through it once per person before you open the review form.

Who a rating really describesThe research on rater effects, and the 4 places reviews go wrong, plus the thin review your strongest people tend to get.
The evidence fileA checklist for the whole review period and the 2 questions to ask colleagues who worked closely with your report.
The 3-sentence summaryWhat to write before any rating, and why you’re not ready to rate if you can’t write it.
Behavior, impact and the bias checkBefore-and-after examples, the Monday test, and the question to ask before you finalize a rating.
High performers and people who are strugglingExample wording for both, so you name the stretch for one and say it plainly for the other.
The review conversation and your worksheet5 moves for the meeting, what to say when your report disagrees, and a worksheet to draft each review.

Why this matters now

Steven Scullen, Michael Mount and Maynard Goff looked at ratings for 4,492 managers, each rated by bosses, peers, direct reports and themselves. In their 2000 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the raters’ own tendencies explained 62% and 53% of the variation in ratings across the 2 data sets. The actual performance of the person being rated explained 21% and 25%.

For many leaders this is review season. Your report will read every sentence, act on some of it, and carry the rating into their HR file. A review built on the whole year, written in behavior and impact and checked against your own bias is one they can use.

If they read the sentence, do they know what to keep doing or change on Monday?

Ramona Shaw, host of The Manager Track and founder of Archova, has spent roughly the last decade working with first-time managers.

Want the full conversation?

Episode 338 walks through where reviews go wrong, the 5 steps to write one, and how to run the conversation when your report disagrees, in about 19 minutes.

Listen to Episode 338