Ryan’s Journal: Performance reviews
by Ryan Pew
Today I conducted my quarterly Business Review with the leadership at my company and I can tell you I’m happy it’s over.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, it’s just that they can cause undue stress on everyone in the office for weeks on end.
You build your deck, rehearse your script and try to prepare as best you can for the unexpected questions. After it’s over you breath a sigh of relief.
As I went through my review today I was prepared and looking forward to it. I crave feedback and I don’t receive a ton of it from my manager, so this was an opportunity for me to receive some much needed responses.
At the end of it I discussed some initiatives that I wanted to pursue and they green lighted two of the three, not bad in my book.
After it was all done I realized that I would actually prefer to have these more often. I read that Goldman Sacks has continuous feedback and it helps associates see where they stand in real time. Maybe that’s a bit much, but more than once a quarter can be good as well.
How do you approach this exercise at work?
If the leadership is positive than I think it’s a good thing. I have seen it skew to the negative, though, when you have a demanding boss.
Are these events even needed? In sales I think so because you have a business to run. Does that apply elsewhere?
