Rate Me! Evaluate Me! I'm Good and Ohhhh So Smart!

It's that time of the year when Christmas carolers go a-wassailing, holiday lights twinkle merrily upon trees and employees everywhere prepare for annual performance reviews. I am in that mode right now as well as I prepare my own self-assessment to submit to my boss with his review of me to come sometime in January. As a supervisor, I will be receiving 9 self-assessments from my own employees that I will need to act on come January and while I am fortunate to have a really good group... 9 different appraisals? Yeesh. It's not a hugely welcome prospect, mostly because this is not something I can or would just blow through - it's just too important to people's careers to take lightly.

So here are a few tips for you to give some thought to as you get ready for performance review time (and some to help you prepare well ahead of time for future reviews):

Make it easy on your boss.
This comes under a few different forms and the more that I look at it, this might be one tip that comprises several at one time. If you work within a review process that has you assess yourself, don't make it hugely difficult for your boss to give you a positive review. First and foremost, write clearly and don't be ridiculously verbose. Also, give clear examples of what you have done in the past year. Now, if you don't have a formal process of writing up a self-assessment and you just have a one way review where your supervisor lays down his/her view of your work, these tips all still apply because this will all bolster your case if you and the head honcho do not quite see eyeball to eyeball.

Avoid mind-numbing detail.
While I have full faith that your achievements in 2007 were the stuff of Arthurian legend, it's best not to treat your performance review as the chance to recount every potential positive thing you did in lurid detail. If you need to abbreviate every other word in order to fit your epic tale into the pre-defined text box of the performance review form... you might just be including too much. Maybe that's just me.

Stay calm in the face of criticism.
At some point, someone is going to have less-than-stellar things to say about your work product... not me mind you, but the rest of your slobs might have this problem. But to be serious, it's just a part of the process and, in a way, you should welcome criticism provided it's constructive to your improving at your job. If no one ever tells you what you can do better or tweak a little bit, you're going to get stale and have a much harder time advancing (unless you have a gift for cold-eyed analysis of your strengths and weaknesses). But if you immediately face any amount of "room for improvement" with a tight forced smile and gripping the armrests of your chair lest you throttle your boss... you need to take a deep breath. While much can be at stake in your annual review, you will never ever help yourself by getting emotional - all you end up accomplishing is reaffirming whatever the criticism was in the first place. If you disagree with it, be prepared to provide examples to the contrary.

For the future:

S.M.A.R.T. objectives.
Ok, Ok... you, me and every other person I can think of hates to be told the tip of "Make sure you're doing S.M.A.R.T. objectives!" As a refresher, S.M.A.R.T. stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timebound
Ugh, I hate myself a little bit just for writing that out. The idea of conforming your objectives to these criteria gets tiresome in a hurry, but I can definitely say that the extra hour or so you spend doing this will pay off later. This is (obviously) more of a long term tip.

Define a means to exceed your objectives.
This is a corollary to the S.M.A.R.T. tip, but in creating your own goals for the year, make it clear what you need to do not to only meet your objectives, but to exceed them as well. This can be a fairly process of chatting with your boss about what you feel it takes to be better than the norm and it helps to properly set expectations for the year ahead. For example, maybe your objective is to complete five IT implementation projects, but what does it mean if you do six? Is that top notch? Or do you need seven? Better to know that now as opposed to in December and be sorely disappointed if you and your boss have completely different ideas. And besides... do you really just want to slide along and never be seen as a top performer? If that's the case, I have no idea how you made it this far in a blog post all about how to do better in performance reviews. You're some kinda freak. Shoo.

The kudos file.
I'm not talking about those candy bars that masquerade as a semi-healthy granola bar, but rather, keep a log of all the praise, props and positive pronouncements (a 4 bagger of alliteration!) someplace where you can whip them out for your review. I do this with e-mails for myself and I also keep them for my own employees when someone sends me a nice note for someone on my team. But hey, I cannot say every boss will do this, so do it on your own and build up your arsenal of good work. This is absolutely killer material and should never be blown off.

Anyhoo, I will be knee deep in all of this soon enough and hopefully I am doing a good enough job of following my own advice on the topic. Stay tuned.

(And in case you are wondering, I took the quote from The Simpsons episode where the teachers went on strike and Lisa lost her mind not being graded)

Life Is Bigger Than Your 3 to 4 Cube Walls

Leo and his very fine blog zen habits had a post the other day that truly struck a cord with me and I believe it would do the same for countless cube-dwelling denizens like myself: "Escape Your Location: How to Become Free From the Office". Isn't that the dream of office workers everywhere? To find some way to not be stuck in a beige/gray cube for 8-9 hours a day?

I cannot be the only one who discovers an instant shot of productivity when I am doing work out of the office. There is always the potential for distraction when you are not in the comfy confines of the traditional workplace, but if you are professional about what you do and you truly do get your job done well... does the fact that you are not around for the Friday morning office bagel club really matter?

One of the more powerful suggestions is #8 under tips - reduce your needs. I plan on doing a fuller treatment of that idea in this blog soon. It's a concept I have been rolling around in my head for the past few months... how acquiring more stuff does little to make you happier and only ends up limiting you many times (not all the time, but more often than I think a lot of us... including me... care to admit).

Winning the War in the Corporate Trenches

Office politics is usually a term referred to with disdain and often accompanied by a sneer. The term conjures up images of bootlicking toadies, backstabbing corporate climbers and untold amounts of cronyism within an old boys' network. None of this is terribly pretty.

The funny thing I've found is that the notion of office politics described above is not terribly accurate in a lot of ways. Do those kinds of nefarious activities occur in companies of all shapes and sizes all around the world? Of course they do, but that's not truly the full extent of what office politics means. In fact, think of the times you may have heard a co-worker blame office politics for their not getting ahead in the company. Now think of how often you thought they were airing a legitimate concern as opposed to your knowing it was more of a sour grapes moment. My guess is that you usually found the gripes more unfounded than based in moments of a true "screw job".

That's because office politics is less about being a kiss-up and really more about how you operate within the system of a corporate office. Many describes this as "knowing how to play the game", but I have a hard time thinking of it as a game given how serious it all is to the future of so many different people. To me, office politics, in its most proper sense, is most about:

• networking with people across your organization and organizations with whom you work;
• learning how to toot your own horn (because if you don't do it, who will?);
• understanding who can help you with your career or a project and who will not; and
• at the most basic level, figuring out how to get what you want out of your job and career (without being a complete jerk in the process).

A really nice article was done on the topic over at BNET called "How to Win at Office Politics". One caveat I would provide to the article is that the section on "Reconciling Mars and Venus" to describe how men and women handle office politics differently is definitely a reach and I would not place too much stock in their ideas on gender differences.

One piece I would like to emphasize on my own that is touched on in that BNET piece is to be careful of how you handle promoting yourself in the workplace. I am in very full agreement with the need to let other people know you are doing well, but there are some definite limits. Let me describe a person that you probably know (and unfortunately, I definitely do):

You walk down the hallway to the water cooler and run into Biff, someone within the office you know only casually. You do the usual pleasantries, say hello and ask Biff how he's doing. No sooner does the question finish on your lips than Biff launches into how he is working on projects for Executives X and Y and how many hours he has been working and blah blah blah. And this is not a sometime thing… it's almost each and every time you run into Biff. There really are no normal conversations with Biff because Biff is very busy selling Biff and all his delightful Biffness.

This is absolutely painful to endure as a listener and has the exact opposite effect than is intended – you don't sell anyone and your co-workers end up doubting that you really do any real work at all. All talk and no walk. Now, don't let this stop you from trying to promote yourself more at work… just don't pepper every conversation with it.

On a closing note, I do plan on writing about the workplace in my blog, but since I am actually fairly decent at office politics, I will avoid another cardinal sin: talking out of school. Many an erstwhile blogger has been unceremoniously dumped from their jobs by blogging in a little too much detail about what happens at work or about particular co-workers. I'm here to share some lessons learned… but there is a reason everyone at work sees me as the diplomat – Ma Kuzia didn't raise a fool.