The Middle Manager’s Guide to Performance Reviews
This article is part of my series “The Middle Manager’s Guide” where I share practical tips and lessons learned in my engineering leadership roles to help you thrive as a current or aspiring senior leader. It was co-written with Maggie Litton, Director of Engineering.
Performance reviews are one of the most stressful times in any company, and especially for leaders in middle management roles. Not only do you need to write your own self-review (anyone else struggling with keeping a record of their accomplishments?), but you also need to write them for the managers who report to you, and calibrate across your teams, and ultimately make sure people get the recognition they deserve. Oh, and it helps if the whole process is fair and as transparent as possible. Meanwhile, you’re likely not the person who ultimately makes the call on who gets promotions and raises - your busy boss is - so it’s your job to make a convincing case to them.
We’ll help you get there in two steps:
Aligning everyone’s contexts and motivations
Making performance reviews work for everyone
This guide will be most helpful to you if:
Your company has some sort of performance review approach/process, regardless how formalized it is, and
You have an HR or People Team involved too.
Understanding everyone’s contexts and motivations
From you and your boss to your direct reports and engineers: Everyone involved in performance reviews has different contexts, motivations, and goals. These differences are important to recognize and navigate, as they can easily become a huge source of frustration for everyone involved. Being aware of what each role brings to the review process can help ease this frustration and make the performance review process easier.
VPs
What VPs think about and what context they bring:
Thinks about the long-term and strategy, rather than day-to-day goings on. Their main concern is getting the reviews done, while keeping the disruptions stemming from them to a minimum.
Expects to make hard decisions and knows that not everyone will agree with these decisions. Their goal and job is to optimize for what’s best for the business.
They care about the outcomes. The VP does not want to be involved in calibration at team- or domain-level, but does want to know it’s being solved.
They think about inclusivity and fairness across their organization. To help get there, they review data like promotion rates and compensation increases and compare these with performance assessments.
Like everyone involved in this process, they probably have some biases, especially when it comes to people whose work they’re more intimately familiar with. This may include biases in favor of people who did highly impactful work that the VP had insight into, or biases against people for whom bigger challenges arose in the last year.
The VP’s goals during performance reviews:
Meet business needs.
Optimize for the big picture and a useful organization design.
Concerned with sticking to the budget.
Gain or maintain credibility with partners like HR and Executives/leadership and minimize friction.
During performance reviews, VPs ask themselves:
Is this fair? They’re concerned with ensuring that the organization as a system is fair overall. This doesn't necessarily mean every decision they make will align with every individual’s desires and needs.
If one day, all of my decisions came to light (e.g., internal compensation data leaked), could I still stand by and justify my decisions?
How does this scale?
What impression of our organization does it create? Examples may include:
Does my organization look like it's promoting too many people compared to other orgs?
Do our approach and results hurt my credibility as someone who's supposed to have high performance standards?
Are we asking for too many exceptions to standard processes? This makes us look disorganized.
Does it fit into our budget?
Does this align with the expectations of our Executives/Board?
***
Director
What Directors think about and what context they bring:
Their purview is across a set of teams. They understand nuance across teams and individual performance.
The Director still knows, and somewhat regularly speaks with, individuals on teams, e.g., in 1:1s, and is often familiar with individual’s accomplishments and challenges.
Knows their boss’ motivations and goals.
Has some, albeit often limited, context on bigger organizational goals.
The Director may be less motivated by sentiment as they usually bring some experience already. They aren’t doing things like the following for the first time: Building a promo packet; or deciding a promotion/compensation increase case isn’t strong enough and therefore holding back the nomination; deciding that not everyone gets a raise; managing someone out of the business.
The Director’s goals during performance reviews:
Often doesn’t know what the budget is, but wants to stick to it.
Wants the VP to know that they are managing managers well, and that managers are making hard decisions without hand-holding them through it.
Wants to be helpful in setting expectations with managers.
“Translates” between individual team members and resulting expectations and wishes that their managers bring, and high-level organizational goals.
Show that they are aligned with the VP’s vision and philosophy.
What Directors need from VPs during performance reviews
Ask your manager about these topics as you’re preparing for review season. They may not have all the answers upfront, so stay in touch with them throughout and figure it out together.
Communication & involvement throughout this process: To what extent does the VP want to be involved/aware?
VP’s vision for the organizational makeup: Does this VP think an org with a bell-curve distribution of seniority is right for this business? Or do they prefer a model with a few very senior anchors for lots of less experienced engineers?
Values: This may or may not align with official People Team policy. For instance, are they more likely to insist on minimum tenure in a role? Is the VP comfortable promoting fairly recent external hires more quickly than longer-tenured veterans if the newbies have the right skills, or bring needed fresh perspective?
Compensation philosophy: Where does the VP fall on the spectrum of “spread a small raise across everyone (“peanut-buttering”) vs. strongly correlating pay to the folks with highest impact?
Promotion expectations: How many promotion slots is considered reasonable given this year’s budget? Is this year’s budget bigger/smaller than in the past?
Impact: What does the VP count as “impact” when it comes to compensation increases and promotions?
During performance reviews, Directors ask themselves:
Is this fair across my teams?
Do my line managers demonstrate that they can hold people accountable to standards like a career ladder? Do the managers really understand what the career ladder means?
Do the cases that my direct reports are making for their teams all line up? Some managers may give very glowing reviews for everyone they work with, whereas others are more nuanced in their assessments. One manager’s examples for high-impact work may be another manager’s “meets expectations”. How do I calibrate across all my teams to make sure we’re all holding the same bar?
How much extra case-building and justification will our choices require? How much of my relationship capital would I have to spend on these recommendations?
Line Manager
Cares about their team and getting people what they deserve.
Thinks more about individuals than org design.
Has less concept or understanding of business needs.
Tends to think short-term. The combination of this and thinking only about their team creates conflict.
Might think of the design and make up of their team.
Wants specific, useful feedback on the performance of direct reports.
How to make performance reviews work better
As a Director/middle manager during performance reviews
In this section, you’ll find pointers to what information can be helpful to get from your boss or HR team. It’s worth keeping in mind that the way you handle this process itself is also going to leave an impression on your colleagues, so tailor your approach to how they work: If your HR department or boss usually works at a very high level, it may not be useful to overwhelm them with questions on details. Instead, focus on a few critical questions and give them proposals for how you’d like to address the rest.
Ask:
HR: Get guidelines on:
Adjustments and promotions (“X% of your org for promo will be considered normal”).
Expected ranges of salary increase for various levels of performance.
Compensation increases: Is it expected that everyone meeting. expectations gets a raise? What's the typical compensation increase for someone who’s being promoted?
Your manager (VP):
Get their vision for the organization.
Get their positions on judgment calls so tradeoffs are consistent.
Understand how decisions are made and who’s ultimately calling the shots.
Get visibility on org design and business needs. E.g., expectations around promotions, hiring, finances and business needs.
Get guidance on calibrations: Who’s performing those, how, and who will act as a tiebreaker if needed?
Do:
To your manager (VP):
Align with your peers proactively. Get together with them (in a meeting or async) to calibrate your performance ratings.
Share information in aggregate so it’s easily digestible.
Flag (potential) outliers early on, so they know and can spot a pattern, if there is one.
As a line manager during performance reviews
Hand this to the managers who report to you!
Ask:
Get the big picture: What are we optimizing for? Understand as much as possible what your boss and company are trying to accomplish.
Values: What do we reward? Tenure in role? “Merit”? ‘Impact”? Specific in-demand skill sets?
Constraints
Do we have targets for normal % of employees to promote, targets in terms of makeup of org/teams at different levels, number of people per levels?
What is the budget for my team/department?
How does this years’ budget & overall methodology compare to previous years? If things are shifting, say so. For instance, during times of rapid growth, promotions may have happened more frequently. When headcount is intentionally flat, or when you’re oversaturated with a certain level of employee, longer tenure in role might be the norm.
Communication: What do you (boss) need in your performance reviews?
Do:
Make hard decisions which align with guidelines. Let's talk about performance guidelines here, e.g., expectations like “around X% of people will likely be top performers”. Most line managers hate these, understandably, especially knowing all the unique circumstances that justify everyone on your team being rated as a high performer. By the time you're a middle manager, you may reluctantly start seeing some value in them: You don't think it's realistic that everyone is a top performer, or, even if you do, you know that you won’t change these guidelines. As a line manager, make the hard decisions so your manager doesn’t have to.
Get on the same page with your peers.
Keep performance reviews short and think about the audience. Is it for an employee? HR? Or your boss? They all have completely different needs. In any case:
Show don’t tell
Give examples
Compare to the career ladder
Don’t just make it positive - glowing reviews are not helpful! They likely lead to distrust; your managers know that no one is perfect, and focusing only on positives will create suspicion that your standards are too low or that you’re overlooking issues.
Be honest with your team - talk about business needs more and use this as an opportunity to help your teammates improve their business acumen.
Avoid moving into complaints-only mode: Call things out that aren’t going well, but don’t get stuck there - depending on the case, you may need to disagree and commit at some point, suggest alternative approaches, or, e.g., if you feel like someone is treated unfairly, report the case to HR.
Don’t put the blame on others. Your job is to align your team with company needs. If you wanted to give someone a raise, but it wasn’t possible due to budget concerns, don’t try to look good by “taking sides” and saying things like “I tried to give you a raise, but it was shut down due to budget concerns”. This undermines your leadership team and sows distrust.
Get:
On-going, quality feedback from your boss and your team. Ask questions like:
When you over-ruled me, what was your logic?
How aligned did my decisions seem with your intent?
What did I recommend that seemed odd to you?
Performance reviews are hard, but understanding everyone’s context and goals will go a long way towards making the process successful, and ultimately giving your employees the feedback they need to be better.
In our next article in this series, we’ll discuss metrics and how to make them work for your teams.
